I’m not sure it’s possible in the current environment. It’s hip and trendy to be a liberal in the suburbs. The same thing has happened in the Westchester and Long Island suburbs here in NY – since NY is pretty blue nobody really noticed it the way they do in VA, but it’s still here.

Somewhere along the line the Republican message stopped speaking to a bunch of people who were once solid Republicans. Unfortunately I don’t know that the party has gone to the focus groups and such to really put a finger on why they’re drifting away. My casual and amateur observation is that they probably feel like Republicans started focusing only on social issues and they don’t much care about those issues.

Look, most people in the ‘burbs don’t make $250k a year – but a lot of them do, and a lot of those people are still voting for Democrats election after election. That is mind-boggling because – especially in the NY suburbs – $250k isn’t going to go all that far (once you pay state taxes, property taxes, high prices, etc), and higher income taxes are not going to help these people. Especially since these same people, even where they aren’t making $250k are going to have salaries that put them well above the thresholds for freebies that Democrats propose. I would bet that most NY suburban families won’t see 75% of the “tax cuts” and refundable credits that Obama is offering – they come in above the phase-out numbers.

So suburbanites get taxed more and get virtually none of the benefits, and they still think Democrats are going to solve their economic concerns. The old pocketbook issues that carried the GOP in the ‘burbs seems to be slipping at just the time when “cultured” liberals are escaping the wastelands they’ve created in urban centers. Hence you get “rapid movement” – you see an influx of liberals at the same time that you are allowing voters to slip from red to blue, which only compounds things.