Suburban Betty
| 👩🍳 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 30-45 |
| Home | Levittown, NY |
| Demographic | suburban, white, housewife |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
A Long Island housewife with school-age children in a postwar housing development. She is the cast's swing voter on personal character, judging a president on whether he seems safe, decent and competent; her worries are nuclear war, disease and her children's schools.
Who they stand for
Suburban women were the largest new group of voters in the postwar years. They leaned Republican in 1960, when women favoured Nixon slightly, and Democratic in 1964, when Goldwater's talk of using nuclear weapons drove them to Johnson. Their politics were shaped by the PTA and the evening news, and they were moved by issues that affected their children directly. These included the Sabin oral polio vaccine campaigns of 1961 and 1962, concern over strontium-90 contamination of milk from atmospheric nuclear testing, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1962 Supreme Court ruling against school prayer that began in a Long Island school district, and the military draft as their sons approached the age of eighteen.
The group Women Strike for Peace marched in 1961, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was signed partly with voters like her in mind. Levittown Larry shares her household and votes based on the tax bill. Catholic Mary shares her worries but is also a committed party voter. Betty belongs to no party and holds no fixed political doctrine, and her vote depends on how a president comes across to her personally.
Playing to them
She responds well to a president who is calm during a crisis and is seen to be calm, to the Test Ban Treaty, to vaccination and water fluoridation programmes and school aid, to Medicare for her parents, and to a First Family she can admire personally. Competence and decency matter more to her than any specific programme, so a Democrat who governs quietly keeps her support, while a Republican who talks openly about missiles loses it.
She does not forgive recklessness with nuclear weapons, a scandal involving the president's personal character, disorder that reaches the suburbs, or a war that begins calling up young men like her sons. Her sympathy for civil rights is genuine, but it does not extend beyond her own school district. Winning her support loses Pentagon George's support over the treaty and the risk of confrontation, loses Goldwater Barry Jr's support over what he sees as softness, and loses Prairie Ruth's support over the school aid, water fluoridation and the parenting advice of Dr Spock. Levittown Larry and GI Bill Bobby tend to vote the same way she does, which makes the three of them among the most important voters to hold together in the cast.
Where they live
The five states where Suburban Betty makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Vermont
- Utah
- Maine
- New Hampshire
- North Dakota