suburb

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — A few years ago, Allison Posner was barely involved in politics.

Now the 42-year-old mother of two from Maplewood, New Jersey, hands out food and diapers to immigrant families outside a nearby detention facility. She waves signs on a highway overpass between school pickups and orthodontist appointments. And this weekend, she’ll lead a No Kings protest march across this affluent town alongside her husband, her children and thousands of others who are convinced President Trump represents a direct threat to American democracy.

“The people in the suburbs are definitely radicalizing,” said Posner, a freelance actor.

A growing faction of concerned citizens living in suburban communities across the United States — places once known for political moderation or even conservatism — are increasingly positioned on the front lines of the anti-Trump resistance. More than a year into the Republican president’s second term, the soccer moms are becoming bona fide activists taking to their well-manicured streets to fight Trump and his allies.

The leftward lurch could cost Republicans control of Congress for the president’s final two years in office. It could also reshape the Democratic Party by elevating a fresh crop of fiery progressive candidates emboldened to push back against the Trump administration more aggressively than the establishment may prefer.

Indivisible, the activist organization spearheading the third round of No Kings protests this weekend, said roughly two-thirds of more than 3,000 planned demonstrations will be held outside urban areas. Overall, more than 9 million people are expected to turn out nationwide for what leaders predict will be the largest day of protesting in U.S. history.

“We’re going to be everywhere,” Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin said.

Organizers said sign-ups have been especially enthusiastic in suburban areas with high-profile congressional races like Scottsdale, Arizona; Langhorne, Pennsylvania; East Cobb, Georgia; and here in northern New Jersey’s 11th District, which holds a special election April 16.

Democratic voters last month chose Analilia Mejia, a former political director for Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, as their candidate to replace Mikie Sherrill, the more moderate Democrat who was recently elected as New Jersey’s governor.

Posner said she’s excited to have a fighter represent her district, someone who can channel the outrage she sees every day.

“I’m seeing people from the PTA or the neighborhood who would have never joined a protest in the past, who are now asking how they can get involved,” Posner said. “This is not some other people’s fight. This is our fight.”

‘Our hair is on fire’

For decades, affluent suburbs like those in northern New Jersey helped elect Republicans who fit the districts they represented: business-oriented, culturally moderate and disinterested in ideological fights.

That began to change in the Trump era.

Across the country, college-educated suburban voters recoiled from Trump’s brand of politics. They shifted sharply toward Democrats in the 2018 midterms and in the presidential elections that followed. Districts like New Jersey’s 11th, once a Republican stronghold, have since become part of a new liberal coalition rooted in places that were, until very recently, politically competitive.

Even in Summit, New Jersey, one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs, Jeff Naiman feels as if he’s living in an “authoritarian nightmare” of Trump’s making.

“It’s like our hair is on fire,” says Naiman, a 59-year-old radiologist who leads his local chapter of Indivisible. “Our country’s being torn apart.”

He’s supporting Mejia, and he has no doubt she’ll win next month’s special election — and again in November’s general election.

“In this environment,” Naiman said, “I think the chances of her losing the general election are basically zero.”

Mejia, an outspoken progressive activist endorsed by Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., emerged from the crowded Democratic primary last month, beating more moderate candidates like former congressman Tom Malinowski.

She’s critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, calls for the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and backs Medicare for All. She’s also eager to raise concerns about what she describes as Trump’s dictatorial tendencies and will be one of the featured speakers at a No Kings protest this weekend.

“A ZIP code does not protect anyone from rising violent authoritarianism,” she said in an interview.

Mejia still describes herself as a soccer mom, even as her Republican critics accuse her of trying to soften her activist image ahead of Election Day.

“My youngest plays baseball and soccer, my oldest lacrosse and basketball,” she said. “And when I take my children to activities, to games, and I speak to other parents, I know that we’re all experiencing this economy and this political moment very similarly.”

Mejia defended herself against accusations of antisemitism for her position on Israel, which she accused of committing genocide in the war in Gaza, a topic that emerged as a key issue in the race.

“When I say Palestinians have rights, like Jewish people and Israelis have rights, that is not antisemitism, that is humanism,” she said while acknowledging there is antisemitism within the Republican and Democratic parties. “I am an Afro Latina raising two Black sons in America. I know othering kills. I know how dangerous it is when we dehumanize communities.”

A Republican balancing act

New Jersey’s 11th District was represented by a Republican until Sherrill was elected during the 2018 midterm elections that served as a harsh verdict at the halfway mark of Trump’s first term.

Joe Hathaway, the Republican nominee in next month’s special election and a town councilman from Randolph Township, hopes to convince voters that Mejia is too radical for them. Republican strategists in Washington, too, believe a surge of far-left Democratic candidates nationwide like Mejia in otherwise moderate districts might help their party maintain its razor-thin House majority this fall.

Yet suburban Republicans are facing serious political headwinds from the leader of their own party in the White House. Hathaway, for example, initially declined to say whether he voted for Trump.

“I don’t think it’s important,” he said in an interview, before acknowledging that he cast his ballot for the president three times. “This job is representing the district. NJ-11 comes first, before a president, before your party.”

Hathaway backs the president’s war in Iran and many of the economic policies in Trump’s big tax and spending cuts bill. But he was also quick to highlight areas of disagreement.

The Republican said he supports most of the Democrats’ demands in the Department of Homeland Security shutdown fight, including proposals to require federal immigration agents to wear body cameras, clearly identify themselves, take off face masks and receive better training.

He also wants Republicans who lead Congress to stand up to Trump, whose use of executive authority Hathaway said is “pressure testing” the checks and balances outlined in the Constitution.

“Congress needs to reassert that it is the first branch of government and take more of a leadership role than it’s been doing,” he said.

Inside the suburban shift

Suburban Americans have been slowly moving away from the Republicans over the past 15 years, according to Gallup polling that tracks party affiliation over time.

Trump was unable to stop the shift despite warnings that Democrats would “destroy” the suburbs with low-income housing.

In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won 54% of voters who said they lived in the suburbs while Trump won only 44%, according to AP VoteCast. That was a substantial improvement on Democrat Hillary Clinton’s performance in a smaller survey of validated 2016 voters conducted by the Pew Research Center, which found that Clinton and Trump split the group about evenly.

The suburbs have also grown more diverse and educated over the past few decades, demographic shifts that may make Democrats more confident. In both of the past two presidential elections, AP VoteCast found that college-educated and non-white suburban voters were much likelier to support the Democratic candidate.

Naiman, the Summit radiologist, said he’s witnessed a transformation in his town, which was represented by Republicans at the state and federal level for decades until Trump took over.

“I don’t think that Summit is going to be swinging towards Republicans anytime soon — at least not as long as Trumpism is around,” he said.

Peoples writes for the Associated Press. AP polling editor Amelia Thomson DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.

For years, Beirut’s southern suburb has been spoken about as though it were a world apart: A Hezbollah bastion, a target, a warning, or a battlefield. But in Arabic, the word “dahiyeh” simply means “the suburb”.

The word itself is ordinary. What makes it extraordinary in Lebanon is its history.

When the Lebanese speak of Dahiyeh, they do not mean any suburb of their capital city. They mean southern Beirut in particular – a dense belt of neighbourhoods that grew from villages, fields, informal housing and municipal edges into a major extension of the city.

Dahiyeh – in size nearly as big as municipal Beirut – has been shaped by migration and displacement in the past 50 years. While many moved there in search of work or housing, most of the others were pushed there by wars, political unrest, evictions and a general sense of being neglected by the Lebanese state.

The social geography of Lebanon, which gained independence from French colonisers in 1943, began to be transformed in 1948 when Israel’s establishment saw the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land in what is commonly referred to as the Nakba. After Israel’s further occupation of Palestinian lands in 1967 and the expulsion of Palestinian fighters from Jordan in 1970, southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut became increasingly bound up with the Palestinian national movement.

Beirut’s ‘belt of misery’

Dahiyeh’s growth, however, accelerated after 1975, when the Lebanese civil war broke out. People displaced from other parts of Beirut moved south. The subsequent Israeli attacks and invasions in 1978 and 1982 drove more people to the edge of the capital. In that sense, Dahiyeh was not just a destination for “migrants”. It was also a refuge for the uprooted, the poor, and those repeatedly forced to start over.

Studies by scholars such as Mona Harb, professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut (AUB), show how a common noun – Dahiyeh – gradually evolved into a distinct political space: A stigmatised periphery marked in the Lebanese imagination as Beirut’s “belt of misery” that hardened into a territory with its own social and political significance. Today, it is part of Greater Beirut, woven into the capital geographically, economically and socially, even if the country’s politics may have treated the area as an outlier.

Harb’s work explicitly frames the southern suburb as a politically produced urban territory rather than just a space outside Beirut. To understand how that happened, one has to begin with the making of modern Lebanon.

Under the French Mandate, and later through the political order consolidated at independence in 1943, power in Lebanon was distributed through a sectarian system that heavily favoured the established elites, especially the Maronite Christians, who dominated the presidency and other key positions. The system not only created inequality, but also formalised and reproduced it.

Rural Lebanon, especially the south and the Bekaa Valley, remained underdeveloped and politically neglected for decades. Among those most affected were Lebanon’s Shia community, who were disproportionately concentrated in the poorer agricultural regions and had less access to state investments, infrastructure and patronage than the more privileged urban and mountainous centres. Scholars say it was not simply a temporary developmental gap, but a long history of marginalisation that defined the country’s politics.

Israeli attacks on Palestinian positions inside Lebanon repeatedly hit the surrounding Lebanese communities as well, mainly in the south. For the Shia in southern Lebanon, these attacks sharpened a bitter awareness: They were living on the front lines of a bitter regional conflict, while they were also being denied equal economic rights and meaningful political inclusion in Lebanon itself.

Out of that reality emerged a new form of Shia political mobilisation centred not only on identity, but also on deprivation, dignity and state neglect. That mobilisation found its earliest expression in Harakat al-Mahroumin, the Movement of the Deprived, founded by Imam Musa al-Sadr in the 1970s. Al-Sadr became a towering figure of modern Lebanese Shia politics because he gave social, religious and political forms to grievances building up for decades. That movement later grew an armed wing: Amal.

Al-Sadr’s mysterious disappearance during a 1978 trip to Libya remains unresolved and politically contested to this day. What is not contested is his historical importance. He helped turn the Shia of Lebanon from a neglected rural underclass into an organised political constituency demanding equal rights, representation, and a defining national presence.

The rise of Hezbollah

The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon changed the Shia political landscape yet again. Israel’s siege of Beirut, the departure of Palestinian icon Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization forces, and Syria’s desire to dominate Lebanon all intensified divisions within Lebanese society.

Amal, which meanwhile had grown closer to Damascus to get weapons, money and political backing, remained a major force. But new Islamist movements emerged from within and around it, shaped by the Israeli occupation, disillusionment with older leaderships, and increasing support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially in the Bekaa region.

Over time, these currents crystallised into Hezbollah. The split within the Shia movement was less theological and more about political strategy, defined by questions over aligning more closely with Syria, solidarity with the Palestinians, and general resistance against the Israeli occupation. Differences between Amal and Hezbollah over these questions turned violent in the 1980s, an intra-Shia fighting that Lebanese often recall as “a war among brothers”.

As Hezbollah grew stronger, Dahiyeh became much more than a residential belt. It turned into an urban heartland of a social and political force. Hezbollah built institutions there: Offices, schools, clinics, welfare networks and media infrastructure. Amal also had a presence, but the common shorthand that reduces Dahiyeh to a “Hezbollah stronghold” always conceals more than it reveals.

Today, Dahiyeh hosts a Shia majority, but also has a small minority of Palestinians and other Lebanese communities, including Christians. It bleeds physically into what is known as Greater Beirut, including its Christian and mixed areas. So when the suburb is bombed, it is not some isolated military island that is hit, but a deeply inhabited part of urban Beirut.

That is precisely why Dahiyeh is so central to the Israeli military’s thinking. During the 2006 war, large sections of the southern suburb, especially Haret Hreik, were devastated by Israel. The destruction became so emblematic that Israeli military strategists came up with what came to be known as the Dahiyeh Doctrine: Use of overwhelming force and large-scale destruction of areas associated with an armed group, with the aim of generating deterrence and putting pressure on residents supporting the group. Rights activists and legal scholars say the doctrine violates international humanitarian law, as civilian neighbourhoods and infrastructure do not become legitimate targets simply because an armed group is embedded among the population.

That Israeli pattern, however, has intensified since October 2023, when a genocidal war on Gaza and attacks on Lebanon began. Meanwhile, the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli strike in late 2024 eroded Dahiyeh’s resistance. That erosion is more visible in the ongoing Israeli attacks on Beirut and southern Lebanon, where more than a million people have registered as displaced since March 2. The old formula – that Dahiyeh was the principal red line and that any strikes there could be deterred by Hezbollah’s threats of retaliatory strikes on several Israeli cities – no longer holds.

Once again, Dahiyeh has become a focal point of the war, with repeated bombardment sending plumes of smoke over a place that many outsiders still describe as a world apart, but which is in fact woven into Beirut’s daily life. Built over decades by the poor, the migrants and the repeatedly uprooted – and shaped by the politics of marginalisation against those whom al‑Sadr once named “the deprived” – Dahiyeh has long served as both a refuge and a front line. Today, it is again being made to carry the costs of a conflict larger than itself.