Why Are Republicans So Irrelevant In Big City Politics?
A little armchair political science among friends.
A self-described socialist has been elected as mayor of New York City. (He isn’t the first.) Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani narrowly beat out former Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo. By all accounts, Mamdani pulled it off by centering his campaign around one issue: the cost of living.1
For the first time since 2009, New Yorkers had something resembling an honest-to-God election for mayor. With Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary, and once-presumptive nominee Andrew Cuomo refusing to gracefully bow out, an otherwise staid general election ended up being a tight race.
Even in this banner year for democracy in the Big Apple, the nominee of America’s second largest party proved to be totally irrelevant. Perennial candidate and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa finished the race with a paltry seven percent of the vote. Even Donald Trump managed to pull in around 30 percent of the New York City in the 2024.
The situation in New York City is hardly unique. Among America’s largest cities, only a handful have Republican mayors. In a survey of the core cities of America’s top 25 metropolitan areas, only three have Republican mayors—that’s 12 percent of mayoralties, in a country where 54 percent of governors are Republicans and every presidential election since 1984 has been a nearly even split.2
The situation is even more extreme when you look at city councils: among the 21 major US cities with partisan city councils that I surveyed, 13 don’t have a single Republican member. All but one (Houston) have fewer Republican council members than their 2024 presidential election results would suggest they should have.3 This, in a country where Republicans control 56 percent of state legislators and roughly half of Congress.
What gives? Why are Republicans so uniquely irrelevant in big city politics?
Is it that the ideology of conservatism is inherently unappealing in a context where the government just has to do more?
I suspect this is the most popular theory among people who spend all day thinking about ideas.4 It’s the hypothesis I heard most often when asking friends for their take on this question. While the usual “small government” conservative tool kit might be fine for the state or federal level, the point of local government is to do stuff—such as provide schools, parks, and public safety.
Regardless, I think this is plainly incorrect. The more business-minded and libertarian stands of American conservatism are perfectly compatible with various “best practices” in urban governance, including the use of prices to manage the commons, scaling back unnecessary regulation, and using competitive sourcing to improve public service delivery.
Even in their populist varieties, conservatives often hold positions that better reflect the median voter. In the wake of COVID-19, conservatives were more in line with the general public in wanting to see public schools open sooner.5 Today, conservatives are in line with the resurgence of tough-on-crime politics. And if you don’t recognize lowering property taxes as a safe applause line, you should touch grass.6
Yet any Republican candidate who would like to run on these popular policies must pretend to be a Democrat, as with Los Angeles’ Rick Caruso or New York City’s Eric Adams.
Is it race?
Republican cope notwithstanding, Asian and Hispanic voters continue to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, and Black voters almost unanimously go blue. Both groups heavily concentrate in big cities. Short of a political earthquake, Republicans are never going to be relevant in Black supermajority Midwestern and Southern cities like Detroit or Baltimore.
But demographics aren’t destiny: the largest major American city with a GOP mayor (Dallas) is a minority-majority city. Miami, another major American city with a GOP mayor, is supermajority Hispanic. And Jacksonville, with a fairly typical—that is to say, diverse—New South demographic profile, has an exceedingly uncommon GOP city council majority.
Is it local interest group politics?
Public sector unions are the single most powerful interest group in most cities. They give hundreds of millions of dollars to local candidates to expand local public sector employment. A startling 96 percent of the money they give out goes to Democratic candidates. Better yet, they often staff up campaigns with their organizers, operating shadow campaigns on behalf of Democrats.7
But if the root cause is interest group politics, there should be at least some balance. Even among public sector unions, the most powerful unions—police unions—are conservative. Business and real estate groups are conservative and well-positioned to make big donations. Yet these interest groups usually endorse centrist Democrats in local elections, while supporting Republicans in state and national elections.
Is it that Republicans simply don’t live in cities?
On average, only about a third of the voters in the big US cities voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 2024. This explains why Republican mayors are so uncommon. But it doesn’t explain why city councils are so lopsided.8 In Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose, around a quarter to a third of voters picked the Republican candidate in the last presidential election.9 Yet across these five major cities, there isn’t a single Republican council member.10
Nor does it explain why this equilibrium persists. Perhaps a supermajority of most big city voters identify as Democrats, and—while they might be open to right-of-center local policies—they will never vote for a Republican.11 The rational thing would be for big city conservatives to instead run under the mantra of a local party that better reflects the blend of local policy preferences.
Thus, my first hypothesis: Conservatives are irrelevant in big city politics because they don’t—and usually can’t—start local parties that distinguish them from the GOP.
In other developed countries, conservatives commonly do this sort of thing. Take Vancouver: Since 1986, their federal elections have been a competition between a center-left party and a social democratic party. But during the same period, Vancouver was governed almost exclusively by center-right mayors and councils, even as the local electorate drifted to the left.
Local conservatives in Vancouver dispensed with national party labels and the baggage this entailed. They formed municipal political parties—the Non-Partisan Association (NPA) and ABC Vancouver—and adopted policy platforms better calibrated to local views. Unshackled from federal conservatives on polarizing issues like immigration or foreign policy, local conservatives could focus on popular pro-growth policies.
This virtually never happens in the US, and not because our conservatives are less strategic.12 As law professor David Schleicher notes in a 2008 paper attempting to understand the lack of political competition in US big cities, exclusionary ballot access rules—which default to restricting ballot access to Democratic and Republican candidates—make local political parties practically infeasible.13
As any Libertarian Party or Green Party organizer can attest, if you have to spend tens—or hundreds—of thousands of dollars fighting for ballot access before the campaign has even starts, you have probably already lost.
To the extent that there remains political competition in many US cities, it happens within the Democratic Party and is largely invisible to the average person. In San Francisco, the relevant divide is is between “moderate” and “progressive” Democrats.14 The trouble is that these designations aren’t on the ballot, and so rationally ignorant voters can’t easily cast votes that reflect their preferences.
My friend and political scientist Stan Oklobdzija—very much not a Republican, but a fan of competitive local elections—elaborates on what it would take to turn US cities into functional, multiparty democracies in this post.
Nor is any of this inevitable. Indeed, the lack of political competition in big US cities is quite weird from an international perspective.
On a recent trip to Scandinavia, I was surprised to learn that the mayor of Oslo—Norway’s largest city and capital—is a member of the conservative party.15 In Stockholm, the mayoralty alternates between the major right-of-center and left-of-center parties. Conservatives likewise govern Berlin, Madrid, and Warsaw, to choose a random sampling of European cities.
Perhaps Europe is just weird, and we’re the normal ones. But a glance at the developed nations of East Asia reveals that the mayors of Tokyo and Seoul are also conservative. And when you compare the US to our closest peer states—Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—it becomes obvious that we’re the weird ones.16
What makes the US so different? Answering this question could probably fill a dissertation. But with the confidence of a poster, I’ll posit a second theory: the extreme fragmentation of US local governments results in single-party jurisdictions.
An unusual feature of local government in the US is that it is extremely fragmented. In practice, we use the term “city” to refer to metropolitan areas—that is, a broadly self-contained labor and housing market with a discrete core and identity. In practice, the legal boundaries of the typical US city only cover a quarter to a third of this population.
Compare Cleveland to Tallinn.
In Cleveland, a single party controls the mayoralty and every seat in the council. The city proper covers only 17 percent of the metropolis. In Cleveland, as in nearly every US city, the vast majority of the metropolis is governed by a patchwork of small, separately incorporated suburbs that divide residents based on race, class, and culture—and thus, politics.
In Tallinn, seven different parties hold seats in the city council. Tallinn covers 72 percent of Harju County—a representative cross-section of the city that yields lively local political competition.17 This is the norm internationally. In nearly every one of the non-US cities I’ve mentioned in this piece, the city proper governs a supermajority of the metropolis, from the traditional urban core to the suburbanizing periphery.18
This theory is partly supported by domestic evidence. Within the US, big city politics in the South are uniquely competitive across parties. I suspect this is less because of the region’s prevailing conservatism, and more because Southern states gave central cities greater power to incorporate undeveloped land and annex smaller suburbs.19
Why care at all?20 If you’re a Republican, the reason to care is obvious.21 But if you’re a Democrat, maybe you’re happy that the Republicans are irrelevant in cities. I think there are three reasons why a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat might support greater political competition:
First, uncompetitive big city races produce early-career Democratic candidates who are less prepared to run for higher office.
Second, uncompetitive elections result in worse government, hurting the brand of the Democrats who run cities—not unlike the California penalty.
Third, single-party politics result in high-profile Democratic candidates who are far to the left of most Americans—another branding problem.
In some US cities, political competition may remain a competition between a center-left and left party. But in many more US cities, healthy political competition will necessarily take the form of a center-right party versus a center-left party—as in big city politics in the rest of the world. Given everything else going on in American politics, we should be so lucky.
I’m defining this as the core or major cities of the top 25 MSAs, as the classic list of largest cities is heavily distorted by arbitrary municipal boundaries. A look at cities proper only slightly changes this story: Oklahoma City has a Republican mayor and Republican-majority city council and Jacksonville has a Republican-majority city council. I omitted Riverside, as I couldn’t trash down the partisan lean of their independent mayor. You can quibble with the data I chose to collect, but it would take some pretty heavy-duty quibbling to interfere with the conclusions I reach in this paragraph. I collected this data in the summer of 2025.
Compared to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles—where there isn’t a single Republican city council member, despite around a quarter to a third of voters in both cities voting for Donald Trump—New York City is actually something of a mecca of political competition with its six Republican council members.
That is to say, people who read Substack.
Democrats were more responsive to teachers unions than to parents—or the science on post-vaccine infection risk and widening achievement gaps. As Pete Buttigieg has pointed out, they paid the electoral price for it.
They also support structural election changes that benefit their advocacy, such as maintaining odd-year elections and paid time off for public-sector workers on election day.
I don’t get into local gerrymandering here, but it’s rather obviously a factor in Republican council underrepresentation. When I asked a friend (a Los Angeles Democratic operative) for her theory of what explains this gap, she cut to the chase: “bc historically districts have been drawn by council which is a dem majority. but now we have an independent redistricting commission so we’ll see. but they all get appointed by council so it will probably stay dem only.” With all the chatter about gerrymandering in California and Texas, I’m surprised by how little this comes up.
Only in the most progressive cities, e.g. San Francisco and Seattle, do Republican presidential candidates regularly fail to secure 20 percent of the vote.
The Wikipedia page for the Austin City Council incorrectly suggests that there is a Republican member. They were voted out in 2024.
How else would they have taken over most state governments and all three branches of the federal government?
Schleicher also explains why merely forcing elections to be non-partisan—a Progressive Era reform that aimed to break up local party monopolies—doesn’t help. Voters depend on party identification.
It should probably go without saying that a San Francisco “moderate” would be a far-left candidate anywhere else in the US.
To be clear, Norway is not a de facto single-party state: the national government is currently governed by a leftist coalition.
In each of those Anglosphere peer countries, conservative mayors and council majorities are quite common.
I’m being generous to Cleveland here: Harju County goes well beyond what may qualify as metropolitan Tallinn, but since their cities already work as metropolitan governments, there is no Estonian peer to the US’ Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Tallinn proper realistically covers something like 90 percent of the people who work in the city.
In future pieces, I’ll be talking more about why US metropolises are so fragmented, and what it means for policy outcomes. For example, we know that more fragmented metropolises permit less housing.
If a state’s prevailing political culture is to blame, why has Salt Lake City—a rump central city governing a paltry 15 percent of the metropolis—not had a Republican mayor since 1974, despite the overwhelmingly conservative bent of Utah politics?
The great thing about not having an editor is that you can ask questions like this at the end of the piece.
I think that Republican irrelevance at the most practical level of government is an underrated factor in the rather extreme, ideological turn the party has taken in recent year. Having to manage trash pick-up and balance a municipal budget might do the party rank-and-file some good!
OK, so you asked for someone who wrote a dissertation on this, and I almost sort of did, and started putting some of it in my own substack, but it got really long so it's going to be in multiple parts. But here's part 1 which just addresses the main question: why do Democrats dominate the cities.
https://sabrdance.substack.com/p/this-town-aint-big-enough-for-the
After 52 years in or consulting with local governments, I have one experience-based conclusion: Nonpartisan local governments function best. As with every human institution, there are exceptions, but I haven't seen many. This doesn't mean that some partisan local governments aren't great. There are places where one-party hegemony results in good local government.
Instead of furthering partisanship (which is working so well at the state and national levels these days) perhaps we should be asking ourselves if trying to frame every problem in binary terms makes any sense at all.
I appreciate your footnote - which I see as supporting my point -suggesting that ideologues (of whatever stripe) ought to have to take the calls about the potholes, the lights left on at the ballpark, the stray dogs, speeding in the school zone, etc. I have worked for some very effective local officials and none of them were visibly partisan outside their elected position. Ideology and problem-solving don't come in the same package.