The Suburbs Are Changing. But Not in All the Ways Liberals Hope.

Orange County, California, long a bedrock of the Republican Party, will not send a single Republican to Congress in January for the first time since 1940.

The party lost four seats there in the midterms, mirroring Republican losses just outside Minneapolis, Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, New York and Washington, D.C. The election was a suburban rout, lifting Democratic hopes for a durable realignment in the parts of suburbia that are highly educated and increasingly diverse.

But farther down the ballot in Orange County, voters also considered several propositions meant to ease the state’s housing crisis. Orange County voters opposed a bond to fund housing assistance programs, which passed statewide. And they rejected a rent-control measure by a wider margin than the rest of the state (the measure failed).

Newly Democratic Orange County is not exactly on its way to becoming liberal San Francisco.

“There is this idea that if all these suburban areas are blue, that will mean they’re automatically more progressive,” said Lily Geismer, a historian at Claremont McKenna College in California. That is an indication of something more progressive, she said, but underneath are “still commitments to a lot of kinds of inequality.”

Her research on suburban Democrats identified many who supported liberal agendas in Washington while opposing affordable housing or school desegregation in their own communities. That dissonance reflects the particular politics of many suburban communities — politics that have made them a national battleground.

Election outcomes in the United States have become increasingly correlated with population density, a pattern that also appears in other industrialized countries. Rural areas are now reliably Republican, urban areas overwhelmingly Democratic. The suburbs are lodged in between, with many economically conservative but socially liberal voters who have a foot in each party — or for whom neither party is a perfect fit.

The midterms were fought in large part in these suburbs.

After this election, there are no truly urban congressional districts represented by Republicans in Congress. The last and only one to flip was New York’s 11th, covering Staten Island and part of southern Brooklyn. Florida’s 25th, west of Miami, is the densest Republican district left.

Many of the districts that flipped Democratic this year, particularly in Sun Belt suburbs of Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Orange County, have grown much more racially and economically diverse, defying conventional portraits of suburbia.

“The imagination of the suburbs is stuck in a model that emerged in Orange County in the 1960s: Goldwater-Reagan voters, white-collar, conservative activists,” said Matthew Lassiter, a University of Michigan historian who has also studied suburban voters.

By contrast, Orange County’s 39th Congressional District today is one of the most diverse in the country. The demographic change that Democrats hope will advantage them nationally — as long as Republicans continue to seem uninterested in courting minorities — is already well underway in these places.

Today Democrats are benefiting from both the changing nature of the suburbs and the changing preferences of white college-educated voters there who are repelled by the president. But the second trend is more precarious for Democrats.

That is because, as political scientist Jefferey Sellers puts it, many suburban voters tend toward an eclectic mix of preferences that can seem contradictory. Particularly in denser, close-in suburbs, voters tend to be more cosmopolitan than in rural areas and turned off by culture war issues that animate other Republican voters. But they are also more fiscally conservative than many urban voters and opposed, for example, to the higher taxes some liberal policies would require.

Rural and urban America clearly have distinct politics, one emphasizing individualism and limited government, the other shared commons that require bigger government. (It is not entirely clear, though, whether these environments shape people’s politics, or if people choose to live in them because of their politics.)

In a sense, suburbia has its own politics, too. Many voters there are motivated to keep taxes from rising and to protect the benefits — good schools, open spaces, stable property values — that attracted them to the suburbs in the first place.

“Moving into these environments, the political identities that move to the fore are not Republican or Democrat, or conservative or liberal,” Lassiter said. “They are homeowner, taxpayer and school parent.”

Some of the resulting impulses — opposing changes to neighborhoods, schools or taxes — are essentially conservative. Even liberal homeowners often behave this way.

At the local level, such attitudes do not seem particularly partisan, in part because we have a long tradition in the United States of treating local politics as nonpartisan, Sellers said, in contrast to our national politics.

“The separation between the two levels helps to encourage people to dissociate their preference toward building a border wall from their preference toward, say, encroachment in their own neighborhood,” said Sellers, a professor at the University of Southern California. “People are capable of massive intellectual contradictions in politics.”

President Donald Trump has done much more to stress the cultural issues on which many highly educated, white suburban voters disagree with the Republican Party than the economic issues on which they are better aligned. That makes these voters ripe for Democratic appeals today. It also means some of them could be courted back by a different kind of Republican message in the future.

Lassiter, Geismer and others have questioned whether these well-off suburban voters can be stable partners in a Democratic coalition for just this reason: Their economic interests, they argue, simply are not aligned with poorer, minority Democratic voters who want more affordable housing, integrated schools or services funded by higher taxes.

These suburban voters siding with the Democratic Party today, however, are increasingly taking the place of more rural communities and white working-class voters who are leaving the party. And those white working-class voters have not particularly embraced progressive policies, either.