Posted on 07/08/2025 6:15:41 AM PDT by MtnClimber
All the attention being thrown at New York’s mayoral primary race, won by socialist Zohran Mamdani, raises broader questions that deserve answers. Why do voters keep electing Democrats responsible for so much urban decline and decay? What will break the left’s stranglehold on our once great cities? Is the situation simply hopeless?
Of the nation’s largest 20 cities, only two have Republican mayors – Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Republicans hold the mayorships of just 25 of the 100 largest cities. And that number is down from 30 in 2020.
More mysterious is the paradox that, despite the fact that blame for empty stores, rising crime, and the exodus of people rests squarely on the shoulders of Democrats in most of these cities, voters rarely hand control over to Republicans.
Look at the history of the 10 largest cities and despair.
Los Angeles has had one Republican mayor since 1961. New York has had one and a half since 1969 (Michael Bloomberg had been a lifelong Democrat, but ran as a Republican in 2001 and 2005, and then left the GOP midway through his second term).
Chicago has been electing Democratic mayors since 1931, and Houston since 1982.
Phoenix has elected Democrats for 20 years (a Republican was twice appointed as an interim mayor).
In Philadelphia, the last time a Republican was mayor was in 1948, and it’s been 24 years since San Antonio voters picked a GOP candidate for the city’s top office.
The other three of the top 10 cities – Dallas, San Diego, and Jacksonville – have been notable exceptions, with each having a fair share of mayors from both political parties.
Not only do voters in the nation’s largest cities keep electing Democrats, many of the ones winning elections today are more radical than their predecessors. Seven cities are today run by socialist mayors. Ten years ago, there was one.
Three years ago, Los Angeles, described by NBC News as suffering “long-simmering frustrations with issues like homelessness and crime” – not to mention the exodus of hundreds of thousands of residents – under Democratic leadership, had the chance to elect a wealthy real-estate developer, Rick Caruso, who promised to clean up the place.
Instead, voters overwhelmingly elected Castro-loving communist and former “community organizer” Karen Bass, who’s proved more incompetent than her predecessor, with the city now $1 billion in the red and entire neighborhoods burned to the ground in wildfires while she was vacationing in Ghana.
After the fires, Caruso said, correctly, that “We have terrible leadership resulting in billions of dollars in damage because [Bass] wasn’t here and didn’t know what she was doing.”
But Bass will still probably win reelection next year.
New Yorkers, after suffering eight years of Bill de Blasio and now the wildly unpopular, scandal-ridden Eric Adams, appear poised to elect a Marxist, who is guaranteed to make everything in New York worse.
What’s truly bizarre is that voters keep putting Democrats in charge even as their friends and neighbors vote with their feet to leave these Democratic hellholes.
In just the past four years, the one-party cities of Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago have seen their combined populations shrink by more than 370,000.
People are fleeing other Democratic cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Portland, Baltimore, Milwaukee (which hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1906, but has had three socialist mayors), Albuquerque, Minneapolis, and Cleveland (which has had only two Republican mayors since 1941).
Leftists keep yapping about how they want more people to live in densely populated areas, but then do everything they can to drive people away.
So, what is it about cities? Is there something in human nature that causes people to get more liberal – or dumber, depending on your perspective – the more densely packed together they are? Is this just a fact of life? And who cares, anyway? If Democrats want to ruin these cities and people keep voting them into office, we should just say good riddance, right?
But think about it: We are all paying the costs of urban blight and decay that Democrats have brought forth. We pay them in the form of larger housing subsidy costs, bigger welfare costs, deeper economic stagnation, and more widespread cultural rot.
Imagine what the nation would be like if our urban centers were thriving, prosperous, peaceful, innovative, family-friendly, affordable, and nice places to live. Where businesses were able to flourish, and schools were models of excellence. Imagine the hole this would blow in the Democrats’ effort to win national elections simply by appealing to urban leftists.
There’s no reason to believe that our major cities can’t be rescued. But that will never happen if the right gives up trying.
Thomas Jefferson viewed cities as “pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man”.
Jefferson was right.
Until the urban groups realize they are being destroyed by left wing policies they will Not change, unless forced to.
We are now 60 years into the lefts policies of dependency and victimhood. That’s 3+ generations deep.
Man of these folks view not working or being productive as morally superior and their right.
NYC is a perfect example of this. They left runs the city into the ground, they eventually decide enough is enough. Put a Republican in as mayor they clean it up and make it livable again and as soon as it is they vote the left wing back in and they run it back down.. there is no hope at least in the short term for American urban cities.
I don’t mean to exclude Black people from “we,” but in the following case, I think think there’s an issue of who’s victim of interracial crime, and who *can* leave when the going gets bad. Black people eventually leave major cities that go to rot, they just take longer.
In 1960, the population of Detroit was ALREADY in free-fall. It had 1.2 million White people (probably down from at least 1.4 million already, but I don’t have racial data that old). By 2020, it had only 60,000.
In 1940, St Louis had 750,000 White people; by 2020 it had only 130,000. Baltimore went from 750,000 to 150,000.
The urban communists win the old fashion way by buying votes, distributing patronage and pay for play corruption. Republicans have never been accused of machine politics. NYC’s Zoltar has upped the ante with his blatant free stuff communism.
One remedy is to have the people who occupy the city most of the time, somehow vote in the city
The population of NYC during a weekday/workday is completely different from that on non workdays
The people who use the City to work in don’t have any say in its government. I don’t know if it would change it from democrat but the surrounding communities there are not as blue as the city
It's not a paradox.
The only thing most Americans hate worse than Democrats - is Republicans.
Good post.
Cities served their purpose years ago but they have outlived their usefulness.
We should stop trying to save them and start accepting the inevitable.
“Hiroshima”
Fill our cities with all Japanese people and they will turn into paradises.
Lol.
Better to as whether it is possible to break the leftist death grip on public schools and teachers’ colleges.
I seriously doubt all these cities can be saved because they don’t want to be saved.
Why do voters keep electing Democrats
Ignorance and stupidity with a massive thirst for unscrupulous power to do any damned thing they wish to do at any time.
To civilize them is like trying to teach a lion to fetch.
The 1965 immigration act was the worst piece of legislation ever
The population density of cities gives them tremendous political power. NYC 'generally' dictates who NY elects for President and its Senators. The same can be said for political dominance in other states that have large democrat cities, e.g., L.A., Philly, Boston, Chicago ....
With political power comes the ability to pass/influence legislation that perpetuates the power and monopoly of large democrat run cities and by association their state.
In order to break the political monopoly of big cities, Congress would need to cut off all federal aid and start prosecuting and jailing people like Bass and Newsome. God knows, Congress and the Executive (DOJ, FBI) have had plenty of reason to break up the 1 party system of these big D cities but have chosen not to do so.
IMHO - We have a Congress that is mostly feckless and corrupt. It's corrupt in the sense that it minimizes the needs of America and Americans in favor of its political party, big donors and special interests.
Anyone except Congress would tell you that we are drowning in debt and the obvious solution would be to drastically reduce spending and end fraud, waste and abuse.
God help us!
No.
It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The worse the cities get, the more sane and decent people flee them, so they continue to get even worse. The last time there was hope for the cities was in the Reagan era. People forget that the original definition of “yuppie” was “Young Urban Pioneers,” idiots like me and my wife, who thought it would be great to buy and restore one of those big old Victorian fixer-uppers that was selling for cheap. Then we found out that the schools were hellholes, the prevailing neighborhood ethos was, “If y’all wanted to keep it, you’d a put a better lock on it,” and the cops, the city government, and the school board DIDN’T CARE.
There’s good reasons for White Flight, and it’s not a moral failing on the part of the people who are getting out.
I worked for a time doing painting and carpentry for a company that was buying up old houses in the ‘hood and bringing them back up to code. One of the most painful lessons I learned in that job was that you can’t help people who don’t want to be helped, are perfectly happy living in squalor, and resent it — violently! — if you try to do anything to improve their living conditions.
> We are now 60 years into the lefts policies of dependency and victimhood. That’s 3+ generations deep.
Yes. This. Exactly, except maybe it’s 4 generations deep, as so many girls become first-time mothers at 15.
I blame Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” After $30 trillion spent, it’s time to admit that civilization lost, poverty won. If you subsidize the worst of human behavior, you just get more of it.
It is the voters in these cities that are the problem.
The original population that built and once occupied these beautiful cities have been driven off and what is left is happy to vote in candidates that promise them lots of free stuff - which is exactly what Mamdani is doing.
They also are happy for their candidates to “punish the rich” - something Mamdani is also promising to do.
Throughout history cities have also been the centers of culture as well as scientific and industrial advancement.
***That wins the thread!!!***
It will quite possibly come down to the "swamping lifeboat" theory.
1. The larger cities will inevitably drag down the rest of the nation
- or -
2. The rest of the nation's taxpayers will refuse to subsidize the Dem's plans for the large cities.
I.e., there will be no fed money bailouts until the large city voters learn how to vote responsibly.
There was an item on X the other day claiming Fox was reporting the Trump Admin was bailing out L.A. store owners for riot losses. I argued that was the exact wrong lesson for L.A. voters.
At times. But they don’t stay that way.
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