The numbers are almost too dramatic to believe. Some early research by Ohio State University political scientist Thomas Wood estimated that the Republican presidential vote was up 9 percentage points in Manhattan, 12 points in Brooklyn, 5 in Philadelphia, 5 in Chicago and 9 in Miami-Dade County, Fla. Even if those figures don’t turn out to be precisely accurate, they still augur a reversal that no one in the political universe expected.
But it wasn’t just the presidential vote, or a partisan uprising. Progressive candidates lost in seemingly secure progressive strongholds, especially in California, even as Kamala Harris was winning the state’s presidential vote. San Francisco Mayor London Breed was unseated by a challenger who attacked her from the right on law-and-order issues. Across the bay in Oakland, the mayor and district attorney were both recalled from office, also largely on public-safety concerns. In Los Angeles, progressive county prosecutor George Gascón was beaten by an opponent who derided his less-than-strict approach to a whole variety of criminal-justice problems. There are numerous other examples.
It’s clear what happened. What remains to be decoded is why these things happened. To explore that, we need to move beyond the events of this year and look back at several decades of urban life and demographic change.
During those decades, America’s largest cities lost much of their working-class and middle-class white population and came to be dominated by a mixture of minorities and affluent white liberal professionals. The white blue-collar population was moving to the suburbs or gradually dying off. When Chicago elected an African American mayor in 1983 on the strength of black support and white liberal votes, over the opposition of a white law-and-order opponent, that seemed to capsulize a new era in urban politics.
But demographics do not stand still. The urban minority populations are now increasingly middle class, with middle-class values and concerns. More than in the past, their concerns are about the maintenance of order and security, and this year they demonstrated their belief that progressive governments and candidates did not reflect their views. This is most true of Hispanics, and especially of Hispanic men. Early indications are that Donald Trump won a majority of the votes of Hispanic males, something that hasn’t been the case for a Republican in more than 50 years. Those weren’t just votes for a presidential candidate: They were protests against the government they were getting at the local level.
The most incisive recent study of urban political attitudes was conducted earlier this year in Chattanooga by the Manhattan Institute. In that study, a full 78 percent of the respondents listed crime and safety as major issues. Most of them said that crime was worse in Chattanooga than it had been in 2020. Black residents were more likely to say this than whites or Hispanics. Some 64 percent of those responding reported that they felt unsafe somewhere in the city during the average day.
Those findings are striking given the fact that violent crime has actually decreased in Chattanooga. But homelessness, trash collection and petty crimes have grown worse in the past four years. The survey respondents weren’t imagining that.
SOME BROADER NUMBERS ARE HELPFUL HERE. In the United States as a whole, the most recent statistics from the FBI tell us that violent crime was down 3 percent between 2022 and 2023. Murder and manslaughter were down 11.6 percent, rape down 9.4 percent and burglary 7.6 percent. Provisional data for the current year suggests that those patterns are continuing. But one crime that has increased significantly, as in Chattanooga, is shoplifting, an icon of disorder virtually everywhere in the country.
It’s pretty well established that most people respond more to changes in the prevalence of a problem than they do to the absolute numbers. When traffic delays increase in a community, and drivers are waiting through one more red light at a busy intersection, they will complain angrily even if the actual delay is modest. When citizens start to see petty criminals stealing merchandise from a clothing store or jumping over a turnstile to avoid paying transit fares, they will conclude that disorder and lawlessness are getting much worse, even if the larger numbers don’t really show that.
It’s this fear of disorder that influenced much of the vote in 2024 in America’s largest cities. And it’s legitimate to ask how much progressive government, and Democratic government specifically, has contributed to it.
THE ANSWER, ONE HAS TO SAY, IS QUITE A BIT. Obviously it’s a mistake to blame the left for everything people are worrying about in cities, but if you list some of the policies urban leaders have espoused or enacted in the last few years, you begin to understand what urban voters are worried about.
There are the lenient crime laws that downgraded felonies to misdemeanors. In 2014, California’s Proposition 47 reclassified shoplifting, grand theft, receiving stolen property, forgery, fraud, writing a bad check and personal use of most illegal drugs as misdemeanors if the dollar value was below $950. Large portions of Prop 47 were invalidated at the polls in this year’s voting.
In 2020, the Democratic-controlled Oregon Legislature made possessing illicit drugs such as heroin punishable by a ticket and a maximum $100 fine. That was a state law, but it had most of its impact in Portland, where drug offenses were most prevalent. The law was repealed this year amid widespread public opposition, but it had long since done its political damage.
Then there was the most incendiary and damaging slogan of recent times: “Defund the police.” It is hard to think of any left-tinted idea more likely to alienate the vast majority of voters virtually anywhere in America. Obviously not every Democrat or progressive candidate bought into this slogan, but its damage was immense. It was Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” multiplied many times over.
THERE WERE REASONS BEHIND ALL THESE LAWS AND SLOGANS. “Defund the police” was a reaction to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020. The downgrading of property crimes was an attempt to deal with the real problem of excessively long imprisonment for nonviolent offenders. But they gave the progressive forces, and the Democrats in most of urban America, a political taint that explains much of what happened to them in 2024.
One way to understand that is to look at San Diego. As resentment over issues of public order spread across urban California, San Diego was immune. While other big California cities were taking their revenge on progressive government, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria was winning decisive re-election on a platform that stressed public safety and enhanced support for the local police. He touted the 10 percent increase in police salaries that he had steered through the City Council.
It’s become common in recent years to talk about how the middle class is disappearing from American cities. There’s historical truth to that, but the fact is that a significant new middle class is emerging, albeit a different one from the cohort of a generation ago. It has an important component of newcomers to this country, Hispanic and Asian and recent arrivals from the Middle East. This population prizes safety and security above almost all other concerns. It is a grave mistake for any political party or movement to alienate it.
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