Suburbs: New shortcut to White House?

WASHINGTON -- The presidential contest between John McCain and Barack Obama this fall is likely to be settled in places such as Clackamas, Arapahoe and Geauga.

Suburban counties including these — outside Portland, Denver and Cleveland, respectively — have become the hardest fought and most closely won battlegrounds of national elections. "Suburbs are where the battle line is drawn," says Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. He says suburban voters tend to be "pragmatists and non-ideological, and they want problems fixed."

A generation ago, cities were considered predominantly Democratic and suburbs safely Republican, but the political leanings of suburbs shifted as they became more racially diverse and densely populated. Most Americans now live in suburbs.

Lang and demographer Thomas Sanchez of the University of Utah analyzed presidential, gubernatorial and Senate elections since 2000 and identified the 94 most competitive counties in a dozen battleground states. Their study will be released next month.

The closest contests were in "inner suburbs," those most closely tied to cities. The biggest swing from election to election was in "mature suburbs," communities that grew up in the mid- to late 20th century and are relatively stable in population.

In Northern Virginia, for instance, Fairfax County moved into the Democratic column in the 2004 presidential election for the first time in 40 years.

The next ring of faster-growing communities are called "emerging suburbs," and the farthest from cities are "exurbs." The denser the population, the more Democratic the vote.

Still, even in Republican-leaning "exurbs" there has been significant movement between the two major parties. Democratic candidates increased their vote by nearly 9 percentage points in those more sparsely populated communities from 2002 to 2006, one reason for their gains in Congress and statehouses that year.

The rise of suburbs as the nation's key battleground has affected what issues candidates emphasize — rising gas prices are particularly important to the many suburbanites who commute by car — and which states the candidates target.