Well, lookee here. It's another Democrat talking point that the media is uniformly painting as reality.
The gist is that "educated" people live in the suburbs and of course they're too smart to support the party of Donald Trump. This narrative focuses on "college-educated" women in the suburbs because they are said to be especially angry with the president as a natural effect of their gender. The default declaration is that all educated women oppose Trump. It's a ludicrous assumption to make, but there is a higher purpose besides just the usual identity-politics playing of the woman card.
Pre-election headlines:
"Amid talk of a potential blue wave, Democrats already have begun to turn the tide in GOP suburbs" – Chicago Tribune.
"Voters In Connecticut Suburbs, Once Reliably Republican, May Power A Blue Wave In Age Of Trump" – Hartford Courant.
"Will Whole Foods locations explain a blue wave?" – Austin American-Statesman.
Links are provided as a courtesy but there's really no reason to click on them. These MSM echo chambers all end up saying the same thing. It's a biased media playing out a coordinated effort to use the illusion of impartial "journalism" to advance a Democrat talking point via the use of self-anointed experts from the nation's leftist universities.
Daydream Believers
Democrats need to show that they are attracting moderate, sensible Americans. That they are not just the party of radicals that more and more Americans see them to be. Thus, the myth of the universal smart-cookie female suburbanite who's kind of conservative on some things but just can't take any more of Trump's America.
Cue the university-affiliated "experts."
Here's the Chicago Tribune quoting Christopher Mooney, a political scientist with the University of Illinois’ Institute of Government and Public Affairs:
"I've got a picture of her on a PowerPoint … She’s about 34, she's got a kid in the backseat that she's taking to daycare or to soccer, she’s driving an SUV and she’s driving around in Schaumburg or Lisle or something like that ... She's socially, fairly liberal. She has no problem with gay people. Immigrants maybe make her a little nervous but not that much. But she doesn't like her taxes, and she doesn't like Donald Trump and all these nasty things about people. That's one of the problems some of these suburban Republicans have at the moment and the governor."
He can see her! It's like he's riding in that SUV himself.
Hartford Courant, you're on. How about a sweeping statement that can't be proven? "The Republican Party has had a 'woman problem' for the past few years," Gayle Alberda, assistant professor of politics at Fairfield University, told the paper. And now that Trump has come along, "[w]omen are just done," she asserts.
The default declaration is that all educated women oppose Trump.
Austin Statesman-American, can you top these?
Why, yes it can. The paper quotes Mark Jones, a Rice University political science professor, saying in reference to the ugly battle over new Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh's nomination:
"Given Whole Foods' high prices and epicurean snob vibe, it wouldn't surprise me that in GOP districts they are concentrated in areas with large numbers of upper middle-class and middle-class college-educated Anglo women, many of whom in the past have voted Republican but who today are repulsed by Donald Trump and alienated by the [Brett] Kavanaugh confirmation process.”
Is that supposed to be serious "scientific" political analysis?
These are the professors and "political scientists" the media prop up to advance the line that suburban women are about to hand the House over to Democrats. All three of the above quotes are pure personal imagination yet are reported as being indicative of a discernible trend that may spell doom for Republicans.
This is what gets Democrats in trouble in elections these days. First, they and their complicit media spin these unproven narratives for propaganda purposes. Then, as the election approaches, they start believing their own bunk. Instead of addressing real issues important to non-fictitious Americans from all walks of life, that soccer mom in the SUV becomes real to them, and they eagerly anticipate her heading the vanguard of the lockstep female blue wave.
Suburbanites For Trump
David Catron touched on the myth of a suburban blue tsunami in a piece at The American Spectator. He points out that the media love to present the Rust Belt voters who keyed Trump's White House victory as "a coalition of toothless hayseeds wearing KKK hoods who celebrated his election by guzzling moonshine and beating their common law wives." But he points out that Trump won most of the suburban counties in Michigan in 2016. A 2016 Forbes article reported that "[s]uburban voters particularly put Trump ahead in the crucial Midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and came close to winning him supposedly deep blue Minnesota."
In short, there is no reason to believe that the suburbs offer a particular advantage to Democrats. Yes, Democrats have a clear, overwhelming advantage in large metropolitan cities. Unfortunately for them, that is about the full extent of their advantage, save coastal fortresses like New England and the West Coast. By creating mythical soccer moms who are flocking to their ideology out of frustration with Trump, Democrats are trying to push their little blue bubble as far out on the map as they can.
Unfortunately for them, they cannot simply will their mythical narratives into reality through the aid of their allies in the media, polling companies and universities. They tried that in 2016, and we all know how it worked out. Another painful lesson may be headed their way.
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