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US Campaigns Hunt Votes in Fast-Growing Exurbs

Posted on: Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 07:15 CDT

By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

LEESBURG, Virginia -- They are called exurbs, the far-flung outer suburbs where country roads are now lined with fast-food joints and fields have erupted in a crazy quilt of chain stores, condo complexes and rows of nearly identical houses.

For residents and officials, they can be a fast-growing nightmare of urban sprawl, traffic jams and crowded schools. But in many areas, they have also become crucial new election battlegrounds that could hold the key to U.S. political power.

"Over the next 20 years, these are the areas that will decide who is elected governor, who has majorities in Congress, who controls the statehouses," said Mike Henry, who managed the victorious campaign of Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia last year.

"If your campaign is not in the game in these suburban areas, your election is in jeopardy," he said.

Suburban residents have been a critical election target for decades, giving rise to catchy buzz words like "soccer moms" and "office park dads" to describe the lifestyle and demographic of prized swing voters.

But as sprawling mega-suburbs push deeper into the countryside, past Democratic-leaning inner suburbs and into Republican-leaning farm areas and small towns, the fight for the political loyalties of residents has grown more intense.

President George W. Bush's 2004 campaign put a premium on identifying and turning out voters in exurban areas and rolled up big winning margins there. Bush captured 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the United States, cementing a widespread perception they had become Republican strongholds.

A Los Angeles Times survey after the vote found the 100 fastest-growing counties gave Bush a 1.7 million-vote advantage over Democrat John Kerry. That was up sharply from 2000, when Bush won 94 of the counties but had an edge of only 1 million votes on Democrat Al Gore.

But the 2005 governor's race in Republican-leaning Virginia scrambled those perceptions. Democrat Kaine, focusing on suburban priorities like transport and schools, won in several big exurban counties that were carried a year earlier by Bush.

His victory gave hope to Democrats who must compete in newer suburban growth areas if they want to reclaim control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008.

"These areas tend to be home to high-income, highly educated voters who show up at the polls," said political analyst Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, who rejected the idea that any party had an inside track with the exurbs.

"These are areas that are changing the fastest, have people arriving in enormous numbers, have demands for better schools, better roads -- and politicians have to be responsive to them," he said.

FAST GROWTH, NEW PROBLEMS

In the northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., rocketing growth has nearly tripled Loudoun County's population to 240,000 since 1990, straining roads, schools and services.

In the southwest suburbs of Houston, the once sleepy town of Missouri City expects to double its population of 65,000 in the next 10 years. One new subdivision alone, Sienna Plantation, has nearly 10,000 residents and expects to eventually have 60,000.

Such rapid growth has reshaped political priorities for both voters and politicians.

Henry Hilburn, a clerk in a cigar store in Leesburg, Virginia, who moved to Loudoun County from New York last year, found his daughter had to wait three weeks for a kindergarten place. His 1.5-mile (2.4-km) commute takes up to 30 minutes.

"If I'm looking at a politician, I want to hear their plans for schools, their plans for traffic. They have to be aware of what people who live out here need," Hilburn said.

In Texas, Missouri City Mayor Allen Owen said politicians have turned their attention to mass transit plans and spend more time trying to identify voters in a suddenly crowded market.

The number of voters in Fort Bend County, which encompasses Missouri City, in the 2004 election was about 163,000, up dramatically from 92,000 in 1996. The growth poses a distinct challenge to the area's politicians.

"Four years ago there wasn't anybody running for anything around here," Owen said before a recent candidate forum in nearby Rosenberg, Texas, that attracted more than 80 candidates for state, county and local offices. "Now we have to do this just so people can introduce themselves to voters."

PATTERN REPEATS

The story is much the same in the Rocky Mountains south of Denver, or along the interstate corridor around Orlando, Florida and in the suburbs north of Atlanta, Georgia.

Many of the fastest-growing exurban areas have seen an influx of immigrants in recent years, diversifying a population of whites who had left urban communities.

In Missouri City, the percentage of black students grew from 16 percent in 1980 to 31 percent in 2005, and the percentage of Hispanic students rose from 17 percent in 1980 to 21 percent in 2005, according to Fort Bend school district figures.

"Exactly as the conventional wisdom was settling in that these counties were Republican, they were actually becoming dense enough and diverse enough that they became much less easy pickings for Republicans," said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.

In a report for the progressive New Politics Institute, he said between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of white residents in what he called the "emerging suburbs" of the United States fell from 85 percent to 79 percent.

Dick Simpson, a political analyst at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said not everyone had caught up with the demographic changes.

"To win in these areas, you want to appear to be dealing with the problems of education, transportation, health care, jobs and job training," he said. "That's what people in suburbs want to hear about; they are less interested in immigrant bashing and other social issues."

Source: REUTERS

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