In The Diploma Belt, Dems Are Dominant
Since the 1980s, Democrats have dramatically gained strength in the nation's best-educated large counties. Atlantic Media Political Editor Ronald Brownstein and National Journal's David Wasserman explore the trend in this week's magazine. A must read:
When L. Brooks Patterson began his career in Republican politics about four decades ago, his home turf, Michigan's Oakland County, tilted so reliably toward the GOP that general elections were almost an afterthought. The real contests were for the party's nomination."Back in those days," Patterson recalls, "if you won the Republican primary... you had basically already won. The Republican Party was dominant."
The GOP exercised that dominance up and down the ballot in Oakland, a comfortable, largely white-collar suburb just northwest of Detroit. For decades, no Democrat won countywide office; Patterson served as the county's prosecuting attorney from 1972 until 1988 and, since 1992, he has won five four-year terms as county executive. Oakland routinely generated comfortable margins for Michigan's Republican nominees for the Senate and the Governor's Mansion. And throughout virtually the entire second half of the 20th century, the county boosted Republican presidential nominees -- giving more than three-fifths of its votes to Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, and George H.W. Bush in 1988. From 1940 through 1992, the only Democratic presidential nominee to win Oakland County was Lyndon Johnson, during his 1964 landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater.
Those days are gone. Starting with Bill Clinton's re-election in 1996, Democratic presidential nominees have carried Oakland in four consecutive elections. The first three of those victories were narrow, but Barack Obama won a whopping 57 percent of the county's votes. Dating back to 1920, no Democratic presidential candidate other than Johnson -- not even Franklin D. Roosevelt -- had done so well.
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