Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

Trump wants suburban voters. Do they want him?

President Trump arrives at the Mankato airport.
President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign stop at North Star Aviation at the Mankato, Minn., airport Monday.
Jim Mone | AP Photo

President Donald Trump needs suburban votes to win in November. He started blatantly targeting this key demographic on Twitter recently. 

A few days prior, he wrote:

But Trump’s approach to connecting with suburban voters displays a significant ignorance about who they are and how they view the world in 2020. The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll shows the president would only receive about a third of the suburban vote today – a stunning decline from the nearly 50 percent support he enjoyed in 2016.

Wednesday at 9 a.m., MPR News host Kerri Miller talked with a political analyst and a historian about how the suburbs are changing – and whether the Democrats are appealing to this important demographic at this week’s convention.

Guests:

  • Matthew Lassiter is a historian who specializes in political history and urban/suburban studies at the University of Michigan.

  • Khalilah Brown-Dean is an associate professor of political science at Quinnipiac University.