CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

There is a wide and growing disparity between rural and urban core voters, but the suburbs remain roughly evenly divided. They are also demographically ascendant, as both rural areas and urban cores stagnate. The majority of Americans even in the metropolitan areas of over a million, upwards of 85 percent, live in low to moderate density, overwhelmingly automobile oriented, compared to under 15 percent in and around the urban core. More importantly, the suburban share continues to increase, as evidenced in last year's Census estimates.

Suburban residents are more likely than urban core residents or aging rural residents to have children, nearly twice as likely to be homeowners and be part of the country's large, albeit beleaguered, middle class. They represent a far larger portion of the population in red-leaning metro areas, like Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and Kansas City than in the older "legacy" regions like New York, San Francisco, Boston or Chicago, where the urban core population represents a far larger share. People with suburban lifestyles, for example, account for more than 95 percent of people in the Atlanta area but slightly less than 50 percent in New York and 75 percent in Chicago. [...]

Given their diversity, suburban voters are hard to categorize. As property owners and families, they would tend to like maintaining their way of life; despite the Hollywood accounts, Pew finds, suburbanites are more satisfied with their place of residence than either country folk or city-dwellers. 

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