President Biden and former President Trump are both fighting for the suburban woman voter, but she’s no longer the “soccer mom” caricature that gained traction in the ’90s.
The label connotes a stereotypical picture of a white, college-educated woman, married with a couple of kids. She’s a type of suburban woman voter, but far from the only one.
The country’s suburbs have grown more racially and ethnically diverse, and looking at a single archetype of the suburban woman voter for 2024 risks missing key differences across the demographic.
“If you want to talk about suburban women, you want to get away from the caricature. It’s much different than it was … because there are many more people of color moving into the suburbs than there were before,” said Bill Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
In 1990, a few years before the “soccer mom” moniker caught on in the 1996 election cycle…