The suburban vote: Exploring how voting trends differ across race in the Philadelphia suburbs

Keywords: Suburbs, voting trends, elections, Philadelphia
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

With more individuals now living in suburbs than in urban towns and cities, suburbanization represents the largest population shift in the post-WW2 era. In recent years, the ethnoracial composition of suburban areas has become more diverse with minorities now accounting for over one third of the suburban population. Moreover, with most metropolitan areas experiencing poverty beyond the urban core, more individuals now live in poverty across the suburban realm than in cities.

The suburbs are continuously diversifying which makes this realm a less reliable voting bloc for both the Democratic and Republican parties. The 1980 election saw the white population constitute 90% of all voters, but this had fallen to 73% in 2016. With minority groups expected to play an active role in future elections, our research critically examines voting trends across race throughout the urban realm to ask, “how have voting patterns changed across racial groups between 2016-2020?”.

Using the L2 Voter File, this research operates an exploratory data analysis to examine voter participation and party registration for each of the four major racial categories to examine how this changed between elections. We further this analysis by thinking about spatial formations of the urban and suburban landscape. Focusing on Philadelphia, a site of huge contestation as Pennsylvania’s vote swung from majority Republican to Democratic, we use the RUCA coding system to determine the urban and suburban spaces of Philadelphia and consider how voting trends across race differed throughout the two spaces following the two most recent elections.