The 2020 election once again showed that the pursuit of affluent, white, college-educated suburbanites dominates the political strategies of both parties. Donald Trump made a transparently racist appeal to the so-called suburban housewives of America, warning that liberals were plotting to “abolish the suburbs” by flooding their neighborhoods with low-income housing and Black Lives Matter protests. And while Joe Biden acknowledged the increasing diversity of American suburbia, his campaign continued the decades-long centrist Democratic project of crafting electoral appeals and calibrating policy positions toward moderate, upper-income voters.

The obsession with upper-income, white suburban professionals provides myopic understandings of the past and flawed lessons for the future. In 2010, the US Census revealed that, for the first time, a majority of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos in America’s one hundred largest metropolitan regions resided in suburban areas and not in central cities. More than half of all poor people, and of first- and second-generation immigrants, in these major metropolitan regions also lived in the census-designated suburbs, where fewer than one-fourth of households conformed to the mythical suburban ideal of a married couple with children under the age of eighteen.

Suburbs today are more working-class, and more diverse, than ever before. But it is not clear that the Democratic Party establishment, including the incoming Biden administration, is ready or willing to embrace the suburban electorate on its own terms.