Blue Cities and States Need to Get Their Act Together

Three and a half years ago, I delivered a warning to California officials in The New York Times:

Since then, homelessness in California has only gotten worse. So have housing costs in much of the state. And while violent crime levels have dropped off again after a brief spike during the pandemic, that hasn’t done much to change public perceptions of crime. Those perceptions are driven more by the abundant signs of low-level urban disorder: the encampments, the open air fentanyl use in places like San Francisco, the maximum security treatment that CVS still gives to deodorant bars and tubes of toothpaste.

And that anger, cynicism, and disaffection? Just take a look at the election results. California voters elected, by a 40 point margin, to undo elements of the state’s 2014 sentencing reforms. They rejected proposals to raise the minimum wage and make it easier to raise public funds for affordable housing construction. Most disconcerting of all, 55 percent of California voters rejected a proposal to ban forced prison labor.

As I write this, Kamala Harris is running about 7 points behind Joe Biden’s 2020 lead in California — about 57 percent to roughly 64 percent. You can see a similar rightward shift in other blue parts of the country, and especially in New York City, where Harris ran a full 16 points behind Biden’s 2020 margin of victory. That should alarm anti-Trump activists everywhere.

I do not think we can blame urban dysfunction in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco for Trump’s return to the White House. But it probably contributed at least a bit to the narrowing Democratic margin in those places. And it certainly contributed more than a bit to the overall rightward trajectory in American urban and blue state governance.

That urban dysfunction is the result of larger tectonic shifts in American political economy, some of which state and local policymakers have no ability to control: COVID, post-COVID societal trauma, and post-COVID inflation are all global phenomena. But some of the other political headwinds that Democrats now face in cities are a direct result of their own mismanagement.

We have a housing and homelessness crisis because blue cities and states have, for decades, accepted a status quo under which it is effectively illegal to meet rising demand for more homes. We have inadequate and decaying public transit because of underinvestment, alongside rules and bureaucratic procedures that stymie any attempt to build ambitious public infrastructure projects. And power in many blue cities is badly fragmented—within the public sector, yes, but also between the public sector and a sprawling network of largely unaccountable nonprofits and advocacy organizations.

A number of blue state leaders have stepped forward to promise they will resist the worst depredations of the second Trump administration. That is good and necessary. But they will need popular support and popular mobilization in order to effectively push back against Trumpism. And they will not be able to maintain that support unless they get their own houses in order.

A strategy of resistance to Trumpism needs to be paired with efforts to renew blue state and blue city governance. Democratic mayors and governors need to prove that anti-authoritarian liberalism is capable of solving problems. They need to make real progress on ground-level, meat and potatoes issues like rent inflation, unsheltered homelessness, and decaying public infrastructure. The governments they run are often sclerotic, slow-moving, and captured by outside interests; they need to become muscular, efficient, and directly responsive to the needs and preferences of residents.

In addition to creating political room to maneuver against the Trump administration, more competent administration in blue states and cities will enable them to serve as sanctuaries for people fleeing oppression elsewhere. Many immigrant communities in red states are now in great danger; queer people in those regions and women seeking reproductive health care may also need somewhere to go. Abundant housing and improved public services would enable the anti-MAGA parts of the country to open their arms to new residents.

Many state and local Democratic officials will be tempted to navigate this perilous time using the tools they know best: delaying actions in the courts and symbolic displays of solidarity. I don’t mean to denigrate either approach, since we’ll need them both. But these are short-term, defensive tactics. In the long term, there’s no hope for a durable, anti-Trump Democratic coalition if Democrats can’t prove their ability to govern the places where they already hold power.