The Revolt of the Urban Public?

Voters Want to Bring Back the Shine to America’s Cities

The sun came up Wednesday morning, but for many, no doubt, our proverbial American “shining city on a hill” had lost some of its luster. While the presidential election results have disappointed many city dwellers, the results in our actual, non-metaphorical cities show that the urban electorate also wanted something different—not a wholesale ideological shift, but leaders who actually take the problems of urban governance seriously.

Urban voters want to bring the shine back to their cities.

Many theories will be offered in the coming weeks to explain Kamala Harris’s decisive defeat, but the fact is that Donald Trump improved his performance over 2020 seemingly everywhere and with everyone—including in the densest, bluest cities. While Harris won most urban counties, the extent to which Trump outperformed his 2020 numbers is notable: he improved his share of the vote by 34% in New York City (nearly 70% in the Bronx!), 32% in San Francisco, 27% in Los Angeles, and 22% in Washington DC. In the chart below, you can see the red shift for the counties home to America’s 24 largest cities.

(Note: calculations made by author based on data from uselectionatlas.org, accessed on November 7, 2024)

There’s good reason to suspect that it had something to do with, as James Carville once said, “the economy, stupid.” Derek Thompson at The Atlantic puts the presidential election into an international context in which voters all over the world have repeatedly punished incumbents of all political stripes for inflation. Meanwhile, Jed Kolko at Slow Boring notes that “Counties with a higher cost of living swung more toward Trump in 2024 relative to 2020. Expensive counties tend to be blue places like big coastal cities…” Ben Glasner and Cardiff Garcia, writing at Agglomerations, say that “One possible, straightforward reason is the intense dissatisfaction of residents in the biggest cities, which tend to be locally ruled by Democratic mayors and politicians.”

This last one strikes me as more on the mark. Indeed, zooming in on some of the specific races in urban areas, city dwellers appear to have voted for urban abundance and against urban dysfunction, even as they still largely voted for Harris. Coast to coast, voters expressed dissatisfaction with housing scarcity, streets impacted by drug use and visible homelessness, and prosecutors deemed “soft on crime”—and they voted against the politicians and policies who were responsible for it all.

San Francisco offers a clear example. The preliminary results show that San Franciscans have elected a new mayor, Daniel Lurie, who ran on a platform of cleaning up the city’s unsafe streets, rooting out corruption and inefficiency in the city’s bureaucracy, building more housing, and improving the business climate—this is a

City of Yes

agenda if there ever was one. At the same time, San Franciscans look set to replace some of the worst offenders on the city’s Board of Supervisors with more sensible candidates. They overwhelmingly reelected District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who unlike her recalled predecessor, is actually prosecuting criminals. Of further interest, nearly 60% of San Franciscans voted against a statewide ballot initiative that would have legalized rent control—perhaps the most expensive way to create a housing shortage—while 66% voted to increase sentences and allow felony charges for drug and theft crimes, which have plagued retail businesses in the city. Nearly 70% of San Franciscans also supported a local measure backed by the Chamber of Commerce that will lower taxes for some businesses.  

Before anyone bemoans a conservative takeover of San Francisco, bear in mind that 80% of San Franciscans voted for both Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi. At the local level, The City That Can’t couldn’t take it anymore and voted (some of) the bastards out.

The trend continued in Austin, where pro-housing candidates were also rewarded at the polls. Over the past two years, a YIMBY supermajority on City Council delivered major land use reforms, including the abolition of parking mandates and a reduction in minimum lot size requirements for single-family homes. These were hard-fought, highly-contested wins, so this election was shaping up to be a referendum on housing policy. Mayor Kirk Watson, who shepherded the reforms through City Council, won about 50% of the votes against four reform-skeptical challengers—but as of publication it’s too early to tell whether he won outright. Of the three other incumbents on Council, only the candidate who voted against the housing reforms lost reelection—to a pro-housing candidate. In the two races with open seats, YIMBY candidates did well: in Austin’s conservative District 10, the YIMBY candidate lost by 1%—less than 500 votes, while in the crowded District 7 race, YIMBY candidates received a majority of votes (the YIMBY vote was split, and the race now goes to a December runoff). At the very least, it looks like the supermajority will be preserved, if not increased by one.

Again, lest anyone complain that Joe Rogan and Elon Musk stole this election, every single incumbent up for reelection voted for a recent $218 million contract with the police union that will increase salaries by 28%.

The pattern repeated in cities across the United States. New Yorkers, who won’t have mayoral and council elections until next year, passed several ballot measures championed by Mayor Eric Adams, which he described as “for everyone who desires a safer city, cleaner streets, greater fiscal responsibility, [and] transparency in the city’s capital planning process.” (Of course, the most important vote in New York this year will be the City Council’s upcoming vote on the mayor’s “City of Yes” zoning reforms.) 

Meanwhile, Los Angeles voters elected to increase funding for homelessness services and affordable housing—while throwing out their “soft-on-crime” district attorney. Voters in Oakland recalled their mayor and district attorney for the same reason. Like their neighbors in the City by the Bay, Oaklanders and Angelenos voted against rent control legalization and for greater criminal penalties for theft and drug use. Whatever the moral merits of drug legalization, voters have come to associate the practical implementation (or misimplementation) with increased disorder. While such disorder would be readily apparent to anyone wandering the needle-strewn streets of San Francisco, Oakland, or LA, voters rejected drug legalization ballot measures in Massachusetts, Florida, and the Dakotas, too, as Charles Fain Lehman discusses at The Causal Fallacy. 

At the risk of committing a causal fallacy myself, the results from urban elections across America suggest that city dwellers voted largely for affordability and against disorder. Despite the nationwide red shift, Kamala Harris won almost every single one of America’s top 25 cities. This was not a Republican takeover—it was a rebuke of the misgovernance that has characterized too many of our cities in recent years. 

This is good. Every leader of every city in America should be working to deliver abundant housing, clean streets and public spaces, and across-the-board public safety—that is the urban mandate coming out of this election.

As in 2016, I fear there will be a temptation among some local leaders to nationalize local politics in protest of the president-elect. This should be strongly resisted. While I am personally disappointed (though not surprised) by the presidential election’s outcome, I wish the incoming president well and hope, for all our sakes, that he is able to recruit competent patriots to staff his administration—and that time will reveal some of the uglier aspects of his campaign to be rhetoric more than reality. Regardless of how Donald Trump comports himself in office, American cities do not need more posturing and grandstanding on issues that City Hall does not control, and adding ammunition to the urban-rural culture war will surely not help cities. As the red shift signals, voters want results—and leaders who will deliver them.

In Austin, voters have endorsed the City Council’s land use reform agenda and sensible approach to law enforcement—let that be a model for other cities, and possibly a way forward in 2028. Despite the red shift, the Democratic Party remains the party of America’s cities, but urban voters are no longer tolerant of the excesses of the far left and ineffective local leadership. If the Democratic Party wants to show that it can govern a vast nation, one that includes suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas, it will first have to prove that it can more effectively govern the cities it already controls. America’s urban voters have signaled that they are tired of the status quo and ready for urban revival.

It’s time to bring the shine back to America’s cities.