RUTHFULLY YOURS

All the attention being thrown at New York’s mayoral primary race, won by socialist Zohran Mamdani, raises broader questions that deserve answers. Why do voters keep electing Democrats responsible for so much urban decline and decay? What will break the left’s stranglehold on our once great cities? Is the situation simply hopeless?

Of the nation’s largest 20 cities, only two have Republican mayors – Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Republicans hold the mayorships of just 25 of the 100 largest cities. And that number is down from 30 in 2020.

More mysterious is the paradox that, despite the fact that blame for empty stores, rising crime, and the exodus of people rests squarely on the shoulders of Democrats in most of these cities, voters rarely hand control over to Republicans.

Look at the history of the 10 largest cities and despair.

Los Angeles has had one Republican mayor since 1961. New York has had one and a half since 1969 (Michael Bloomberg had been a lifelong Democrat, but ran as a Republican in 2001 and 2005, and then left the GOP midway through his second term).

Chicago has been electing Democratic mayors since 1931, and Houston since 1982.

Phoenix has elected Democrats for 20 years (a Republican was twice appointed as an interim mayor).

In Philadelphia, the last time a Republican was mayor was in 1948, and it’s been 24 years since San Antonio voters picked a GOP candidate for the city’s top office.

The other three of the top 10 cities – Dallas, San Diego, and Jacksonville – have been notable exceptions, with each having a fair share of mayors from both political parties.

Not only do voters in the nation’s largest cities keep electing Democrats, many of the ones winning elections today are more radical than their predecessors. Seven cities are today run by socialist mayors. Ten years ago, there was one.

Three years ago, Los Angeles, described by NBC News as suffering “long-simmering frustrations with issues like homelessness and crime” – not to mention the exodus of hundreds of thousands of residents – under Democratic leadership, had the chance to elect a wealthy real-estate developer, Rick Caruso, who promised to clean up the place.

Instead, voters overwhelmingly elected Castro-loving communist and former “community organizer” Karen Bass, who’s proved more incompetent than her predecessor, with the city now $1 billion in the red and entire neighborhoods burned to the ground in wildfires while she was vacationing in Ghana.

After the fires, Caruso said, correctly, that “We have terrible leadership resulting in billions of dollars in damage because [Bass] wasn’t here and didn’t know what she was doing.”

But Bass will still probably win reelection next year.

New Yorkers, after suffering eight years of Bill de Blasio and now the wildly unpopular, scandal-ridden Eric Adams, appear poised to elect a Marxist, who is guaranteed to make everything in New York worse.

What’s truly bizarre is that voters keep putting Democrats in charge even as their friends and neighbors vote with their feet to leave these Democratic hellholes.

In just the past four years, the one-party cities of Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago have seen their combined populations shrink by more than 370,000.

People are fleeing other Democratic cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Portland, Baltimore, Milwaukee (which hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1906, but has had three socialist mayors), Albuquerque, Minneapolis, and Cleveland (which has had only two Republican mayors since 1941).

Leftists keep yapping about how they want more people to live in densely populated areas, but then do everything they can to drive people away.

So, what is it about cities? Is there something in human nature that causes people to get more liberal – or dumber, depending on your perspective – the more densely packed together they are? Is this just a fact of life? And who cares, anyway? If Democrats want to ruin these cities and people keep voting them into office, we should just say good riddance, right?

But think about it: We are all paying the costs of urban blight and decay that Democrats have brought forth. We pay them in the form of larger housing subsidy costs, bigger welfare costs, deeper economic stagnation, and more widespread cultural rot.

Imagine what the nation would be like if our urban centers were thriving, prosperous, peaceful, innovative, family-friendly, affordable, and nice places to live. Where businesses were able to flourish, and schools were models of excellence. Imagine the hole this would blow in the Democrats’ effort to win national elections simply by appealing to urban leftists.

There’s no reason to believe that our major cities can’t be rescued. But that will never happen if the right gives up trying.