Republicans believe they can control a new, more promising demographic: the fast-growing, conservative communities just beyond the suburban sprawl, where tony malls are rising almost monthly out of fields and farmland. For Republicans, this means a whole new market of potential entrepreneurs to enlist and mobilize. If Bush can harness the power of the exurbs, he can create a kind of organization the counttry has not yet witnessed -- a political machine for the new economy.

Fortunately, we live in a one-person-one-vote democracy and not in one that's one-dollar-one-vote. Those exurbs may well be promising GOP territory, but the population density is low (deliberately so), and the families are generally small, quite unlike the areas dominated by the Democrats, which tend to be high-density.

But what happens when those exurbs, slowly and surely, turn into the same kind of suburbs that people are fleeing from? Those who live there, however willing they were to have farmland turned into homes for themselves before they moved in, are going to, sooner or later, start getting upset that their idyllic retreat is no longer as remote and unpopulated as it was at the beginning, so they're going to start to turn to zoning measures to control growth, which is going to put them in direct conflict with developers and real estate intrests, who also happen to be strong supporters of the GOP. When that happens, who do you suppose the GOP is going to back, the exurbanites or the developers?