When my best friend in Austin quips, “It’s great living in a blue city in a red state,” I’m often tempted to reply, “We really don’t know what it would be like to live in a red city in a red state – or even a red city in a blue state.” Why? Because they barely exist. Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors.
From the standpoint of the textbook Median Voter Model, this is awfully puzzling. Even if urbanites are extremely left-wing, you would expect urban Republicans to move sharply left to accommodate them. Once they do so, the standard prediction is that Republicans will win half the time. But plainly they don’t.
One possibility is that Republican politicians are too stubbornly ideological to moderate. But the idea that virtually no one in the Republican Party is power-hungry enough to tell urban voters what they want to hear is deeply implausible.
The better explanation, as I’ve explained before, is that urban voters have party preferences as well as policy preferences. They don’t just want left-wing policies; they want left-wing policies delivered by the Democrats. Even if Republicans were offering exactly the same policies, urban voters would vote for the Democrats anyway. Hence, one-party democracy, as they have in Singapore.
Once you buy this story, however, you just push the puzzle back a step. Why exactly are big cities so uniformly inhabited by majorities who want left-wing policies delivered by the Democrats?
Economists will naturally gravitate to the functionalist story that left-wing policies are in the material self-interest of urban dwellers. Yet this hard to believe. How, for example, do classic left-wing policies toward the homeless serve the material self-interest of urbanites? If anything, you would expect urbanites to favor draconian policies to “encourage” the homeless to go elsewhere. Much the same goes for urban crime.
Even if this story were broadly true, however, it still wouldn’t explain the uniformity of left-wing cities. You think there would be room for at least one mega-city that created a safe haven for rich urbanites who want to complacently enjoy their riches without having to deal with – or pay to remedy – any of the classic “urban problems.” And it seems like a staunchly Republican city could easily deliver this package by offering little redistribution (or actively redistributing from poor-to-rich!) combined with punitive approaches to homelessness and crime. Such policies don’t need to “work” in the sense of solving the social problem; they just need to work in the sense of exporting the social problem elsewhere. Yet even if you broaden the sample to cities with just over a quarter million people, the vast majority of cities still lean left.
A popular alternative story emphasizes that cities are diverse and cosmopolitan, and Democrats are much more comfortable with diversity and cosmopolitanism. But this answer dodges multiple questions, starting with: “Why can’t urban Republicans just get comfortable with diversity and cosmopolitanism, then win half the time?” Plus: “Why isn’t there a single city that isn’t diverse or cosmopolitan?” One can easily imagine a Patriot City of straight, white Trump supporters.
A better story, in my view, is that (a) cities provide anonymity, (b) anonymity reduces the cost of violating traditional norms, and (c) Republicans value traditional norms more. True, you still need voters to have strong party preferences for this story to work. Main problem: This story implies that when left-wing norms become tradition, the socially conservative minority will move to cities to escape. Hard to believe, but testable! You could even tweak the preceding account into a habit formation story: when you lower the cost of violating traditional norms, people start violating them. Eventually, they get used to violating them, which eventually makes them disfavor traditional norms.
Main doubt: It is not entirely clear that norm violation is easier in cities. Think about mask-wearing norms. While you are more anonymous in cities, you are also surrounded by a much larger number of self-appointed norm-enforcers.
Better stories? Try to ponder both the Median Voter Model and the Tiebout Model before you answer.
READER COMMENTS
robc
Sep 16 2021 at 11:25am
My question is, why isn’t there a competing party (non-GOP) in the cities?
There should be two left wing parties in large cities, with each having roughly 1/2 the mayors. You could say that this happens in the democratic primaries, but I think you are just as likely to have two Subset A primary opponents as a Subset A and Subset B (ignoring primaries with many candidates) opponents.
There are at least 3 reasons I can think of:
GOP gets enough of a share anyway to make the general a 3 party race, which would allow the GOP to win sometimes, so that is a non-starter.
Major party rules make it hard to get the new left party on the ballot (does not apply to NY).
Even if the city was split between D and New Left party, it might cause problems in races other than mayoral, so that even if they agreed to work together as a coalition in state house or us house, there might be issues as in reason 1 above in these other races, making the formation of a separate party untenable.
Jim Birch
Sep 17 2021 at 1:03am
Doesn’t first past the post voting more or less force a two party system. If you split, you lose. Preferential voting and larger multi-member electorates produce more diversity. It allows the voter to usefully choose a party that may only get 20% of the votes.
robc
Sep 17 2021 at 9:50am
Yes, but oddly enough, primaries often have multiple candidates even though the same math applies there. You might get a D primary with two moderates and one progressive on the ballot, for example.
Eric Harris
Sep 18 2021 at 7:52am
Yes, “first past the post” (i.e. the winner is the one who gets a plurality) does pretty much guarantee two dominant parties. Exceptions occured when a major issue is avoided by the two parties, or they take much the same position and a large fraction of the electorate prefers something else.
But absent ballot access laws, it does not have to be the same two parties. People form a competing party to address that issue. That new party either replaces one of the old ones (e.g. Republicans replacing the Whigs) or the new party’s platform is adopted by the old (e.g. Socialist planks adopted by the Democrats and the Republicans).
This changed about a century ago, when “reformers” wrote laws which had the effect of making it difficult for people to form a new political party. This lead to a slow decline in both election competitiveness and voter participation to current, dramatically lower levels. Oh, and political engagement.
Details — including both anecdotes and statistics — supporting this can be found in _Why America Stopped Voting_, by Mark L. Kornbluh .
Information about current restrictions on ballot access and new party creation can be found in Richard Winger’s _Ballot Access News_. https://ballot-access.org/
Freedom Fan
Sep 16 2021 at 11:28am
Your explanation is directionally correct – urban voters are voting for Democrats rather than the Democrat’s policies (mostly). People in cities identify as “urban sophisticates” no matter their station – from barista to barrister. In that, they set themselves apart from how they imagine rural Republicans (slack-jawed yokels) and how they imagine wealthy Republicans (amoral capitalist exploiters). Urban sophisticates move “words rather than things” and thus are largely immunized from most of the effects of their policy choices. By way of counter-example, property developers in big cities are nearly all Republicans.
With respect to policy choices, urban sophisticates favor policies that seem to be against their interest (e.g., tent cities, non-prosecution of theft), but are, for the most part, minor inconveniences to them personally and visible demonstrations of their form of personal compassion which requires little effort or real sacrifice, but a great deal of “tolerance.”
Gary Lowe
Sep 16 2021 at 11:34am
You say “Why can’t urban Republicans just get comfortable with diversity and cosmopolitanism, then win half the time?”
Then you say: Republicans value traditional norms more.
So why can’t we ask “Why can’t urban Republicans stop valuing traditional norms more”?
Seems like a flaw in your analysis.
Hazel Meade
Sep 17 2021 at 11:38am
Agreed.
But they can’t embrace diversity and cosmopolitainism without alienating the Republican rural base, which they depend on for turn out. You constantly see the same cycle – Republican tries to move left to appeal to urban swing voters, becomes labeled a RINO, and then loses the primary to a more traditionally hardline cultural conservative.
A problem for libertarians is that there really aren’t many voters that are genuinely motivated to vote for free market economics. Most Republicans are motivated by cultural issues, and most Democrats are motivated by being *against* free market economics. You can’t base a party on free-market economics and cultural liberalism because there just aren’t that many people out there who are politically active and motivated by that. Maybe there could be but most of the politically active people are partisans locked into their own echo chamber and there aren’t enough genuinely libertarianish types to create one. The libertarian “echo chamber” such as it is, only exists in orbit of the conservative one, and is constantly pulled into the vortex of cultural conservatism.
CDRCool
Sep 17 2021 at 1:48pm
To your first paragraph: Do you see this? I don’t know that this is false, but I can’t remember any examples at the state level of it happening. I assume what you mean is someone wins the republican primary, then campaigns or governs more moderately than promised or expected and then lose the next primary.
I can think of lots of times where one moderates in the general election, that’s the expectation. But in all the cases that I can think of of a governor or senator winning purple or blue state for the republicans, the party takes what it can get and leaves them be.
Matthias
Sep 19 2021 at 4:12am
Why couldn’t there but a city ‘RINO’ who doesn’t care about alienating rural voters in her quest to become mayor?
MB
Sep 16 2021 at 11:35am
You leave out an obvious factor, elections. I just voted in Boston preliminary round for mayor, the runoff for the top two is in November. An early September preliminary round on an off off year election (no federal or state elections being held) has a low turnout. The city unions do turn out. The top two are always backed by the unions – usually it is just the mayor (no incumbent this year) that has any chance – as he/she knows the unions will decide the election and treats them accordingly. The November election has a slightly higher turnout, but the unions still have outsized influence.
Chicago has similar off off year elections, but they even go further holding the preliminary round in February and final round in April. Who goes to the election in February – city union members. New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Atlanta, … – off off year elections – the notable exception is San Francisco (Presidential election year).
Why do you think progressives that dearly love voter participation hold municipal elections when the fewest number of people will likely vote? It boggles my mind.
Aaron
Sep 16 2021 at 5:53pm
San Francisco also has its Mayoral election on off years (the next one is 2023). But the members of the Board of Supervisors serve staggered four year terms, so half the districts are always elected at the same time as the President and the other half are always elected at the same time as the Governor.
nobody.really
Sep 17 2021 at 11:54am
If you’ve ever been involved in a local political race, you’ll know that running during a presidential race is a crap shoot.
The phrase “All politics is local” dates at least to 1932. But Reagan ran a campaign based on broad national themes with relatively little local horse-trading and back-slapping. Ever since, presidential campaigns have adopted a similar format–and political parties have aligned more closely to ideology.
This dynamic exacerbated a common complaint from local politicians struggling to make themselves heard during presidential campaigns. Society faces a trade-off between maximizing the number of voters (as occurs during presidential elections) and maximizing the attention given to candidates lower down the ballot (as arguably occurs during non-presidential elections). So it doesn’t surprise me that many jurisdictions would opt for the second strategy.
logan
Sep 16 2021 at 11:37am
Isn’t this the same question as “why are there red states and blue states?”.
I think the “as voters become better informed, politics becomes more nationalized” story is fairly plausible. Namely, it is much harder for a would-be Republican mayor of NYC to disavow the actions of Republicans in Texas or Florida than in the past. And we’re not even talking that distant of a past, since both Bloomberg and Giuliani were Republican.
John Hall
Sep 16 2021 at 11:52am
I often reflect on how first-pass-the-post voting interacts with Democratic advantage in cities to produce disproportionately large majorities on city councils. For instance, if the Democrats have 60% support in each individual district, then they might end up winning every district and have 100% of seats. The Republican party is shut out of government completely, even if they have underlying support. Individual Republican politicians do not end up in government and do not build the necessary experience and connections to have a shot at becoming mayor (absent billions of dollars, like Mike Bloomberg).
However, this story doesn’t address your underlying point. Why do the Democrats have roughly 60% (using the number above) support and why aren’t Republicans competitive in cities?
It seems like it would be useless to think about questions like this without considering urban machines from the 19th century. For instance, the Democratic party in New York City now has its origins in Tammany Hall. Voting for that party was also connected to jobs and people were connected to individual politicians. I don’t think the connection between voting and jobs is as significant as it was then, but I don’t doubt that it has some role to play. Moreover, local elections have less turnout and I suspect city employees form a larger share than in state or federal elections. City employees might have tighter connections with incumbents, perpetuating the incumbents power. In this sense, it wouldn’t be so much a story about Democrats or Republicans per se, so much as it is a story about incumbency and a historical accident.
I’m not so sure above is sufficient. If it’s a historical accident, then that makes more sense for old cities. Why aren’t newer cities split? It would be useful to think of some counter examples where some cities had primarily right-wing leadership until they reach a certain size and then some left-wing leadership takes over.
To your story, I think your argument explains better why conservatives move away from cities and cities become dominated by non-conservatives. However, it doesn’t explain why Republicans don’t move to the center. Have you looked at the platforms of Republicans running for office in NYC? They exhibit no evidence of moving to the center, IMO, and have platforms largely in line with the national party. I think it’s a little difficult to explain why this is so…
Evan Sherman
Sep 16 2021 at 4:05pm
+1 on the machine politics explanation. Machine politics and large cities are like PB and J. So the interesting question is: Why are the large US city-level political machines all Democratic? History is a big part of it, but yeah, I don’t have a comprehensive explanation either.
zeke5123
Sep 16 2021 at 5:29pm
I think because the machines are generally supported by unions and the only unions left are public unions. At a national level, those unions are by and large tied to the Democratic party. So, even if at a local level a Democrat or a Republican would equally play ball they have an incentive to go with the local Democrat (because these unions are never just local).
Daniel
Sep 17 2021 at 8:49am
In southern states where union membership is very small to none you would think large cities could vote Republican specially since they vote Republican for the governor and president. And yet southern large cities have Democratic mayors.
Michael Lewyn
Sep 19 2021 at 11:16am
Not true until recently. Dallas had a Republican mayor in the 1990s, Jacksonville and Fort Worth still have one. The Southern cities that have never had Republican mayors (e.g. Atlanta) are majority black.
John Hall
Sep 17 2021 at 1:29pm
It occurs to me that the structure of primaries also plays a role in this story. If the Republican party wanted to win elections in these cities, they should nominate the most centrist candidate they could. However, primaries tend to produce candidates would represent the median of the party. The result is that the candidates are too conservative to do well in a general election. It likely also keeps the party from moving leftward to capture more voters due to the composition of primary voters (more politically active and more right-wing).
It would be interesting to see if Louisiana’s jungle primary has an impact.
Evan Sherman
Sep 17 2021 at 2:12pm
Totally agree that this helps explain how Democratic cities stay Democratic, but really, the explanation is not specific to cities. Rather, it applies more broadly to the big demographic sort, which affects all kinds of voting landscapes (including cities). The tendency of primary voters to select candidates that are not appealing to centrists/moderates imposes party intertia (within districts, states, national vs. local, etc.) pretty much everywhere.
Nicholas Weininger
Sep 16 2021 at 11:56am
There are some very left-wing cities where the Democrats have two distinct, relatively organized, competing wings– in San Francisco it’s well known that “progressives” vs “moderates” is the really important contest, for example. And of course the “progressives” try whenever they can to smear the “moderates” as being secretly in league with those dastardly Republicans.
Speaking of which, I think affective tribal polarization and the nationalization of politics have to be a main factor somehow, but what this doesn’t explain is why blue cities are so much more uniformly one-party places than blue states. Lots of reliably blue states have, or recently have had, moderate Republican governors who have moved to the center to accommodate statewide voter preferences in exactly the way you predict: Charlie Baker, Larry Hogan, Phil Scott are all classic examples. And the reverse is true for some reliably red states (Andy Beshear, John Bel Edwards). But the only Republican mayor I can think of who did something similar recently was Kevin Faulconer in San Diego.
This may be partly because big cities are bluer than even the bluest states, and that may connect to nationalization of politics: a moderate R mayoral candidate having to appeal to an electorate that is 80+% D by national standards may just be too hard to pull off, compared to a moderate R gubernatorial candidate appealing to an electorate that is 60% D. And that may in turn be an artifact of somewhat arbitrary city boundary-drawing choices both driving and driven by partisan sorting: lots of cities would be a lot less uniformly blue if they included even their first-ring suburbs, and a lot of neighborhoods in city limits feel basically the same as the first-ring suburbs.
Floccina
Sep 16 2021 at 12:03pm
It seems to me that Democratic mayors tend to be more conservative than Democrats in congress, so I’d go back to, they want Democrats, they trust Democrats and do not trust Republicans. Better to run as a conservative Democrat in a big city than a leftist Republican.
Floccina
Sep 17 2021 at 11:17am
And the GOP does not want to ruin the national brand, and an ambitious politician in a big city sees more opportunity in the democratic party not dragging around the GOP’s national politics.
John Thacker
Sep 16 2021 at 12:22pm
As noted, while there’s long been a tilt, it’s particularly pronounced recently. Kevin Faulconer is the most recent example of a truly large city with a Republican mayor, but there have been others, such Pat McCrory in Charlotte, NC. (The closest right now are just under a million, like in Jacksonville.)
In the mid-1990s, the mayors of all of North Carolina’s 5 largest cities were Republicans; related to that, North Carolina had (and still mostly does) fairly extensive annexation powers for cities.
In the recent past, when Republicans were largely a suburban base (and Democrats actually did better in many rural areas) a large part of the answer had to do with the local annexation laws. The creation of Greater Toronto has been good for Conservative mayors in Ontario, for example.
In the current situation the Republicans have been tilting more rural, so while there are fights between suburban and urban Dem wings (and sometimes with different party names, like in Seattle), there’s not a lot of Republicans who win.
John
Sep 16 2021 at 12:37pm
Demographics. Cities attract the young, immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities, LGBT… because they can provide minorities with a larger support network. So at best mega cities will be center-left on social issues. We used to have center-left Republicans running mega cities but the parties have become too well sorted now. Those center-left Republicans like Michael Bloomberg and Eric Adams are Democrats now.
Thomas Knapp
Sep 16 2021 at 12:38pm
Alternative hypothesis:
There’s an intersection of two trends here.
One is the late 20th century trend of Republicans centering their appeal on suburban and rural populations, while Democrats centered their appeal on urban populations.
That trend intersected — at or past a point of no return — on the longer-term trend of continuously tweaks to election law and election administration to preserve particular parties’ control of particular constituencies in perpetuity through things like gerrymandering, ballot access restrictions, etc.
Party <em>primaries</em> may help hold the ideology in place, but for the most part if a Democrat in a safe urban Democratic district got the Democratic nomination and then put on overalls and a straw hat and played banjo at campaign rallies while calling for tax cuts, that Democrat would still likely beat the Republican who snuck into the GOP nomination before outing herself as a card-carrying member of Democratic Socialists of America and campaigning in a “tax the rich” dress.
Stephen
Sep 16 2021 at 12:42pm
Very thoughtful musings on mega-cities. I wonder, however, if this isn’t related to the more general problem of important institutions that are overwhelmingly Progressive — academic, media, entertainment — and how difficult it is to turn them around or at least cause them to be more “balanced.”
For a few years there was hope for those who do not subscribe to the dominant ideology because the Internet seemed to provide a way for them to find each other, but then Big Tech placed its thumb firmly on the scale on the side of wokeness –all under the guise of stopping “misinformation” or “providing safety” or stamping out racism, sexism, homophobia, climate denial, etc. and what evil person would disagree with any of that?
If you want to keep your job and keep your home and family safe, you’ve got to go along to get along.
Jonathan S
Sep 16 2021 at 12:55pm
For those interested, here’s a list of the 100 largest cities (city proper, not urban/metro population) and the political parties of each: https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_the_100_largest_cities
The splits are: 63 Democract, 26 Republican, 4 Independent, 6 Nonpartisan
Of the top 37 largest cities, only 4 mayors (10.8%) are Republican.
I only counted 14 principal cities on the list with Republican mayors (Jacksonville, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Fresno, Virginia Beach, Colorado Springs, Omaha, Miami, Tulsa, Bakersfield, Lexington KY, Anchorage, Stockton, Lubbock), the rest are suburbs. Miami is the only surprise to me on that list.
Warren Platts
Sep 16 2021 at 1:12pm
Cubans tend to vote Republican.
BC
Sep 16 2021 at 1:07pm
First, Big Blue cities like NYC did elect a Republican mayor like Rudy Giuliani in the late 90s and early 2000s, so any theory must explain what changed over the last 20 years. Back then, liberal urban voters did care about classic “urban problems” like crime.
Crime has re-emerged as a top issue among NYC voters this year — crime seems to be a non-issue mainly when crime rates are low — but, as Caplan points out, urban voters today appear to want (left wing or right wing) policies delivered by Democrats, not Republicans. The party label matters. In the 90s and 2000s blue state voters elected Republican governors (Pataki in NY, Schwarzenegger in CA) if they delivered moderate policies. (MA voters still do.)
Voters have become more partisan nationally, self-sorted (Tiebout Model) and, having done so, seem to vote by party label as a matter of identity. The power of the party label became apparent in 2016 when R support for Gary Johnson and Bill Weld cratered far more than could be explained by policy/ideology when they switched their label from R to L.
Warren Platts
Sep 16 2021 at 1:10pm
The answer is simple: Republicans, particularly of the Trump-supporting faction, are perceived (incorrectly) to be by definition racist, white supremacists. No self-respecting voter will knowingly vote for Hitler. (The never-Trump faction is too small to matter.) Since most big cities are majority-minority places (less than 50% white), if you are a white candidate, the only way you can get traction is by being a Democrat that repudiates racist Republicans.
Jon Murphy
Sep 16 2021 at 1:15pm
That story doesn’t make sense.
Firstly, it would only explain the trend over the last 4 years, but the trend Bryan is discussing is much older.
Secondly, empirically it is incorrect. One of the interesting things we’ve seen is the GOP gaining share of minority voters over the years, especially between 2016-2020. So, the “Republicans are racist” narrative doesn’t seem to hold outside certain circles.
Warren Platts
Sep 16 2021 at 1:15pm
I should add that even if you are POC candidate running as a Republican, you will be besmirched as a tool of racist, white supremacists a la Larry Elder.
Jon Murphy
Sep 16 2021 at 1:33pm
Sure, but even then that doesn’t appear to be affecting anything. Such slander falls upon either deaf ears or its preaching to the choir. It cannot explain the trend Bryan is discussing.
Christopher Moore
Sep 19 2021 at 5:24pm
Actually it has. Foreign born population is the highest correlation with voting Democratic. Most mega cities have massive proportions of foreigners- my city of LA is 40%. LA county is around 35%. People with no cultural heritage of American political tradition just believe the media messaging that white Republicans are racist and POC Republicans are race traitors. This is all despite the fact that most of the working class immigrants dont share cultural values with the progressive liberal establishment.
ee
Sep 16 2021 at 1:46pm
3 trends come to mind:
Decrease in ticket splitting: this could be driven by the rise of the internet and the splintering of a more centralized narrative (unified tone) into many sheltered narratives (antagonistic, conspiratorial tone). With less ticket splitting and more partisanship, political parties optimize for accumulated benefits elections across every level: local, state, national. By contrast in a world with totally free ticket splitting, politicians could shift themselves toward the median just for that constituency.
Rise in federal power: assuming a rise in federal power over the last century (every crisis is a one-way ratchet for federal power), as well as party-correlated voting related to the decline in ticket splitting, parties favor federal elections over local elections. So the median voter that is optimized for is not the city voter but the state voter, or the median voter in the median state! (for the electoral college)
Urban vs rural is the national battlefield: I don’t feel confident about this, but based on voting splits, maybe urban vs rural is the top federal issue that parties optimize for. It pits manufacturing vs services, food producers vs food consumers, local production vs foreign production, locals vs immigrants. So imagine if Republicans decided to create a Republican city: maybe its policy preferences would become aligned with Democratic party values.
ee
Sep 16 2021 at 1:47pm
This site tricks you with the text editor: it lets you use bullets but removes them after posting 🙄
sean
Sep 16 2021 at 1:50pm
Could just say the best talent leaves.
Call it the buttigieg effect. He knows he can never win a higher office than South Bend to develop his political career in Indiana. He can’t become a POTUS candidate unless he has solid experience at a higher level. So he leaves for Washington and enters the cabinet. Others would change states. But if you live in an area where you party isn’t strong enough to win elections you leave for elsewhere. Therefore that state/city never develops good politicians because all the good politicians leave because they can’t get promoted. And then the loser party looks incompetent since they don’t have any good leaders since all the good leaders left for better pastures.
edward Olejniczak
Sep 16 2021 at 2:11pm
If you include cities with populations greater than 100K you do get Republican Mayors.
In TN, a red state, you had Bill Haslam as mayor of Knoxville and Bob Corker for Chattanooga. In todays Republican party they would be called RINOS.
Maybe they support the hypothesis that todays Republicans tend to be less flexible in terms of policy
Luke
Sep 16 2021 at 2:12pm
Isn’t it a problem of having two conflicting median voters. The median voter in the Mayoral Election and the Median Voter in the Republican Mayoral Primary. The latter now being significantly to the right of the former.
As a result even if you have the ‘power-hungry’ Republican willing to appeal to the Median voter – as you had more often in the late 1990s and early 2000s – they won’t get through a Republican Primary in 2020+
Possibly this effect is even magnified by democratic dominance in cities which means many Republicans don’t bother to vote in primaries making the electorate even more extreme relative to the median voter.
Eric
Sep 16 2021 at 2:27pm
The answer is simple. The makeup of the Democratic Party. Unlike the GOP where power shifts from one dominant philosophy to another and everyone gets on board or leaves, the Democratic Party isn’t a true party at all! It’s a coalition of smaller parties that have found it safer to operate under the tent than to go it alone. In most major cities there’s a fiscal conservative and social conservative presence. It’s just not loyal to the GOP in anyway shape or form. And the DEMS are ok with the multiparty model as it keeps them in power and offers a diversity of caucus options.
The structure of the GOP movement is exactly what harms it in big cities!
Michael Rulle
Sep 16 2021 at 2:45pm
The corollary to the “megacity” question is the “rural question”. Why are 80-90% of the counties in the US controlled by republicans? Rural people are different in countless ways from urban people. Also, we must keep in mind, that it is not as if 100% of city voters are democrats and 100% of rural voters are republicans. Any difference or answer we derive is on the margin. Not all or nothing.
It should not be the least bit surprising that rural and city people have different self interests. It would take a massive book to convert data to cause and effect—so I am not going to even try.
One generality is that urban areas(defined as the largest 100 cities) have larger populations of those under 50 than those over 50. Rural areas have a larger population of those over 50 than those under 50. We can probably find 20-50 such factoids—–which we then can attempt to convert to cause and effect.
But back to my initial comment—-are we really that surprised rural areas on average have different self interests than city dwellers?
We do know why cities were built–since the dawn of man—-efficiency of economic activity.
And the speculation that “couldn’t republicans just propose ideas that city people want”? is fundamentally a silly thought. I am sure they do a little as Dems do so in rural areas. But our cynicism about parties can get too extreme–even as cynicism is deserved.
In the end–again–they have different values and self interests.
Having said this—-I am sure each party could do better on the other’s “turf” than currently, which might be a positive for all. But the political efficient market is telling us it is not in the parties’ self interest at this point in history to \do so.
Seth
Sep 16 2021 at 2:53pm
NYC has had about 20 years of republican mayors in my lifetime; say what you want about Bloomberg but Giuliani was the real deal.
another angle is that if Staten Island was its own city — it has a population of almost 500,000 — it would be our only republican city.
Frank
Sep 16 2021 at 4:26pm
From a cute New York Daily News article about Staten Island:
… such was the state of things in the mid-1890s, when islanders were asked to consider if they wished to consolidate into the proposed Greater New York.
They did, largely because they were promised municipalization of the ferry, which was owned by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. In January 1898, they became part of the big city. Many of them, upon further reflection, have been trying to secede ever since.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/staten-island-joined-nyc-new-jersey-article-1.803354
Scott Gibb
Sep 16 2021 at 2:57pm
This is a difficult question to answer. I’m going to take the following approach to simplify.
1. Why are almost all large cities not Republican?
2. Why are almost all beautiful, outdoor towns not Republican?
3. Why are almost all universities not Republican?
The one explanation to all three of these questions is that there there is only one dominant track in America. Its focus is formal education leading to career success and requires conformity to the schoolhouse, the university, and the corporation. This track requires acceptance of city problems; the long commute, homeless people too close for comfort, occasional gang or drug related violence a few miles away, and most importantly acceptance of the horrific social/cultural situation in almost all big city K-12 schools, no matter the income level of the parents whose children attend the school. This is the track of Democrats and it starts, travels through and terminates in big cities.
There are few alternative for those who do not conform and accept this one track. One is to live among the farmers, the ranchers, the miners, the contractors, the elderly, the not-college-educated, the hunters, the meth users, the religious conservatives, in places that are ugly, rural and unbearably hot and/or cold, or that are so remote they lack grocery stores. These are Republicans and the places they live. In this way, Republicans are those who refuse to conform to formal education and big city college, career track. I see them as living on the frontier, building a new world for themselves in pursuit of freedom of thought, to be left alone.
There is at least one other alternative to the dominant track in America, and that is to drop out and move to a beautiful, outdoor town such as Boulder, Bend, Lake Tahoe, Kihei, Bozeman, or Santa Cruz. These are Democrats unwilling to conform to the dominant track, and either unfamiliar or disdainful of the Republican alternatives. These are hippies, hipsters, Bohemians, etc. and of course they are Democrats.
I think if you combine, The Case Against Education and The Myth of the Rational voter you come to the conclusion that Republicans are those unwilling to accept big city problems, and unwilling to conform to the Democrat-dominated, formal education, college career track.
robc
Sep 17 2021 at 10:00am
As was confused to your point #2 until I got to here, then I realized you were just wrong. Boulder falls under #3, its a university town, which is why it is not republican. I have lived in CO for 33 days now, and most of the beautiful, outdoor towns are republican. They are also much smaller than Boulder.
Just at a quick glance, the 3 GOP congressman represent about 90% of the land mass of CO, that includes a lot of beautiful, outdoor towns. The 4 Dems represent Denver and the two big college towns (Boulder and Ft Collins).
Scott Gibb
Sep 20 2021 at 10:05pm
Yep. I’m not surprised that I could be wrong on that one, strictly speaking looking at the percentage of Republican and Dem voters in beautiful, outdoor towns. I would like to look at the numbers for Colorado more carefully though. Can you reply with the names of the beautiful outdoor towns in Colorado that are Republican? I’d like to revise my statement. Quite possibly the correlation would be stronger if median home price were used rather than the subjective “beautiful outdoor town.” Dems live in more expensive places and those tend to be more beautiful places. How about that?
Kenneth W. Regan
Sep 16 2021 at 3:03pm
Is there a quantitative comparison of 2020 versus (say) 1970 to hand?
On the airy speculation front, how many like me feel the GOP jumped a shark with Pat Buchanan’s speech in 1992? Not just the past five years…
Joe Denver
Sep 16 2021 at 3:21pm
I think Bryan is largely correct in that people have preferences for party, not just policy.
So the relevant questions are: what characteristics make someone more likely to engage with the Democratic party? And, secondly, why do people with those characteristics tend to live in urban areas.
I have one theory that I think adequately answers both questions. Namely, and bear with me, urban areas have less social capital, or at least a lower quality of social capital.
In a rural areas, people often find work by asking around. Often they know someone, often a family member, who is hiring. In urban areas, I suspect this is less common, most people hand in resumes, and find work significantly distanced from their close relatives.
It’s obvious why people with lower social capital would gravitate towards urban areas. Namely, they would be unemployed in the countryside. There are a lot more jobs for people outside of close-knit social groups in the city.
Why does this characteristic make them prone to voting democrat? I suspect the answer is signaling (i.e. expressive voting). Voting democrat is a cheap signal for virtue. A family will love you no matter what. But strangers, even friends, will often drop their kindliness if they suspect you are not willing to reciprocate. How can you show that you will go out of your way to be kind? Vote democrat.
Republicans and libertarians should know this fallacy inside and out. Most people just fundamentally know that democrats are kind. Voting democrat is a Schelling point for kindliness, which is far more important in environments with low quality social capital.
AMT
Sep 16 2021 at 3:24pm
One reason I can think of is that the statistics on cities are biased, though I’m not sure how widespread the issue is.
For example, I live in St. Louis, and as is typical of midwest cities, it is VERY conservative. The chart you cite shows it is instead quite liberal. But the problem is that “St. Louis” is defined as essentially the inner 10-15% of what the actual “city” really is. The rest is “St. Louis County” and the portion of the metro area across the river in Illinois, made up of a number of smaller cities and towns which are basically just neighborhoods of St. Louis. St. Louis city is about 300k people, but the metro area is nearly 3 million. So to clarify, I don’t technically live in St. Louis, but ask pretty much any of those 3 million people to tell someone from a distant state where they live, and they’ll say St. Louis.
You can drive through twenty miles of uninterrupted urban development to the west of the “St. Louis” city boundaries, but apparently are not in the same city…It’s all just a technicality that skews the statistics, largely for political reasons.
Evan Sherman
Sep 16 2021 at 3:50pm
St. Charles County – represent, ba-by!
But yes, can confirm: the STL suburbs lean more conservative, especially the further from the center one travels. (Lots of virtue-signalling left-leaning hipsters in some of those inner suberbs. 🙂 )
John Hall
Sep 16 2021 at 4:18pm
That’s a good point.
Mark Z
Sep 16 2021 at 9:40pm
This is obviously not the explanation. Political maps of cities are pretty much always donuts with blue on the middle and red on the outside. This is true of St. Louis (see the map in this article). It’s clearly not the case that the definition of cities proper are gerrymandered to induce this pattern or something; urban areas that are outside of cities proper are generally almost as blue as the cities themselves.
AMT
Sep 17 2021 at 1:00am
Yes, thank you for proving my point!
I said that city dividing lines were due to political reasons, not that they were gerrymandered. Can you imagine, that perhaps a small, wealthy city or town just outside of St. Louis would rather not join the rest of the city and end up having much of its tax dollars distributed across poorer areas? Or a plethora of other possible reasons that might exist?
Mark Z
Sep 17 2021 at 1:36pm
The red on the outside is almost always suburban territory. And the boundaries of pretty much every major city in America were determined well over a century ago, well before this phenomenon existed. And how city limits are defined still can’t explain the phenomenon that dense urban cores tend to be much bluer than less dense peripheries. I am pretty certain that if you were to regress party % on zip code population density, you’d find a strong correlation.
AMT
Sep 17 2021 at 2:09pm
Yeah, the boundaries never changing is exactly the problem. Otherwise cities wouldn’t, and couldn’t, technically ever grow, except by becoming more dense, which I think is obviously a stupid idea. Any halfway reasonable definition of what a city is includes the suburbs, whether they are technically merged into the city or not. I certainly agree denser areas are more blue, but I wasn’t trying to explain why denser areas closer to the center are more blue, so that isn’t an accurate criticism of what I said.
Mark Z
Sep 20 2021 at 11:45am
Why does any reasonable definition of a city include the suburbs? Suburban areas are quite distinct from urban areas in nearly every meaningful respedct. I understand the critique that, say, East Los Angeles is mostly just as urban as Los Angeles and it’s an arbitrary line separating the two, but it doesn’t follow that any definition of a city should include all the outlying, low-density suburbs. What defines the boundaries of a city is inevitably pretty arbitrary. And even if we substitute whatever arbitrary boundary you have in mind to replace the arbitrary boundary you’re criticizing, it doesn’t change much. Big urban MSAs, even broadly defined, are still comparatively blue. The phenomenon in question is pretty robust to the the definition of what a city is.
AMT
Sep 20 2021 at 6:46pm
No. I can tell you those twenty miles of uninterrupted urban development are not distinct.
No, see below. I’d say a 45-55 split is pretty balanced in my books.
That’s a really bad reason to not try to do a better job of it. How about this, if someone commutes downtown to work, and drives through continuous urban development along the highway to get there, they live in the city. That example I spent 5 seconds thinking up is already a gigantic improvement from the current definition.
AMT
Sep 17 2021 at 10:13am
And I’ll add that the map shows more blue in the surrounding area than I expected, so I will adjust my claim that STL is very conservative, to only slightly conservative, if not balanced overall (empirical question, hard to say from eyeballing). In any case, the point is the statistics are skewed because generally the further from the city center the more red things get. I expect this is generally true of most cities, and figure STL is just a bit more extreme in how large the difference between the definition of the city and the actual metro area is. You have to draw the line for the city limits at some point, but I’d say the vast majority of the suburbs ought to count.
Mark Z
Sep 20 2021 at 11:53am
According to Pew, the St. Louis metro area still leans left by a solid margin: Party affiliation was 63% Democrat, 22% Republican in 2014. I remain doubtful that there’s a reasonable definition of St. Louis by which it can be said to be even slightly conservative.
AMT
Sep 20 2021 at 6:34pm
Sure, maybe my impression of just how conservative STL is was a bit off. I already said that. But this sample of, WOW!!! n=100…doesn’t do anything to change my main point, the fact that the statistics are obviously skewed. Why don’t we look at some actual data?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/missouri-2020/
Compare St. Louis city, St. Louis county, St. Charles, Franklin and Jefferson counties. although most of the land area of the last 3 wouldn’t be STL, most of the population in them probably would be.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/illinois-2020/?itid=sf_elections_footer_nav_election-2020
Add in Calhoun, Jersey, Madison, St. Clair and Monroe counties, and even if the numbers still lean slightly to the left, it’s nowhere near as much as St. Louis city alone is. According to my calculations, we have 622,542 to 716,230. That’s 46.5% to 53.5%. To be fair, some portion of the smaller outlying counties shouldn’t count as part of the city, so I think 45-55 is a pretty fair adjustment for that since the numbers would be very small. The point is it’s nowhere near as overwhelmingly blue as people mistakenly believe.
Evan Sherman
Sep 16 2021 at 3:47pm
First, we should clarify that a trend this big and complicated is over-determined – that, in other words, many different factors coincide to produce the outcome. There is no “story” any more than there is a mono-causal explanation.
That said, one other important factor that I don’t see outlined at length: Machine party politics.
Democratic political machines are very powerful in US cities, especially when combined with unions (as a political vehicle). That is to say, even if machine-driven politics could be technically effective anywhere, they are, for several reasons, extraordinarily technically effective in cities. First, cities have large concentrations of less-likely-than-average voters; dominant party machines can be effective at turning out such voters when the occasion demands. Second, and conversely, because a disproportionate number of city people are less-than-likely voters, local-level party machines have a particularly easy time using the tools attached to their machine (e.g. unions) to push low-turnout votes their way. And, more broadly, political machines can use current power to further entrench themselves, allowing a smaller advantage to snowball. This is especially effective at the city level because political resources (attention, money) on city politics are likely to be fairly contained within the city, which the political machine controls. For example, they can draw (i.e. gerrymander) alderman districts in such a way as to consistenly box in opposing voters in 40/60 sections – thus ensuring much better than 60% representation on city councils. The opposing party, at the national level, could theoretically marshal the resources to highlight this injustice, but that usually doesn’t happen when the gerrymandering is at the local level. Finally, a large city (vs. a smaller city) has enough resources to control to further maximize the power of the entrenched party machine that controls said resources. By contrast, in a city of 1000 people, even if a party machine controlled all of the relevant political resources scaled to that city, a grassroots movement could really tip the balance. It’s harder to see that happen in a big city given the scale of resources the machine has at its disposal. So, political machines in big cities seem to be in a sweet spot of size in which the resources are huge but the political battlefield is still small/contained enough that they can coordinate effectively.
(Notice that a lot of these party machine techniques actually exploit first-past-the-post dynamics. First-past-the-post can thus be an asset, not an obstacle, cunning political machine masters.)
The interesting question to me, then, is: why are all of the powerful entrenched city political machines in the US Democratic? Definitely, a big part of it is emergent reality (history, culture, first-mover-advantage, etc.) vs. some abstract reason. But I also wonder if the left vs. right political philosophies have something to do with how likely the left is to organize and coordinate their efforts vs. the right? For example, if the right promotes a free-market labor thesis, it’s unlikely that the right would have very many large and centrally controlled unions to use in a right-leaning political machine. Maybe something there, ?
jim
Sep 16 2021 at 3:52pm
Turnouts for mayor votes are lower. So the impact of public sector unionized city workers, who do vote, is higher.
My guess.
Randal O'Toole
Sep 16 2021 at 4:28pm
Instead of thinking of this problem as Democrat vs. Republican, it might work better to think of it as Middle Class (i.e., college educated) and Working Class. The working class outnumbers the middle class by more than two to one. Democrats have come to represent the middle class and Republicans represent white working class. Democrats tip the balance by capturing black working class. Republicans once tipped the balance by capturing Hispanic working class, but anti-immigration rhetoric on the part of certain Republican leaders (Trump, Tancredo) alienated the Hispanic working class.
The result gives Democrats the majority where there are lots of blacks and Hispanics and/or lots of college educated voters. It gives Republicans the majority where there aren’t so many blacks and Hispanics.
The change will come when a Republican politicians figures out a way to gain the support of the entire working class — white, black, Hispanic, all of which have reasons to resent the white middle class.
Jayson Jones
Sep 16 2021 at 4:47pm
I think you’re missing the point. In cities we internalize our dependence on eachother whereas rural life encourages a self sufficient attitude. Interdependence is basic to Liberal/Democrat political thought and policy. Contrary to the author’s take on Homelessness, Liberal/Democratic policy is aimed at finding them housing not just “disappearing” them. Being antisocial is far easier in rural settings than in urban settings therefore Republican individual independence and social narrow mindedness fits rural, not urban, life.
Ryan
Sep 17 2021 at 1:40pm
Though it is often claimed otherwise, it is very clear how much level of actual concern for the homeless exists among the general occupants of a major city. The claim that liberals are overwhelmingly concerned with “finding them housing” is demonstrably false.
Jameson Graber
Sep 16 2021 at 5:10pm
Um, no, honestly, I can’t.
Curious
Sep 16 2021 at 8:12pm
How about a theory that uses “voting with your feet” idea with history thrown in. Suppose you’re going to purchase home/property in an area, and you can choose between purchasing the property in a city or in a suburb, and you know from history that the city is under strong Democrat party influence. If you disfavor redistribution politics that could devalue your home purchase over time through the risk of future higher taxes, you would be inclined to purchase the property in the suburb, holding other factors constant. Or it could be partisan non-economic culture for which you dislike the Democratic Party’s position.
In other words, it may be that the voters are “sorting” themselves out so that they place themselves in areas that match their politics in light of the history of Democrat Party’s sway over cities. It’s a rational response to the rational voting theory, which says your vote is not going to matter much in an election. So in response, you place yourself in area where you’ll worry less about the fact that your vote won’t make much difference in the election, because the other voters in your area have roughly your same political preferences as you. This “sorting out” could result in some areas (e.g., cities) having a very high proportion of people who vote the same way.
Andrew_FL
Sep 16 2021 at 8:56pm
Repulican cities did exist
This was the hard money, pro-business Republican party. This was the socially conservative, banned contraception in Connecticut, suppressed pornography, contraception, and abortion promotion through the Mail, Comstock Act Republican Party. This was a right wing party. So what changed? In the 1890s, immigrants and African Americans voted Republican. Now, they vote Democratic.
Mark Z
Sep 16 2021 at 9:45pm
Less abstract reasons: conservatives are more likely to have children (and perhaps having children makes people more conservative) and older people tend to be more conservative; and both parents and old people/retirees may prefer living in suburban or rural areas for the space and/or lower cost of living.
The imbalance doesn’t need to be strong to cause a positive feedback loop, since once a city is, say, 55% Democratic, a reliable Democratic majority will consistently enact Democratic policies, which will tend to drive out Republicans and attract Democrats, intensifying the imbalance.
Phil H
Sep 16 2021 at 9:50pm
Hello, echo chamber! Just so that there’s someone in this long discussion thread who says the obvious thing: Republicans are unpopular in cities because they’ve demonstrated an ongoing commitment to bigotry in the last 30 years, and people in cities don’t like that. It’s what Bryan calls “traditional values,” which cashes out in practice as “excluding X” where X is whatever group of people we don’t like today. Virtue signalling matters! And Republicans virtue signal in a very consistent way, which turns urban voters off.
Jon Murphy
Sep 17 2021 at 7:17am
As I point out to Warren Platts above, that narrative is empirically false and doesn’t explain the trends Bryan is asking about.
Ryan
Sep 17 2021 at 1:36pm
Lol – the irony of making a statement like “republicans are bigoted,” much like “all whites are racist” very well illustrates a point I made below: the idea that leftist demographics are somehow more tolerant and open-minded than conservative ones is abject nonsense. Cities may be “diverse” in physical appearance (due very simply to population size), but they are as diverse as mobs, all chanting the same things, all moving in lockstep.
Mark Z
Sep 17 2021 at 1:43pm
You put cities on a pedestal. In my (ultra progressive) city, for example, violent anti-Asian hate crimes are pretty routine, and it’s not Republican white supremacists who are committing them. The kinds of bigotry that don’t ‘count’ in certain contexts for some reason are nonetheless quite real to many people.
Phil H
Sep 19 2021 at 8:29am
That’s interesting. Who is committing them?
Phil H
Sep 19 2021 at 8:39am
Because here’s a bit of media narrative:
“Presidential statements have correlated both to increases and decreases in hate crime,” said Brian Levin, director of the center which wrote the report. “It is notable that on March 23, (2020), when President Trump refrained from ethnic terms relating to the virus for a day and spoke of tolerance, there were no anti-Asian hate crimes in NYC in what otherwise was a historically bad month for hate crime.”
I’m not averse to overturning media narratives, but you will have to give me some evidence to go on.
Mark Z
Sep 20 2021 at 1:15pm
That’s certainly the narrative. As of 2019, in NYC though white people are underrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes (black people are the only group that’s overrepresented). Here’s a left of center take on post-covid ant-Asian hate crimes that nonetheless notes that they’re disproportionately committed by other ethnic minorities. The NY Post notes (re the 2019 report) that this trend also holds for anti-LGBT hate crimes as well.
Jim
Sep 16 2021 at 9:58pm
The reason Democrats dominate cities is that Republicans don’t like living in cities.
“Person who doesn’t like living in the city” could almost be the dictionary definition of the word “Republican”.
Art
Sep 16 2021 at 10:08pm
It’s an economies of scale issue. Big cities provide a large tax base that politicians, unions, poverty pimps, agencies and alike can use to pay for their pet projects and workers. These institutions have, by in large, a payroll full of Dems. In turn those workers and recipients of the largeness of the local government tend to support politicians (Dems) who make sure they get paid no matter how badly they perform. You can’t do that in a small town, no money in it.
Alexander Turok
Sep 16 2021 at 10:18pm
You could rephrase this to “why are there no white megacities.” Republicans win in places that are either overwhelmingly white, like Iowa, or where whites are a small minority that votes as a bloc(the deep South)
Aren’t you the guy who wrote “the myth of the rational voter?” People vote for feelgood policies and if the homeless cause them too much trouble can always move to other cities which for some strange reason don’t have these problems. Recognizing that might lead to you question the wisdom of open borders, alas. But anyway, the really rich people aren’t much bothered by the homeless crisis in places like Los Angeles. They live in gated communities protected by private security firms.
If the Republicans want to win in places like Los Angeles they should adopt a “dualist populism, hostile to both the criminal classes and the rich. Maybe Yang’s party can do it. /s
Jim M
Sep 16 2021 at 10:19pm
It’s a shame, as I would respectfully add that large cities run by Republicans have tended to be pretty successful.
NYC under Giuliani & early Bloomberg.
Jersey City under Bret Schundler.
San Diego under Golding & Falconer.
A GOP mayor can’t rely on party machine politics, has to be a compromised & deal maker, and actually has to hire good people & have legitimate results to have any hope of re-election. A Democratic mayor (e.g. Bill DeBlasio) does not.
Anonymous
Sep 16 2021 at 11:05pm
The key here is local rent extraction on behalf of residents, disproportionately native residents, costing less than moving. Cities are located in desirable places, why else would so many people live there? This is true both in terms of current climate (California) and past geography (being on a river), but once there is a city desirable things locate in the city based on market forces. Businesses benefit from being near customers and individuals benefit from these desirable amenities and being close to their own jobs. Once a city is successful, however, the median voter—who contributes less than the mean person (a purely statistical entity disproportionately impacted by productive outliers)—tries to extract as much rent as possible.
Most proximately cities compete with their suburbs, but so long as the rent extraction of the median voter from the mean person is not too large the city can maintain higher taxes because the cost of commuting exceeds the cost of the higher property taxes. And even if someone commutes from the suburbs to the city they pay in part into city coffers. This explains how cities are able to maintain higher property than their suburbs, but it does not explain why there are no competitors in other states.
For the most successful cities it’s easy to argue that it’s hard to compete with the amenities and job opportunities for the most productive members of society such that the median voter can extract higher rent, e.g. New York City and San Francisco. While this might explain California and New York, it does not explain cities generally. For that, we need to consider what it would take to credibly commit to delivering the kind of city you describe.
The answer is that no one can credibly promise the kind of city you discuss because once highly productive people move to a location en masse other people would move there too, the median voter would have an incentive and ability to extract the switching costs of moving elsewhere, and so the rent extraction begins. The cities you describe would exist in spades if there were a credible commitment mechanism, but there isn’t and so in practice city government is focused on rent extraction.
Finally, a Hayekan / social choice note on the nature of “Blue” cities. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and we should not confuse the government of cities generally (in the US and elsewhere) with classically left wing government, let alone helping the poor. Yes, the median in California extracts rent in such a way that enriches themselves at the the expense of the most productive workers in Silicon Valley, but under Prop 13 California is fundamentally a real estate cartel. Whatever the left wing branding, this is California’s endorsement of de facto inherited titles of nobility that are in practice structural racism to the benefit of the median voter and to to the cost of the migrants (both domestic and international) who actually make California great. So yes, the cities are “Bue,” but we should not confuse that with a commitment to helping poor people *expressed* by the left. The real orientation is towards a statist policy of intervention that extracts from productive members of society.
Jose Pablo
Sep 16 2021 at 11:36pm
This does not seem to be a “US only” phenomenon. Although not to the same extent, the same tendency can be clearly observed in Europe:
“Most of Europe’s 38 capital city mayors belong to parties on the left and center-left of the political spectrum. Of the 28 mayors of EU capital cities, 15 are members of socialist, social democrat or other left-leaning parties, such as the mayors of Vienna, Copenhagen, Riga, Brussels, and Lisbon. Some eleven EU mayors belong to centrist and center-right parties, while only two mayors adhere to the right. Outside the EU, some six European capital mayors belong to leftist parties, one to centrists and three to parties on the right.”
http://www.citymayors.com/government/europe_mayors.html
So, any good explanation has to be (to some extent) “country neutral” (after all, I don’t think Trump significantly affects local elections in Europe)
May
Sep 17 2021 at 12:38am
I think you have to consider a particular oddity of how American cities are organized. Unlike in many countries, they’re not unified entities, but are broken up into a patchwork of municipal corporations and unincorporated areas. This obscures the true size of some cities. Miami, for instance, is officially the 44th largest city in the United States by population. The Miami urbanized area is 4th.
When you look at the true cities, it becomes very obvious why a state like Texas, which has around 85% of its people living in urban areas, does not overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. The Dallas and Houston areas are fairly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but they don’t vie for power in competitive elections over regional governments, but instead can expect fairly stable control over their respective fiefdoms within the region. The midsized cities are more solidly Republican, and along with the rural parts of the state, help push Republicans over the top.
The other issue is that the conservative brand has largely become hostile to the needs of cities in the past 10 years. There may be some resentment behind this. The North largely switched from Republican to Democrat in the 1990s, and most of the large cities were historically in the North. Southern cities attracted large corporations with favorable tax deals, but they also often brought a lot of Northerners with them to do the work, who then changed local culture and politics. Since the Northerners mostly live in the cities and have a lot of economic power, the cities are often targeted in callous ways to prevent them from having too much influence. North Carolina is a prime example of this phenomenon.
Nicholas
Sep 17 2021 at 5:21am
Demographics. Young, idealistic and daft – and this has only become more the case with social media removing bars to being listened to when young. When the young grow up and gather responsibilities they tend to move out, at least to the suburbs.
Knut P. Heen
Sep 17 2021 at 6:00am
I am not sure the Median Voter Model works when the political platform is a vector rather than a scalar. Suppose a Democrat and a Republican candidate offer the same solution to issue A. However, issue A is bundled with the issue B, C, etc. The voter will not switch to the Republican candidate unless the entire vector is preferable to the Democrat’s vector. A single controversial issue held dearly by the Republicans (for example abortion) may rule out voting Republican even if the Republican candidate offer a slightly preferable solution to all other issues. You may argue that there should pop up a Republican with a moderate position on the controversial issue too. The problem is that we define those as Democrats. They would probably not be nominated by the Republicans.
I am also thinking that there may be a reversed-causality issue here. Suppose people with Democrat-leanings have a strong preference for living in Mega cities or that people with Republican-leanings have a strong preference for not living Mega cities. Genes may explain both the political choice and the choice of location.
Karen Tibbals
Sep 17 2021 at 7:44am
I don’t think the issue is political party, I think its an issue of conservative versus liberal. Cities tend to be more diverse which would make conservatives more uncomfortable. Conservatives prefer people to be with people who are part of their ingroup and who look like them more than those on the left. One of the predictors of conservativism is the distance you live from where you were born. Conservatives are more likely to live within 50 miles of where they call themselves liberal.
Ryan
Sep 17 2021 at 1:29pm
I don’t think this is true at all. Conservatives are not uncomfortable with diversity; nor are cities more diverse in general.
This negative stereotype of conservatives is often repeated by liberals, but I think it’s basis is in bigotry not fact. I’ve spent good portions of my life in both rural and urban areas; the rural areas were by far the most tolerant and accepting of outsiders. Cities like Seattle and Portland are quite the opposite. You may have some people with different skin colors, but that is a false diversity. They must all think alike, or they will not be tolerated.
(And the idea that there are no minorities in rural areas is simply false)
liberalarts
Sep 17 2021 at 7:46am
Should a proper theory of this phenomenon also explain why Democrats never hold a majority on rural county commission boards, etc.?
RPLong
Sep 17 2021 at 8:45am
Interesting post.
In my opinion, the issue can be explained by the fact that “Republican” and “Democrat” are largely lifestyle affiliations, not really expressions of belief or policy.
For many if not most Democrats, moving to the big city, and doing “big city things” like drinking coffee in coffee shops, visiting the art museum, bike commuting, and going to an outdoor craft beer festival are the ideal lifestyle choices. Even if some Democrats don’t do these things, they appreciate them as being signals for what the right kind of lifestyle is. Voting Democrat is another such signal.
Similarly, for many if not most Republicans, city life is emblematic of a Democrat-type lifestyle, and so they eschew it. They’re more likely to be interested in lifestyle choices like going camping, hunting, fishing, going to church, visiting a farm, eating at a chuck wagon restaurant, etc. And again, even if some Republicans have no interest in these things specifically, they appreciate them as being signals for what the right kind of lifestyle is.
So this question is basically akin to asking why Buick sells so well in China while selling so poorly in Germany. Brands have brand appeal. Everything is “aspirational marketing” these days. You’re not filling out a ballot, you’re choosing what kind of lifestyle you want to express to others. It’s branding.
JK Brown
Sep 17 2021 at 8:47am
As Thomas Sowell said, “It doesn’t matter how smart you are, if you don’t stop and think”. Cities are busy places where there is barely time to collect your thoughts on some matter of city governance, much less have an independent thought. Cities promote dependence up on the mass and suffers serious collective action inhibitions. Like the crowd around someone collapsed in the street, first someone must break ranks to help, but then also much individually direct a specific person to “call 911”, etc. If just directed at the crowd, the odds are no one will make the call even as each in the crowd think “someone should do something”.
Democrats, in general, don’t leave people alone, so are more likely to give direct orders, thus getting action from those they commandeer.
The nature of a city’s operations means it takes more effort to keep an eye on city governance. (Since the New Deal, the nature of federal government has taken on a lot of these traits, with the president often the super-mayor in people’s minds) The number and increasingly complex nature of the services provided by a city make it near impossible for the citizen to judge the operations of the city except in the broadest of terms.
Representative government has never worked well at the city level. In general, it devolves into cronyism and control by career bureaucrats. As, sadly, is representative governance at the federal level.
Tom West
Sep 17 2021 at 4:10pm
I think recent events in Texas indicate Republicans aren’t so hot on the idea of leaving people alone.
Now Libertarians might, but then that’s probably why they they’re not popular with any side.
Simon
Sep 17 2021 at 10:02am
a) parties tend to look for large nterest groups to represent (or you can say it the other way around)
b) in contemporary US, it’s hard to find 2 large groups with more opposing interests than Urbanites and Suburbanites.
c) by definition Urbanites/Democrats are controlling major cities.
If my explanation is correct, state “color” should be correlated with percentage of population living in urban areas.
Simon
Sep 17 2021 at 10:36am
PS. Why Republicans don’t adjust their positions to appeal to Urbanites? It’s easier to switch parties.
Joe
Sep 17 2021 at 10:20am
You appear to have overlooked another possibility, that urban voters might prefer some right-wing or Republican policies delivered by Democrats. If you live in a big city and spend much time following politics, you’ll see this is quite widespread, particularly with respect to the examples you’ve highlighted: Policing and homelessness.
JaJa
Sep 17 2021 at 10:36am
Another way to look at it is through political discourse/commentary. Most people are tuned into the national level discourse – presidential politics usurps local mayoral/gubernatorial politics. National discourse of Republicans is primarily targeted at “heartland” with abortion/bible/constitution themes. So left wing politics when offered by city Republicans is still unpalatable since these Republicans carry that “stigma”
Ryan
Sep 17 2021 at 1:22pm
I don’t think cities are cosmopolitan and diverse. They generally lack actual diversity, in fact.
Consider this: living in a big city involves quite a lot of crowd behavior, even if unconscious. It requires people to generally accept broad authority, in the form of landlords, etc… It involves tight spaces and a general reduction of the ability to spread out, be left alone, and live your own life.
The mob mentality is inherently a leftist tendency. Conservatives dislike arbitrary authority, they value their autonomy and space, and they tend to value a slower pace and more family-oriented style of living. Cities attract liberals because in many ways they require people to live like liberals.
Niko Davor
Sep 17 2021 at 2:02pm
Where are the Republican cities? Where are the Republican big corporations? Where are the Republican Universities? Where are the Republican mainstream news outlets? Democrats have succeeded at using coercion tactics to non-violently but successfully dominate all these institutions. Caplan previously launched this discussion about big corporations. The prevailing answer, courtesy of Richard Hanania, is that Democrats use the legal system to coerce them that way. That was not obvious and took this crowd years to put that into clear and convincing terms. There are similar answers for how Democrats dominated everything else including cities.
Normal people choose political affiliation like people in the old days would choose a religious affiliation. Democrats currently dominate everything and they are the ruling political religion of today. Republicans cater to those who resent that and want to see an upset to that order. Democrats cater to those who accept and respect the current order, or fear reprisal for speaking against the dominant religion, or have zeal for the dominant political religion.
Tom West
Sep 17 2021 at 4:51pm
As an outsider, it would seem to be the Democratic brand is “Be nice to the less fortunate” and the Republican brand is “America in the 50’s was pretty great”. (Neither of these are relevant to what the party actually accomplishes, but then stated intentions are at least 5x more important than outcomes.)
Given that, it seems simply that the Republican brand has less relevance for all the groups listed above (cities, universities, mainstream news). Big corporations also want to seem nice.
I think a large number of people are choosing their party based on the brand value rather than choosing the default (although that no doubt that matters to some degree).
Honestly, modernity seems to be selecting for the Democratic brand, given that this seems like a relatively world-wide trend over the 60 years.
Hazel Meade
Sep 17 2021 at 2:07pm
I think one aspect worth noting here is that it would even be better for Republicans rural conservative voters if they allowed Republican candidates to get more comfortable with diversity and cosmopolitanism. But the Republican base insists on voting for candidates that stand almost no chance of winning in cities. Why can’t Republican voters get comfortable enough with diversity and cosmopolitanism to nominate candidates that are comfortable enough with diversity and cosmopolitanism to get half of the votes in cities?
Tom West
Sep 17 2021 at 5:03pm
My impression is that a discomfort with diversity and cosmopolitanism *is* the core brand. Everything else is simply policy that’s nearly irrelevant to the voter.
As it turns out, this new branding has been phenomenally successful with a large segment of the population. So much so that I doubt the Republicans can abandon it without facing serious political consequences.
Not certain the long-term consequences are healthy for the US. I tend to believe it’s better for a country when the front-leading parties are nearly indistinguishable so they can be cycled in and out without consequence as each ruling party passes their expiry date.
Dan
Sep 17 2021 at 2:27pm
Few cities have Republican mayors because people’s political views are heavily (and increasingly) influenced by national politics, and national politics is heavily (and increasingly) correlated with urban vs. rural.
The median voter theorem tells us something about what positions the two leading candidates will have, but it does not specify that either of those candidates will carry the label “Republican”. In cities like Los Angeles that have nonpartisan elections, there is no particular reason for them to be. In cities like New York that force a D vs. R general election, if there are far more voters in the D primary than the R primary then the D primary will usually be the deciding election.
Zero million-person cities have Republican mayors in part because there are only 9 of them.
If we double the sample size by looking at the 18 largest cities, then 2 of the 18 have a Republican mayor (#14 Jacksonville & #18 Fort Worth). There are also 2 “Independent” mayors (#7 San Antonio & #11 Honolulu), but they each look more like a Democrat than a Republican. If we instead double the sample size by looking at the current & previous mayor of the 9 million-person cities, then 1-2 of the 18 mayors are Republicans (San Diego, and maybe Phoenix depending on whether you count the previous elected mayor or the interim mayor who served for 10 months).
vincent Söderberg
Sep 17 2021 at 4:53pm
This post makes me think of robin hansons “farmer vs forager” https://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/08/forager-v-farmer-elaborated.html
Kgaard
Sep 17 2021 at 10:50pm
Nobody has mentioned the obvious post-2020 answer: The elections are more likely to be rigged in the cities because it’s far easier to do it there than in the countryside, where everybody knows everybody else.
DannyK
Sep 17 2021 at 11:02pm
There are lots of interesting suggestions in this thread, but surely one big factor is the strong tendency towards anti-elite populism in the modern GOP. Even Senators and Congressmen and Presidents who went to the Ivy Leagues and Yale Law School act as tribunes of the people and mock the pretensions of the urban elite. That plays well to the base; but when you spend a lot of time mocking people who drink lattes, eat sushi, do yoga, etc., then you’re also sending a powerful message to those people that you are not interested in them or their vote.
The Lunatic
Sep 18 2021 at 9:34am
I have a hard time imagining how any serious economist could even pose this question, except perhaps as an exercise for students.
From an ideal version of the Median Voter Model, you’d expect every single-member district election in a first-part-the-post system to be between two candidates positioned exactly on either side of where they believe the median voter to be. But note, then, that parties wouldn’t show up at all, any more than firms show up in classical microeconomics.
Once you apply all the usual Theory of the Firm stuff to the issue of why parties exist, it becomes blatantly obvious that it would be incredibly difficult to simultaneously position a single political party at the 50.1% point of the nation, every state, and every locality within each state simultaneously. A party that takes positions that put it in competition for the median national voter will naturally wind up in positions that are favored by substantially more or less than half of the voters in each of various states, and one aligned at the median voter on a state will wind up with positions favored by substantially more or less than half of the populace in various of a state’s various communities.
Sure, there’s a certain amount of leeway on candidates varying from the parties-as-a-whole, which is why you can get a Manchin in West Virginia. But note all the yelling about that. Flexibility can’t be infinite, because it would otherwise end the party as an entity. And even when you have a Bloomberg in NYC, everybody know he isn’t a “real” Republican, as seen by his choice of party for his presidential campaign.
John Brennan
Sep 18 2021 at 1:10pm
A less stringent Tiebout Model (the one developed after his death–i.e., he could not really debate its interpretation) AND metropolitan fragmentation across the 50 states PLUS the various adoptions of municipal home rule (de jure and de facto) have enabled citizen-voters to “vote with their feet” (in he words of Bryan Ellickson) and escape the negative externalities of urban living created by central city Democrats and their constituencies by moving to nearby suburbs (which are a mix Democrat and Republican across space).
John Brennan
Sep 18 2021 at 1:37pm
In closing, mostly democrats–politicians, voters, and political dependents–are left behind after others leave the central city (ies).
Alex Woo
Sep 25 2021 at 5:29am
Have you considered the possibility of systematic election fraud in urban areas?
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