Dunwoody Amanda
 | |
| Era | The Nineties |
|---|---|
| Age | 22-32 |
| Home | Dunwoody, GA |
| Demographic | young white, suburban, first-generation professional |
| Lean | Lean Democrat |
| Race | white |
| Successor | Beltway Meredith |
A marketing professional in her twenties in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, and the first of her family's women expected to have a career. She is socially liberal, has no settled economic views, and votes Democratic without having thought much about why.
Who they stand for
Women became the majority of American university graduates in the 1980s. By the 1990s a career was the normal expectation for a college-educated woman. Atlanta grew quickly in the years before the 1996 Olympics and drew that generation of women into the office parks of the northern Perimeter. Amanda represents the gender gap of the era. In 1996 Clinton won women by a wide margin while men split almost evenly between the parties. The first law Clinton signed as president, in 1993, provided for family leave. She lives in Republican territory. The northern suburbs of Atlanta were Newt Gingrich's base. Georgia voted for Clinton in 1992 and against him in 1996. Voters like Amanda are the reason those suburbs become competitive a generation later.
She holds the same positions as Madison Steph, but she does not go on marches and has no political theory behind her views. Her successors are Beltway Meredith in the 2000s and Beltway Barbara in the modern era, who work for the government and then defend it. Amanda takes the government for granted because it has never yet failed her.
Playing to them
She supports equal pay, abortion rights stated plainly, family leave, and a president who appears modern and competent. She opposes any president who gives the Christian right a prominent platform, and she resents being talked down to. She often judges a policy partly by the manner of the people who propose it, not only by what the policy itself says. Her economic views are not settled. A tax rise does not change her opinion, but a recession would, because her politics rests on the assumption that the system works. She forgave Clinton for the Lewinsky affair, which Levittown Maureen did not. A president under personal attack keeps her support by governing well.
Winning her on abortion rights loses Cullman Eula, Plano Kimberly and Rio Grande Ofelia, and it unsettles Daly City Marilou. Winning her on equal pay loses no one. She is one of the easiest liberal voters in the cast to win over. Her support is also one of the least reliable, since she has not needed to fight hard for anything she believes in.
Where they live
The five states where Dunwoody Amanda makes up the largest share of the electorate in the nineties:
- West Virginia
- Rhode Island
- North Dakota
- South Dakota
- Maine
Lineage
Dunwoody Amanda → Beltway Meredith → Beltway Barbara
Professional women, moderate Democrats, and what changes is her attitude to the government. Amanda assumes the system works because it has worked for her. Meredith works for a government contractor, believed the government about Iraq, and learned it lied, so she now votes on competence. Barbara defends the FBI, the State Department and NATO because Trump and Bernie both attack them. She takes the government for granted, then distrusts it, then defends it.