AMAC EXCLUSIVE
Looking at a political map of the U.S., the land mass is mostly red (Republican) with isolated islands of blue (Democrats) in urban centers, and a few blue blotches on the West Coast and the Northeast.
But there are heavy populations in the urban centers that match or exceed the numbers of voters in the rural areas and small towns, and this has helped Democrats to win the overall popular vote in every election since 2004, and win the Electoral College every cycle since then with the exception of 2016.
More than three years of the Biden presidency, and even more years of local “progressive” Democrat control, seem in 2024 to be provoking urban insurrections in many large cities which threaten to depress the Democrats’ usual heavy urban area turnout.
The New Deal era of U.S. politics (1933-81) created a government-subsidized public welfare culture that extended beyond the Depression era of the 1930s and World War II. Until the conservative Reagan era (1981-2013) began to reverse New Deal policies, both parties largely adhered to New Deal-style politics.
A more “progressive” post-New Deal program was revived after 2013 and continued at the local level even with Trump’s election in 2016. By the arrival of Joe Biden to the White House in 2021, social and economic policies had veered sharply to the left in cities as well as among Democrat lawmakers in Washington, D.C. But the inefficiency and failure of this political ideology was backfiring among those urban groups Democrats had targeted all those years, namely the urban poor and minority groups.
Much has recently been written by both Republican and Democrat strategists contending that the Democrats’ base of urban working class, black, and Hispanic voters is shrinking, and cite polls to support this. Primary voting so far also seems to reinforce this notion.
Virtually all key swing states in 2024 have at least one very large urban center with concentrations of black and Hispanic voters, and working-class voters in their adjacent suburbs.
Even only a relatively small percentage of this base shifting from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans or third party candidates — or not voting at all — would be electorally disastrous for the Democrats in 2024.
What exactly is provoking the movement of the Democrats’ base of urban voters away from the progressive party?
It is a combination of the Biden administration’s federal energy, regulatory, and environmental policies creating potential shortages, higher fuel costs, and increased consumer prices, along with local anti-police policies, reduced law enforcement and security protection, and higher local taxes and fees.
Democrat officials like to use “tax the rich” rhetoric, but their policies mostly hurt low-income citizens and urban minorities. When these policies begin to affect more affluent voters, they move out of the cities or high-tax states, as has been happening for decades in virtually all large cities and those states with punitive tax policies such as California, Minnesota, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York.
For many years, the social welfare programs of the Scandinavian nations were held up as an ideal and wave of the future. But those policies have proved to be failures, and have now been largely abandoned in those countries. More plainly socialist states in Europe, South and Central America, and Asia have also failed.
The ongoing implosion of urban public school education, and the very recent chaos on the campuses of so many prestigious colleges and universities, is also unsettling voters of all economic classes in urban and suburban locales. Parents, regardless of their financial resources, want their children to have a good education, but the breakdown of K-12 urban public schools and the reputational decline of so many colleges and universities, most of which are administered under progressive ideology, has caused many parents of all backgrounds to seek more secure and dependable alternatives.
All of these unfolding circumstances in the urban American environment pose an immediate problem for Democrats in 2024 in local, state, and national elections. While the establishment news media focuses on controversy, personalities, and sensational scandals —and polling which changes week to week — other forces are at work which will lead to the actual outcome less than six months from now.
