In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Republican National Committee opted not to order an autopsy into what exactly led to the party’s decline in suburban communities that were, until recently, considered deep red.
But if RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel wanted to understand what happened, she could do worse than to look back at the place she was raised: Oakland County, Michigan.
“Oakland County was kind of the quintessential suburban Republican stronghold over the postwar period,” says Jeff Timmer, a longtime GOP strategist who was executive director of the state party from 2005-2009. . . . . “When I ran the Michigan Republican Party, we always pointed to Oakland: ‘These guys have got their shit together,’” says Timmer. To put it bluntly, the shit is no longer together.
Ten years ago, Republicans held two of the four GOP-drawn U.S. House seats in Oakland (the other two were safe Democratic); now, all four are in Democratic hands. Democratic women now represent the Romney family’s hometown in the state House, state Senate and U.S. House (Rep. Haley Stevens). Ten years ago, Brooks Patterson, the silver-tongued sun-God around whom all local politics orbited, was county executive, and Republicans held four of the six countywide elected posts; Democrats now hold five of them, including the executive. After GOP-controlled redistricting in 2012, Republicans had a 14-7 majority on the Oakland County Board of Commissioners; now, Democrats have an 11-10 edge and will control the county-level redistricting process for the first time in a half-century.
The change is happening in lush, sylvan communities like Birmingham and Bloomfield—a place at least three generations of Romneys, McDaniel included, have called home. Here, generations of families with auto-baron surnames set roots.
This was “‘Romney Republican’ territory, but the Republican Party has gone so far away from that,” says Mallory McMorrow, the Democrat who represents the area in the state Senate. “Even looking at the types of things Mitt Romney is proposing on the federal level right now, I think if he were still at home, he’d be a Democrat. The party has shifted so much.”
To the casual observer, this change happened overnight. But the change is less the flip of a switch than a stovetop dial cranked on high—it took a while to heat up but the pot is boiling now.
Between Barack Obama’s campaign in 2012 and Joe Biden’s in 2020, the margin of victory for Democratic presidential candidates in Oakland grew by roughly 55,000 votes. Few have noticed it, but Oakland’s share of the statewide Democratic vote now exceeds that of the city of Detroit. . . . That’s a problem for Republicans in a state that has played a pivotal role in the last two presidential elections. But Oakland is also a national warning light for the Republicans at the highest levels of the party.
Oakland County “represents the dominant trend in the country because it combines the most affluent and college graduates in increasingly diverse suburbs becoming increasingly and emphatically Democratic,”. . . . And there are Oakland Counties all around the nation—affluent, longtime Republican suburbs that have been trending Democratic for a long time, but where the Trump years marked a tipping point. “Look at why the Republicans are so obsessed with reversing Maricopa [County, Arizona]—but also Gwinnett [County, Georgia]—both key to Biden and Democrats winning the states and Senate,” says Greenberg.
These key suburban populations are mostly white but increasingly diverse, highly educated and relatively affluent. They aren’t scared by immigration; they support it in their own communities—especially with highly skilled immigrants, attracted to work at businesses lured to these suburbs, in many cases, by business-minded Republican politicians. They are repelled by white-grievance politics and culture-war clashes, and concerned about the rise of violent right-wing anti-government plots, like the Jan. 6 insurrection and the thwarted plan to kidnap and execute Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They used to think of themselves as Republicans, but nowadays the GOP seems disconnected from the things they care about; it talks less about affordable child care or student debt than banning transgender student athletes or making it harder to vote. It’s the inverse of what President Ronald Reagan said in Macomb County all those years ago: They didn’t leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left them.
[T]he Biden Republicans didn’t spontaneously sprout up in 2020; their emergence is part of a longer story—or, more precisely, several interlocking stories.
It’s the story of how demographic trends are changing America’s suburbs, not simply in making them more diverse, but in making them more highly educated at the same time educational attainment has become a defining predictor of how Americans vote. It’s the story of how the GOP playbook—which often defaults to the tactic of demonizing cities as bastions of out-of-touch liberal elites—has missed an important shift: Suburbs aren’t at war with their cities any longer, and claiming they are has alienated potential Republican voters.
And, critically, it’s a warning of what happens when a political party is associated with one charismatic figurehead and doesn’t invest in candidates with their own identities; and of the strategic blunder of responding to a tidal shift of demographic change by rewriting voting rules instead of fixing a tone-deaf message.
This is the story of how Oakland County went blue—and what that tells us about the Republican Party’s continuing collapse in America’s suburbs.
Between 1990 and 2010, the portion of Oakland’s population comprised by people of color had more than doubled; almost 55 percent of its residents had at least an associate’s degree. By 2014, more than 1 in 10 of Oakland’s 1.2 million residents were foreign-born. For Republicans, it was a demographic time bomb.
And it ticked down just as the Republican Party—nationally and locally—was about to be taken over by someone whose politics were uniquely tailored to turn off people with college degrees, people in diverse and well-to-do suburbs, people who had immigrated to the country; someone who would make it radically easier for Democrats to recruit donors, volunteers and voters from those same groups; someone who would replace Brooks Patterson as the Republican Party’s indispensable man—just as he did with local Republican power-brokers throughout the country: Donald J. Trump.
But it’s not simply that diversity brought in new voters, diluting the strength of the Republican electorate. The new diversity actually affected the political preferences of the mostly white residents who already lived there. Republicans became less Republican. . . . . even if you are a straight, white, Christian person who lives in Oakland County, you don’t want to demonize somebody who’s an immigrant, because they live next door to you and you work with them. … I think that’s the difference: I don’t think my constituents see diversity as a threat.”
In places like Oakland, the Republican Party’s continuing focus on culture-war issues even puzzles former Republican officeholders.
“It’s the opposite of a big-tent party right now,” says Martin Howrylak, a Republican who represented Troy in the state House from 2012-2018. “That was really the game plan of Trump: to create lines: ‘You’re either with me or against me. And if you’re not with me, you might as well—politically speaking—die.’ And that ‘take no prisoners’ approach is the antithesis of what’s needed here. As long as the party continues to embrace the former president, it’s going to have trouble in Oakland County.”
That ‘Biden Republican’ exists, and they call themselves that—out here, they do,” Markham says. “They were pretty comfortable … but they kind of woke up and went, ‘Holy crap, this is not the future that I want for my kids.’ A lot of these new folks—doctors, lawyers, young people—[are] coming to us and saying, ‘The Republican Party doesn’t represent us.’ That's how I ended up being a Democrat.”
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