Monday, Nov. 16, 2020 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
On Nov. 5, all eyes were on Nevada and Arizona as the world wondered if these two states would cast their electoral college votes for Joe Biden or President Donald Trump. Journalists in the United States and abroad delved into the political minutiae of Clark and Maricopa counties, with the outcome of the 2020 presidential election hanging in the balance.
As we now know, both Nevada and Arizona will add to the Electoral College vote total of President-elect Biden.
This international attention confirmed what those of us in the Mountain West already knew: This is a region whose politics are in tremendous flux, and in the future, more and more political attention will be paid to the Southwestern part of the U.S.
Recent Brookings Mountain West research on congressional districts in our region, based upon data compiled by Bloomberg CityLab, charts the parties and representatives for whom these districts voted from 2016 to 2020.
In light of the 2020 election, it is informative to look at what kinds of congressional districts exist in the Mountain West. Today, the region is dominated by suburbs. Every congressional district contains suburban areas, although three districts remain purely rural.
However, that does not tell the whole story. The most common type of Mountain West congressional district is composed entirely of densely populated suburbs. Next in number are districts that include both suburbs and urban areas, followed by more sparse suburbs and suburban-rural mixes. This geography is far from the common perception that purely rural areas dominate in the Mountain West.
In 2016, regional suburban areas were Republican-dominated. Two of the three purely rural districts voted Democratic — one in Arizona encompasses much of the Navajo nation, one in a region of New Mexico heavily populated by Hispanic residents — and districts with urban areas were blue strongholds. Yet three out of the five states had majority-Republican congressional representation.
The 2018 elections produced a sea-change from the 2016 status quo. The Mountain West region experienced a blue wave. Several congressional districts switched from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, and this occurred almost exclusively in dense suburban districts, and in every Mountain West state except for Nevada. At the same time, not a single Democratic representative lost his or her seat. These dense suburbs tipped the balance of the region, shifting congressional membership from majority-Republican-represented to majority-Democrat-represented.
The 2020 elections that recently concluded showed another shift, once more in the opposite direction. Despite the fact that more Mountain West states voted for a Democratic presidential candidate than in recent history, Republicans gained a congressional seat they lost in 2018, and are leading in another such district that is currently uncalled, leaving the Democrats with only two of those flipped suburban districts.
In summation, the road to winning congressional districts in the Mountain West, and indirectly, securing Electoral College votes in the region — and the presidency — runs through the suburbs of cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Denver. These are areas where the partisan balance rests on a knife’s edge, and can be won by either party with enough political ground game. Since 2016, portions of these suburbs flipped back and forth, and that pattern is likely to increase now that both parties understand the importance of this growing region.
Eshaan Vakil is a student researcher on public policy issues at the Brookings Mountain West center at UNLV. He specializes in the intersection of government and technology/science. He can be reached at [email protected].
