I don’t know what will happen in Los Angeles between now and November — don’t know whether Raman can actually close the gap with Karen Bass and win a runoff in which no Republican candidates are present. But in head-to-head polls taken before the primary, Raman has bested Bass, and with Pratt out of the race, she has what looks to be a more natural, and commanding, lane to victory as a liberal-minded alternative to a tarnished status quo. And if Raman does prevail, it will mean that the three biggest cities in America will all be governed by leaders so progressive that they would have been national outliers in previous eras — as Boston and Seattle are today.
Not all of these mayors are the same, and neither are their cities, their ideological styles, their constituencies or governing challenges. But together they form a coherent portrait, in which many of the country’s largest and most visible cities are now high-stakes experiments in explicitly progressive governance, heralding a new era as striking as the years of Bloomberg-style centrism that spread across American cities beginning two decades ago. This was not what anyone outside of the Democratic Socialists of America would have predicted in 2022. So why, exactly, did it happen?
One answer is simply that cities are very liberal, by American standards, but while that’s true, it has been true for a while, and is somewhat less true at the moment (depending on how you read the results of the 2024 election, in which many cities swung at least a few points toward Trump). A related possibility is that the national Democratic Party has lurched leftward, so that the Overton window has moved, as well — though most observers would probably tell you that the party has moved to the right since Joe Biden’s election. And a third might be that cities are already responding to crime declines by spending that “peace dividend” on more expansive social spending — even if most of these races were fought in part over law and order, without much acknowledging how much better things seemed to be getting.
But another possibility is that the country’s overall vibe shift rightward has been overstated, particularly on social media, and that while the country did re-elect Trump in 2024, its cities were never actually heading to some dystopian right-wing future of rampant disinformation and fearmongering. Americans may also like the idea of sewer socialism at the local level, even if they’re not ready to elect warriors for Medicare for all to national office — perhaps particularly while Trump is president, with the liberals everywhere looking for leaders who announce themselves as fighters. And it may also be that certain drivers of so-called Gen Z socialism are especially pronounced in cities, where the cost of housing is most crisis-like, and where many professionals feel squeezed into natural ideological coalition with the urban working class. If politics is now about affordability, it may well be that voters in cities, at least, seem to prefer a progressive solution set to that challenge over anything being offered by the center-right.
But there is one last ingredient I would add to the list: It is in cities that voters most routinely encounter, and thereby come to value, public goods. Much of the American social fabric was torn up by the experience of the pandemic emergency, which prompted most of us to withdraw from one another, not to mention from collective experience and too often from mutual obligation and responsibility. That damage may have been most visible in cities, where there were fewer pedestrians and more obvious signs of social chaos, where the stores were all closed and the subways empty and the problem of homelessness and addiction more visible as a result. But the loss of those spaces, and of those experiences, also meant the most to cities and the people living in them, who didn’t want to live in permanent retreat from one another. In navigating back from that, they may have helped bring about a new political era for American cities.
