Park Forest Phil
| 👨💼 | |
| Era | The Fifties |
|---|---|
| Age | 22-28 |
| Home | Park Forest, IL |
| Demographic | young suburban, white, white-collar |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
Phil is a junior salesman in his mid-twenties, married with a baby, living in one of the planned postwar suburbs south of Chicago. He has no fixed party yet, and he is the new suburban voter that both Republicans and Democrats are trying to claim.
Who they stand for
Park Forest, Illinois opened in 1948 as a privately built new town of rental courts and tract houses for young families moving out of Chicago. The sociologist William H. Whyte made it the setting of his 1956 book The Organization Man. Its residents were the first generation of white-collar men hired in bulk by expanding corporations, moved into home ownership by FHA and VA mortgages, and driven to work each day on the new expressways. Their parents had been Roosevelt Democrats in the city, but the children were younger, better paid, and less attached to that loyalty, and in 1952 and 1956 the suburban ring around every Northern city voted heavily for Eisenhower. That vote was not yet a fixed party allegiance. These same suburbs split their tickets between the parties, and after the 1957-58 recession, the 1958 midterm elections sent a Democratic landslide to Congress. Phil is the voter that both party machines had lost and neither had fully won.
Playing to them
Phil wants the economic boom to continue. He responds to mortgage credit that stays cheap, highways that get built, an employer that keeps hiring, and a President who carries himself like a general rather than a party ward boss. He measures every policy by whether it disturbs the production line at his job or the quiet of his street. A strike that stops production counts against the government in his eyes, so a President who sides with the union in a steel or auto walkout loses his support. The same President breaking the strike wins Phil's support and loses the support of Steel City Stan and Cannery Carl. Anything that resembles socialism to him, from public power projects to national health insurance, pushes him toward the Republicans. Anything that resembles a return of the Depression pushes him toward the Democrats instead. He would rather civil rights stayed out of the news, so a President who presses for integration in the North wins the support of South Side Marcus at the cost of Phil's comfort, though it does not yet cost his vote.
Where they live
The five states where Park Forest Phil makes up the largest share of the electorate in the fifties:
- Utah
- Idaho
- Vermont
- Wyoming
- North Dakota