A Beach House Divided Against Itself

This month I visited friends and family in two classic East Coast beach locations: the Jersey Shore and Martha’s Vineyard. I know both of them well. I started going to the Shore during my graduate student days in New Jersey and married a woman who has gone there since she was a teenager living in the Philadelphia suburbs. As for the Vineyard, my parents owned a house there, and I spent every summer on the island while growing up. The two places have, of course, always been very different. Much of the Shore is aggressively commercial, filled with large apartment blocks right on the water, amusement parks, crowded beaches, and boardwalks where you can buy all manner of t-shirts, beach equipment, costume jewelry, fudge and a hundred varieties of hugely unhealthy (but tasty) fast food. It is honky-tonk, bustling, loud, raffish, and fun: a classic American scene. The Vineyard, by contrast, with the exception of the bustling town of Oak Bluffs, is aggressively non-commercial, filled with handsome gray shingled homes on peaceful dirt roads, pristine beaches without a French fry in sight, a quaint old whaling port, and shops selling upscale beach clothing, arts and crafts, fancy baked goods… and, yes, fudge (some things are universal). It is tasteful, quiet, genteel.

Over the past few years, the differences have also become more overtly political than ever before. In 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, it became hard to drive more than a few hundred yards on the Vineyard without seeing signs for Black Lives Matter, “Only You and I Can End Racism,” “I Can’t Breathe,” “Defund the Police,” and so forth. By now, most of those signs have vanished, but there are still a few in evidence, along with pride flags, and a handful of Harris/Walz signs sprouting up. Meanwhile, on the Shore, along with a profusion of American flags and Philadelphia sports banners, there are “thin blue line” flags (pro-police, and implicitly anti-Black Lives Matter), plus Trump flags and Trump road signs and bumper stickers. The politics have even made it onto the beach. In Margate, on the Shore, several beach tents had Trump flags or “thin blue line” flags flying over them. One had a massive banner showing a picture of the White House, with the caption “Traitor Joe’s” (gotta update that one!). On the Ocean City boardwalk, shops were doing a bustling business in Trump t-shirts, many of them showing the now iconic picture of the bloodied former president raising his fist under an American flag after the July assassination attempt. Not all places on the Shore are the same, politically. But in the area I visited, south of Atlantic City, the vibe was strongly MAGA.

It’s tempting to attribute this sharpening political divide principally to economic factors. The Jersey Shore has traditionally catered to a far more economically mixed clientele than the Vineyard. Among the vacationers are tradespeople, salespeople, police, firefighters, schoolteachers, predominantly although not entirely white. These are people far more likely to have felt the sting of inflation, far more likely to fear the effects of an economic downturn, than the financiers, corporate executives, doctors, and high-powered lawyers who summer on the Vineyard—including many African Americans drawn to the traditional Black summer resort of Oak Bluffs. Vineyarders may think that Bidenomics has been a roaring success. Shore vacationers are much less likely to agree.

But this explanation is also too simple. If the Vineyard has its share of multimillion dollar homes and luxury automobiles, so does the Shore. In Longport, next to Margate, one mammoth beach house after another lines the principal road, with high-end Range Rovers, Audis and BMWs parked in front. Many of the houses have been built or re-built since Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which put several of New Jersey’s barrier islands entirely under water. On the Shore, your dining options are in no way limited to boardwalk pizza and fries. Walk back a block or two and there are high-end restaurants serving $20 cocktails and $60 entrees, cafes offering $6 lattes. In Margate, medium-sized condos in converted motels are selling for close to half a million dollars. Atlantic City is as depressed and depressing as ever, the fronts of enormous, abandoned casinos decorated with gang graffiti. But much of the Shore is clearly experiencing a wave of prosperity.

Several social and cultural factors seem just as important to the politics, and they start with the changes that have come to the Vineyard, in particular, over the past few decades. These changes are easy to miss, because beach resorts, by their nature, tend to present themselves to the world as unchanging: as pieces of an idyllic past that you can escape to before returning to your normal hectic life. At the annual Vineyard Agricultural Fair, you can watch a horse pull, see a sheep shearing, and check out the winners of the best pie, best tomato and best quilt contests, just like in the 1960’s. The Vineyard still allows virtually no chain restaurants. It has no traffic lights, and relatively few apartment buildings or multi-family dwellings of any sort.

But behind the scenes, the Vineyard has become far, far more exclusive. Since the mid-1960’s, consumer prices in the United States have gone up roughly ten-fold. But in 1966 my parents bought three acres of land on the Vineyard for $10,000. Today, you would be hard pressed to find any comparable three-acre plot there going for less than a million (alas, my parents sold their property long ago). Summer rentals of modest homes without beach access start around $4,000 per week and go up very steeply from there. If you don’t own property on the island and you want to book the car ferry for one of the more popular summer weekends, it’s best to be at your computer in the minutes after the reservation system opens in January. Finding affordable housing for the workers who tend to all the multi-million-dollar homes, and staff the shops and services, has become a major crisis. This summer, a lack of certified crew members for the car ferries has led to frequent cancellations—already close to a thousand just in 2024—sending the system into chaos. (Of course, this doesn’t matter to the wealthiest summer residents, who keep cars on the island full time and arrive by air, often in their own planes). At the local markets you can find little bags of island-made granola selling for $21, and island-grown raspberries for a dollar apiece (seriously!). All in all, put quite simply, a summer resort that once catered to both the rich and the middle class now tilts increasingly towards the ultra-rich.

This tilt has not translated into the sort of overt and performative exclusivity one might find in countries more forthright about having a class system. To the contrary. Despite a few predictably monstrous new homes, it is more common to find multi-million-dollar Vineyard mansions that look surprisingly modest from their grey-shingled exteriors. You can find billionaires doing their own shopping at the up-scale Cronig’s supermarket (or so my friends on the island tell me) and walking through the “Ag Fair” in t-shirts and flip-flops. It all contributes to the unchanging, out-of-time vibe that makes the Vineyard such an attractive place to visit.

But this combination of ultra-exclusivity and vocal progressive politics does not necessarily sit well with the sort of people who vacation on the Jersey Shore—including wealthy ones who could afford a nice Vineyard house. Whether justified or not, the message many of them hear is quite clear: “you think you are better than us.” It’s no coincidence at all that when Ron DeSantis wanted to generate publicity around the border issue two years ago, he arranged to send two planeloads of primarily Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. The migrants received a friendly reception, but that did not stop The New York Post from crowing (without evidence) about the “amusing mass meltdown” among “white liberals… natural hypocrites whose commitment to diversity ends where their pebbled driveways begin.” This sort of populist resentment of elites, powerfully inflamed by conservative media, easily translates into the sort of ugly, corrosive anger that leads someone to put a “Traitor Joe’s” sign on a beach tent. At the Vineyard Ag Fair, I saw one prosperous-looking middle-aged man wearing a t-shirt with the words “Coastal Elitist” on it. I doubt many people on the Jersey Shore would appreciate the attempt at irony.

Needless to say, the divides I have been describing are not absolute. There are plenty of Harris voters on the Shore, and probably more Trump voters than one might expect on Martha’s Vineyard. But the overall mood in the two places is still very sharply divided. And while the two are not, by themselves, typical of red and blue America, the opposition between them does seem representative of the forces that so often seem to be ripping this country apart. A beach house divided against itself: can it stand?