Suburban Sarah
 | |
| Era | The Modern Era |
|---|---|
| Age | 40-55 |
| Home | Chester County, PA |
| Demographic | suburban, white, upper-middle |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
| Predecessor | Security Mom Donna |
Sarah is a college-educated woman in the Philadelphia collar counties whose presidential vote has switched between parties in three consecutive elections. She is the swing voter both major parties focus their general-election campaigns on.
Who they stand for
Sarah represents college-educated white women in large-metro suburbs, the group that shifted the Philadelphia collar counties from Republican to Democratic. Chester County voted narrowly for Mitt Romney in 2012 and has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since. In the 2018 midterm, the same county elected Chrissy Houlahan to Congress, part of the result that gave Democrats the House. These voters had elected Republican governors and members of Congress for decades before that; their vote was decided more by the candidate than by policy. Trump's conduct in office cost him much of their support, and Biden's ordinary manner won much of it back in 2020.
Sarah is the third in a recurring line of Philadelphia-area suburban women. Of the earlier two, only the middle one, Security Mom Donna, supported one party, after the September 11 attacks, out of concern for family safety. Levittown Maureen weighed each pair of candidates individually, and Sarah does the same; within a single presidential term she has been pulled in different directions by inflation, media coverage of crime, and the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. She tends to vote for whichever party seems more competent and organised.
Playing to them
A president wins Sarah's support mainly by appearing competent, and loses it mainly by appearing chaotic. She judges a president by matters close to her household finances, including mortgage rates, her property-tax bill and her local school budget, and by whether the streets she drives through appear well policed; an orderly-seeming White House reassures her on all of these fronts. She does not forgive a president who governs from either political extreme. She sees a Bernie Sanders-style economic programme as a risk of inflation, and she finds an aggressive right-wing culture-war campaign embarrassing in front of her neighbours. Inflation is the fastest way to lose her support, because higher prices reach her household budget before they reach the news.
Winning Sarah's support tends to pull a president toward the political centre, and that shift has costs elsewhere. The school spending that pleases her irritates Country Club Craig and Montana Matt. The political caution that reassures her reads as weakness to College Chloe and Brooklyn Jamal, who want the sharper political edge that worries Sarah. Grill Dad Greg and Rachel Goldstein tend to move together with Sarah's vote.
Where they live
The five states where Suburban Sarah makes up the largest share of the electorate in the modern era:
- New Hampshire
- Connecticut
- Minnesota
- Massachusetts
- Colorado
Lineage
Levittown Maureen → Security Mom Donna → Suburban Sarah
Suburban swing women who vote on competence and character, except in one decade. Donna, after 9/11, votes on national security because her husband is a police officer who worked at Ground Zero, and turns back when the government neglects the sick responders. Maureen before her and Sarah after her have no side. Sarah voted Obama, then Trump, then Biden. Donna is the only one of the three who picked a side, and she picked it for her family's safety, not for an ideology.