Analysis: "How the parties in the US have changed strategy"

Since 1994, the Independent Pew Research Center has asked Americans what they think on various political issues, and in doing so has been able to measure how American public opinion moves between conservative and liberal values. The results are clear. Voters are increasingly polarized and while Republicans became more conservative during the Obama years 2008-2016, Democrats became more liberal between 2014 and 2017, when the study was last conducted. There is no evidence that polarization has decreased since then. But there are still voters for the parties to fight over. The question is who they are.

Actually, it's pretty easy to answer that. Voters in cities vote more for Democrats, while voters in sparsely populated areas vote more for Republicans. It is the suburban voters in between, middle-class families on the outskirts of big cities or in smaller cities around the United States, that the parties are fighting over. Particularly important are suburban voters in those states where election results are expected to be fairly even, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and a few more.

In the 1960s, when Richard Nixon focused his election campaign on "the suburban voter" in particular, suburban voters made up about a third of the American population. This year, that number had increased significantly, 52 percent of Americans then stated that they lived in the suburbs. So here are usually millions of votes to rake in for the parties, if they just bet.

The problem is that the goldmine of voters is believed to have dried up properly. The polarization in the United States has meant that there are significantly fewer suburban voters to fight for the parties, as more voters have simply already made up their minds. But not everyone.

So how are the parties trying to lure over the insecure center voters in the suburbs? Donald Trump often mentions the threat from what he calls the "radical left", and he has recently tried to paint the picture that Joe Biden wants to destroy the villa idyll of middle-class families. The president tweeted, among other things, that Joe Biden will "destroy your neighborhood and your American dream," and that the Democrats want to "abolish the suburbs." With that, the president hopes to scare some insecure center voters to the polls on his side.

Joe Biden and the Democrats, who in opinion polls so far have done very well among suburban voters, use much the same tactics as Trump and say that democracy itself is threatened if the president gets four more years in power. The tactics of both parties lead to one thing: an election that is supposed to be more about and against President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden than about political issues. The only exception is perhaps the corona pandemic, which is very important to voters, whether you live in an urban, sparsely populated or suburban area.