I've written before about the political geography of Fairfield County, Connecticut. As it happens, the Secretary of the State has town-level election results for every election back to 1922. I decided to use this to try to figure out when Fairfield County turned into the moderately Democratic bastion it is today.
My interactive charts and writeups are here but I thought I'd write up some of what I've found. (If you want the charts fully-sized, though, then I'd suggest following the link...)
Introduction:
To repeat myself: Fairfield County, Connecticut might stereotypically consist entirely of investment executives with giant lawns, but there's actually a lot of diversity there. At 18% Hispanic, 64% non-Hispanic white, 10% non-Hispanic African-American, and 5% non-Hispanic Asian, Fairfield County is pretty close to the country as a whole across the broadest demographic categories, although it is indeed far wealthier (26% of the county's households make over $150,000 a year, compared to 10% nationally).
I'm pretty sure I've read people who've used Fairfield County's transition into a somewhat Democratic region as an example of the broader Democratic trends of old-growth suburbs and educated professionals. Think places like Nassau County, New York or Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
To start to understand Fairfield County's Democratic shift, we should probably try to figure out when it seems to have happened, and in which towns, and whether or not it seems to be ongoing.
I transcribed (by hand, and there might be some typos) all of the town-level Presidential results for Fairfield County back to 1924. If you follow the link, then you can see my scatterplot and line chart. You can compare any two years in the scatterplot and compare any subset of towns in the line chart. (To hell with "in one chart"...).
Part of why I made this is to allow other people to make comparisons or historical inquiries, but I have some tentative conclusions and interesting things that I've found. I'd still suggest going to the page, since part of what I liked is being able to easily juxtapose the scatterplot and the line chart, which is a bit hard with DKE formatting. And also, I'd love to see what other people interested in Connecticut political history could find out with this information and layout. Let me know in comments!
Anyway, to answer the question in my subject line: Fairfield County seems to have shifted Democratic in the 1996 and 2000 Presidential elections.
This isn't terribly surprising--Fairfield County went for Bush in 1992, even as he lost nationally, but has gone Democratic in every subsequent Presidential election. And in PVI terms, Fairfield County was basically even in 1996 and has had a PVI between D+3 and D+6 in all subsequent elections.
But there's an interesting split within Fairfield County, once you start looking at town-level results. I added two aggregate lines, one for "urban Fairfield County", which I defined to be Bridgeport, Norwalk, Stamford, Danbury, and Stratford, and one for "suburban Fairfield County"--everywhere else.
Urban Fairfield County:
Before 1996, Urban Fairfield County mostly tracked the national results fairly closely. Clinton won Urban Fairfield County 45-38, only a bit better than his national win of 43-37. But then, in 1996, Clinton won urban Fairfield County 58-32, and every Democrat since then has won Urban Fairfield County in a landslide:
Clinton had significant improvements in all five of the cities I'm defining as Urban Fairfield County between 1992 and 1996. He won Stratford and Danbury by significant margins despite losing both in 1992. (He also improved quite a bit in most of the other relatively low-income parts of Fairfield County like Bethel and Shelton.)
Urban Fairfield County has had significant demographic change, of course. All five cities are currently under 67% non-Hispanic white, although I'm not sure when that happened. But the political shift seems pretty sudden, even though Obama did even better in Urban Fairfield County (barely dropping at all from 2008 to 2012, at least in percentage).
Suburban Fairfield County:
Suburban Fairfield County, as I discuss at the link, is a bit more complicated, with a gradually narrowing Republican advantage over several decades. It also trended Democratic in 1996, but if I had to pick a key election then I would pick 2000.
With Jewish Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman on the ticket, Al Gore actually improved on Bill Clinton in Suburban Fairfield County, scoring particular improvements in the
particularly Jewish suburbs of Westport and Weston. Gore might have won the suburbs if Ralph Nader hadn't done so well, and Suburban Fairfield County had a small and shrinking Republican PVI from 2000 to 2008, when Obama finally carried the suburbs.
A few other suburbs trended Democratic in 2004 and/or 2008, like Wilton, Greenwich, and Redding. But in 2012, Obama dropped 6 points in Suburban Fairfield County, losing particular ground in the wealthiest towns. In fact, in the eight towns with median household income over $125,000 (according to the 2012 ACS 5-year averages), Obama in 2012 actually did worse than Kerry in 2004. A few examples are highlighted in the line chart below.
Without further Presidential elections, it's a bit hard to tell what the baseline is. Wilton and Greenwich, for example, had nearly even PVIs in 2004 and 2008, but Obama lost both by decisive margins in 2012.
Miscellaneous Interesting Things:
-Newtown and Shelton both used to be among the most Democratic towns in Fairfield County, although neither are anymore. (In 1924, before the candidacy of Al Smith helped to reshape Fairfield County politics, Newtown was actually the most Democratic.) Looking at 1928 and 1932 vs. 2012 will show you how Shelton and Newtown stand out in relative Republican shifts, and Shelton in particular was one of the most Democratic towns in Fairfield County until at least 1960. Shelton voted for FDR three times, for Truman, for JFK--and for John McCain. Obviously we're not talking about the same voters, but what accounts for that shift? (I have some thoughts on the link.)
-Relative population and turnout shifts. Bridgeport cast well under 38,000 Presidential votes in 2012, about 9.5% of the county total. Back in 1932, Bridgeport cast nearly 45,000 Presidential votes--a little under one-third of the county total. This is a bit cherry-picked, but compare 1984 and 2000: Walter Mondale actually got more total votes in Bridgeport than Al Gore (and only about 2,000 fewer votes than Gore+Nader), while Bush got under one-third of Reagan's total vote. Part of Bridgeport's dramatic Democratic shift in percentage terms has surely been white flight and Republican out-migration.
Suburbanization can be seen more broadly as well. Up until 1976, a majority of the Presidential vote of prototypically suburban Fairfield County was cast in the five towns I consider to be the area's cities, but in 2012 Urban Fairfield County only cast about 43% of the vote, and even this is a bit up from 2000 and from 2004.
Note:
Somewhere in the origins of the line chart is Shan Carter and Kevin Quealy's New York Times chart "Housing's Rise and Fall in 20 Cities", and I got the idea for the changing URL from Mike Bostock's "Paint By Numbers" block, along with a friend's suggestion.