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If Bill Clinton was the first black president, then Barack Obama might be the first urban one. He is the only American president in recent history to seem unembarrassed about claiming a personal residence in a major American city. Instead, presidents have tended to hail from homes called ranches or groves or manors or plantations, in places called Kennebunkport or Santa Barbara or Oyster Bay or Northampton. There were times, certainly, during the course of the presidential campaign when Barack Obama seemed less than proud of his Chicago heritage. Indeed, Obama treated Chicago as little more than a bedroom community during parts of his presidential bid, choosing to launch his campaign downstate in Springfield instead, and not holding a major public rally in the city until his climactic event in Grant Park on November 4. As John McCain's commercials yapped about the "corrupt Chicago political machine," Obama seemed as though he was worried about bumping into Bill Ayers at Manny's Deli or Tony Rezko at the Frontera Grill. As Rudy Giuliani the former mayor of the hamlet called New York City tried to portray Obama as an out-of-touch elitist, Obama seemed to strain to avoid the caricature.

Like many incoming presidents, Barack Obama was elected partly in reaction to the failures of the previous one, a president who was dogmatic, insecure, white-bread, and at least ostensibly rural. By contrast, Obama is unmistakably urban: pragmatic, superior, hip, stubborn, multicultural. But Obama's election may also represent something more if not a sign that America's psyche has changed then at least that its demographics are on the move. We may still romanticize some of the more familiar, rurally oriented narratives of presidents past: the Ronald Reagan frontiersman caricature (which both Sarah Palin and John McCain tried to co-opt at various times) or the Bill Clinton born-in-a-small-town shtick (see also: Edwards, John; Huckabee, Mike). Fewer and fewer of us, however, have actually lived those experiences. In 1992, when Bill Clinton won his first term, 35 percent of American voters were identified as rural according to that year's national exit polls, and 24 percent as urban. This year, however, the percentage of rural voters has dropped to 21 percent, while that of urban voters has climbed to 30. The suburbs, meanwhile, have been booming: 41 percent of America's electorate in 1992, they represent 49 percent now (see chart).

In other words, if you are going to pit big cities against small towns, it is probably a mistake to end up on the rural side of the ledger. Last year, Obama accumulated a margin of victory of approximately 10.5 million votes in urban areas (see chart), far bettering John Kerry's 3.6 million. Obama improved his performance not only among black and Latino voters but also among urban whites, with whom he performed 9 points better than Kerry. Obama also won each of the seventeen most densely populated states, a list that includes such nontraditional battlegrounds as Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. (One hidden advantage of urban areas: They're easier to canvass to get the vote out.) By contrast, for all their bluster about small towns, John McCain and Sarah Palin beat Obama by just 2.4 million votes in rural areas, actually a bit worse than the 4.3-million-vote margin that Bush racked up in 2004.

With the votes that he banked in the cities, Obama did not really need to prevail in the suburbs. But he did anyway as every winning presidential candidate has done since 1980 bettering McCain by 2 points there. Indeed, among the many mistakes the McCain campaign made was targeting the rural vote rather than the suburban one, as Bush and Karl Rove did in 2000 and 2004.

It may also be that suburban voters are starting to look and behave more like their urban brethren. According to a poll by the National Center for Suburban Studies, 20 percent of suburban voters are nonwhite not much behind the national average of 27 percent and 44 percent live in a racially mixed neighborhood (versus a national average of 46 percent). Suburban voters are just as likely to be concerned about the economy as other voters are and just as likely to know someone who has lost a job. Moreover, many suburbanites who do not live in cities may nevertheless be thoroughly familiar with them; according to the Census Bureau, at least eight to nine million persons commute into urban areas each day. As a result, urban bashing isn't what it once was at the height of white flight and the Reagan revolution. Whereas in 1980, according to the biannual General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago, 24.4 percent of Americans thought that the government was spending too much money to solve the problems of big cities, nowadays that number is down to 12.8 percent. The suburbs are immune to neither urban America's problems nor its promise.

Barack Obama, the former community organizer, may be the first president in a generation to actively seed urban renewal. His proposals include creating an Office of Urban Policy, restoring the Bush cuts to the Community Development Block Grant program, financing so-called regional-innovation clusters to link smaller cities together, and establishing twenty "Promise Neighborhoods" essentially, oases of social services in inner cities. Closer to home, he has already started to pitch Chicago as the prospective home of the 2016 Olympic Games, a potentially climactic event that if all goes well could give a bounce in the polls to his Democratic successor in the midst of an election year.

We have, of course, started to get a little ahead of ourselves. But the future of America is an urban one among the twenty largest metropolitan areas in 2000, nineteen had added population by 2007, a trend likely to sustain itself as rising gas prices place more pressure on exurban commuters. Republicans trail Democrats among essentially every fast-growing demographic except the elderly the youth vote, the Latino vote; they never had the black vote. It is long past time that they hone their pitch to urban voters, and find their shining city upon a hill.

Nate Silver runs the political-prediction Web site FiveThirtyEight.com and is an analyst and writer for Baseball Prospectus.

Illustration by Pitch Interactive

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