Now that the fuss has died down

According to a piece originally published on December 28, 2004 in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Democrats lost 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the USA. Suburban voting power.

The 100 U.S. counties that grew the fastest from April 2000 to July 2003 cumulatively grew by 16 percent, according to the Los Angeles Times analysis. Their Republicanism also is growing. In last month's election, they provided Bush with a 1.72 million vote advantage over Kerry, almost four times the margin they gave Bob Dole eight years ago, according to the Times.

This apparent New York Times piece from November 10, 2002 predicted this demographic shift.

These exurbs are booming. Before 1980, says Robert Lang, a demographer at Virginia Tech, only a quarter of all office space was in the suburbs. But about 70 percent of the office space created in the 1990's was in suburbia, and now 42 percent of all offices are located there. You have a tribe of people who don't live in cities, or commute to cities, or have any contact with urban life. Mesa, Ariz., another quintessential exurb east of Phoenix, already has more people than St. Louis. Extrapolate out a few years, and some of these sprawling suburbs will have political clout equal to Chicago's.

Forget the reductionist Red-Blue dichotomy. In the case of a nearly evenly divided electorate, every major demographic segment becomes a potential swing vote.

This piece originally in The Financial Times on November 4, 2004 also points to the exurbs as a key future battleground:

... the greatest hope for each party's future lies less in the Old America of the Great Plains and industrial mid west, but in the fast-growing Sunbelt states of the south-east and west. Since the elder Bush was elected president in 1988, 27 electoral college votes have shifted to these states and they now account for 59 per cent of national growth in eligible voters since the last presidential election.
At first blush, Sunbelt state growth appears to be fuelled primarily by younger Republican constituencies: white middle-class families along with affluent retirees. These newcomer suburbanites should welcome the Republicans' conservative economic pitch of tax-cuts, school vouchers and the like. By joining home-grown, conservative constituencies of the religious right, it is not hard to see why most of the south and much of the non-coastal west will continue leaning Republican.