This does not surprise me.
GREENWICH, Conn. — You know you’re in a different kind of town when the signs against drunk driving show a line drawn through a Martini glass to which the artist thoughtfully added a stirrer. Greenwich, Conn., is one such town.
Greenwich is home to billionaire hedge-fund managers, private-equity kings and corporate chieftains, as well as ordinary multi-multimillionaires. Interviewing people here requires leaving phone messages with au pairs and catching folks between board meetings.
You’d think that Greenwich would be solid Bush-loving turf — what with all those tax cuts for the rich. It is not. The voters are roughly 40 percent Republican, 40 percent unaffiliated and only 20 percent Democratic, but Bush won the town by only a sliver in 2004, even though his father grew up here.
The political shift toward Democrats has been noted in wealthy suburbs from Seattle to Philadelphia. In 2006, an amazing 63 percent of voters making from $150,000 to $200,000 chose Democratic candidates. Even those making over $200,000 favored Democrats, albeit by a small margin.
Affluent eastern towns like Greenwich have very little in common with the party of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. In my opinion, the Republican Party has more thoroughly regionalized itself than the Democrats ever did. Christopher Shays is the sole remaining New England Republican in the House of Representatives. Fairly soon, Judd Gregg and Olympia Snowe many be the only remaining New England Republicans in the Senate. And this trend is bleeding down into upstate New York, New Jersey, the eastern half of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. These are affluent areas that used to vote on crime and taxes. They’re turning to Democrats in droves.
