I thought I was done with my own 2024 election introspection, but I’m not.
There were plenty of reasons why Donald Trump was able to post his best electoral showing in 2024. Immigration policy, inflation, and just general economic insecurity despite what Wall Street and the unemployment rate say.
A case could be made, however, that Trump and the GOP made gains by making people forget all about the dysfunction of his first term, including his ineffective COVID response and brazen attempt to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results. Instead, he dug in with his supporters and amped up the culture war debate, with his “Kamala is for they/them, and President Trump is for you” rhetoric.
Another part of that is the case Republicans made against the Democratic Party’s governing abilities. Republicans noted the instances of corruption. They exploited the high rates of crime, both violent and property-related, in blue cities and states. They called out blue city and state dysfunction. It worked, and there is some validity to their case.
At the large city level, government dysfunction is real. New York mayor Eric Adams is facing five counts of federal charges related to fraud, bribery and the solicitation of foreign donations. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is facing scrutiny for her inability to solve the city’s housing affordability and homelessness crises. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has been catching it from multiple fronts; his handling of the city’s budget, the Chicago Public Schools, and the city’s high (but not highest) violent crime rate has resulted in low approval ratings and an uncertain mayoral future.
And that’s just the three largest cities in the nation. St. Louis, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit are among the most-vilified cities nationally for their violent crime rates.
The common GOP complaint about Democratic city governance is that the Democrats are too soft on crime, and more interested in appealing to identity politics issues. They fault Democrats for decades of urban leadership, with few positive results. Democrats usually counter by saying the complexity of the challenges is huge and can’t be reduced to just “toughness” measures.
Maybe there’s another effective counterargument from Democrats, one I’ve rarely heard. It goes like this: “stop using urban issues as a point-scoring campaign tactic, and put some skin in the game. Stop behaving as if the problems aren’t at your doorstep as well, and do something about it.”
Republicans have successfully buried the challenges that exist in blue cities located in red states. In an effort to appeal to the suburban and rural voters in their base, they’ve mentally divorced themselves from urban issues. Democrats have not.
Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.
Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.
Photo: Crime scene tape in St. Louis, by Paul Sableman via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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