{UAH} 2020 ELECTION HANDS REPUBLICANS AN OPENING IN URBAN CENTERS

2020 results give the GOP an opening in cities

by Kristen Soltis Anderson, Contributor 

 

December 03, 2020 12:00 AM

 

Cities have long been Democratic strongholds. Today, Democrats are mayors in 63 of the 100 largest cities in America. Of the 20 largest cities, only four have Republican mayors.

And cities are having a tough time in 2020. Cities across the country saw looting and fires caused by those taking advantage of the moment, and in two extreme examples, Portland and Seattle saw portions of the city taken over and turned into “autonomous zones,” with deadly consequences. Earlier this week, heartbreaking crime statistics out of Minneapolis showed carjackings are up over 500% in the city since last year. After being at the center of protests over the death of George Floyd, local officials in Minneapolis initially voted to “defund the police” and shifted $1.1 million in police funding to “violence interrupters.” Add into this a pandemic that has shuttered schools and supercharged massive fiscal crises, and you have a recipe for unbelievably tough times ahead.

So, in a year when there has been a great deal of focus on the massive political swing of suburbs, I find the story of our cities, so rocked by turmoil this year, to be just as fascinating.

While the two competing exit polls tell different stories about what happened in the 2020 election, actual vote data is our most useful guide in the near term to understand voting shifts. In state after state, the political maps that tell us the most about what happened this November, maps that show changes in voting behavior geographically, all show the suburbs that ring large cities turning deeper blue. But the core, downtown areas in many of these metro areas (already largely Democratic strongholds) did not see the same sort of shifts and, if anything, swung ever so slightly back toward Republicans.

My favorite of these is a map by the team at the New York Times’s Upshot that looks precinct by precinct across Georgia, not just at how each precinct voted, but how each precinct behaved relative to the prior presidential election. If you look purely at results by precinct, you see dark blue dots in a sea of red: cities and their surrounding suburbs breaking blue, with rural Georgia breaking red.

But when the map changes from looking at pure results to looking at the change compared to 2016, a different picture emerges. Suddenly, the blue dots look more like blue donuts. The Democratic stronghold of Atlanta suddenly hollows out, with the enormous suburban swing toward Democrats coming into sharp relief even as the center of Atlanta itself looks a pale pink, with precinct after precinct downtown giving Trump a better result than he saw four years earlier.

It isn’t just downtown Atlanta where Trump held steady or fared slightly better than he did in 2016. In Philadelphia County, he won 18% of the vote, up slightly from 15.5% four years earlier. In major cities across the country, some of the very counties where the Trump campaign is suing over results are places where he won a greater share of votes than he did last time. For instance, in the city of Detroit, Trump only received 7,682 votes in 2016 but grew that number to 12,654 in 2020, even as Biden got about a thousand votes fewer than Hillary Clinton had.

Even big cities outside the key swing states got in on the trend; Trump won 1 in 4 voters in Cook County, Illinois, up from 21.4% in 2016, and improved by 2 to 3 points in many of Chicago’s majority-black wards. And with results from New York City only finally being released nearly a month after Election Day, Trump is on track not only to win more votes in New York in 2020 but to make a notable improvement in parts of the city that are more diverse and working class.

Some of this improvement came at the expense of third parties, not the Democratic vote share, and Republicans should not celebrate too greatly about increasing the vote share from the low single digits to the high single digits.

But cities are in need of bold leadership that isn’t afraid to do things differently. I conducted a survey for the conservative Manhattan Institute earlier this year that found New Yorkers were most focused on issues such as the economy and public safety and open to things such as school choice and reduced spending instead of raising taxes to address budget shortfalls. People in these cities may be looking for leaders who can balance budgets, give children the educational opportunities they need and deserve, and keep people safe.

For a long time, voters in major urban areas have turned to Democrats to lead. But after a tough 2020, there may be an opening for a different approach. The Right would be wise to offer its own.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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