A GOP ‘suburban’ agenda: Good policy, good politics

Republicans simply love to look at the map of the 2016 presidential election by county. And why shouldn’t they? It is a dominating ocean of red, and a graphic reminder of Trump’s underdog electoral landslide. It’s the Mona Lisa of the modern right.

Of course, there is no such love for the 2012 and 2008 maps, where many red counties were then decidedly blue.

{mosads}Trump was successful, in part, because he was able to flip 217 counties that had previously voted for Barack Obama in 2012, and nearly as many from 2008. The majority of these areas are predominately rural, with either a significant agricultural community or suffering through the doldrums of manufacturing decline. Democrats simply did not do a good job cultivating votes there, and instead focused on their battlefield of choice: the suburbs.

While the GOP can claim a decisive victory in 2016, the 2017 gubernatorial election in Virginia, and to a lesser extent New Jersey, still showed that the Democrats are targeting and winning over suburban voters. This may pose a problem for the GOP in 2018 and beyond, and should be taken seriously by Congressional leaders and the White House. The 37 seats now rated by the Cook Report as “Republican toss up” or “lean Republican” run the gamut of the country’s suburban communities, from the Jersey Shore to California.

The country’s metropolitan areas are growing at an astounding rate, and census data now shows that 81 percent of Americans live in an “urbanized” areas, including the majority which live in the suburbs. In fact, if you compare the Census Bureau map of Urbanized Areas with the 2016 election county map, the resemblance is striking. The Democratic playbook is laid bare for all to see.

For generations, the GOP struggled to form an urban agenda that meshed with its national policy goals. Perhaps it is time to face the facts that the party simply isn’t targeting the right urban dweller. Republicans have been unable to crack the code of Democratic machines and the identity politics that dominate inner cities. They must think outside of the box.

Speaking in New York terms: The GOP isn’t converting any of Brooklyn’s hipsters, and they’ve always been the nemesis of the Manhattan wine-and-brie set.  The party needs a plan to attract the bridge and tunnel crowd.

These voters are actually ripe for the taking. Hillary may have made some outreach, but for eight years, the Obama administration made enemies out of suburbanites in what affectionately was called a “War on Suburbs.”

Under Obama, HUD sought to usurp zoning laws from localities to “force suburban neighborhoods with no record of housing discrimination to build more public housing.” There was also an attempt to regionalize school districts by combining city school boards with those of outlying counties. Suburbanites saw these as an affront to why they fled the inner cities in the first place, and the Democrats paid with votes in 2012 and 2014.

A GOP suburban agenda needs to focus on several core points; chief among them is the staggering cost of living and working. Ensuring the House’s version of the tax plan, which allows a $10,000 property tax deduction, is critical. Similarly, ObamaCare costs are strangling the small businesses that form the bulk of employers in suburban communities. A repeal is critical.

It is no secret that suburban neighborhoods are the modern epicenters of drug abuse. The White House and GOP need to continue their successful rollout of the president’s opioid agenda and commit to long term funding for treatment and law enforcement. Republicans should own this fight.

On infrastructure, the GOP should make transportation improvements a priority. It must resist pressures to fund costly and pie-in-the-sky projects like the high-speed Hyperloop and aerial gondolas, and instead support tangible expansions of commuter rail and highway networks. These are, and will surely continue to be, the preferred methods of suburban commuting for years to come.

And finally, securing a high-quality education in a safe school has been the goal for many suburban families, and was likely a significant part of their decision of where to live. The GOP should emphatically push educational savings accounts, vouchers and tuition tax credits to give parents a real choice when it comes to schools and help alleviate the cost of education borne by their local property taxes.

Addressing the concerns of suburban voters is not just good policy; it’s good politics. Implementing a suburban agenda over the next 12 months can help ensure the GOP keeps the seats in Congress that it is now in danger of losing. Republican leaders need to realize that this is less of a “win-win” and more of a “must do.”

Joseph Borelli is a New York City council member, professor, former state legislator, Republican commentator and Lindsay Fellow at the Institute for State and Local Governance at City University of New York. He has been published in the New York Daily News and appears on CNN, BBC, and Fox News. You can follow him on Twitter @JoeBorelliNYC.