With a population of nearly 1 million, Jacksonville, Fla., is the 12th-largest city in America, bigger than San Francisco, Seattle or Boston. It’s also the biggest city with a Republican mayor, but not for long: In Tuesday’s election, Democrat Donna Deegan defeated Republican Daniel Davis, an ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Once Deegan takes office, only one of our 20 largest cities (Fort Worth) will be run by a Republican. Republicans also lost the mayor’s office in famously conservative Colorado Springs.
Is this producing soul-searching on the part of the GOP? Are Republicans asking themselves how and why they’re alienating urban Americans, or what they might do to reverse their poor performance in cities?
No. Instead, they are moving in the opposite direction: They’re escalating their political war on cities. They’re using the place where they have the most power — state legislatures — to exercise a kind of colonial control over urban America.
ADVERTISING
Republicans are doing this via “preemption,” whereby state governments enact laws that tie the hands of counties and cities. While preemption can happen in both liberal and conservative directions, these days it’s usually Republican state legislatures imposing their will on liberal cities, preventing them from passing their own laws to regulate commerce, politics and social life. This is possible because every red state contains blue cities, often many of them.
In Texas, the Republican-controlled legislature has passed a sweeping bill that represents the state of the art in “preemption.” The bill heading to the desk of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott would limit state and county governments from passing any ordinance more restrictive than state law in a wide variety of areas, from labor rights to property rights to payday lending and puppy mills. The Senate sponsor of the bill says it’s meant to rein in “activist cities.”
“This is a power play by the state leaders to take control of cities and become the de facto mayors and city councils,” Luis Figueroa, the chief of legislative affairs at the progressive policy group Every Texan, told me. If cities want to regulate in a whole range of areas, Figueroa said, cities “will now have to go to the legislature and ask permission.”
Though Texas is moving in the Democrats’ direction as it diversifies, Republicans have gerrymandered their way into ironclad control of the legislature. Yet most of the state’s biggest cities are run by Democrats, which seems to frustrate Republicans to no end. They have introduced numerous bills that take power specifically from Harris County, the home of Houston, the state’s largest city.
In the past year, about 600 preemption bills have been introduced in state legislatures around the country, according to the National League of Cities, on such hot-button issues as classroom discussion of race and on less headline-grabbing topics such as rules on evictions. Florida has been the most aggressive state in preempting local regulations, with Texas not far behind.
In Mississippi, the state essentially took over policing and judicial functions in the city of Jackson, over the objections of the city’s leadership. Oklahoma passed a bill banning cities from limiting “internal combustion engines and gas-fueled stoves.” Florida Republicans seized cities’ power to make rules on housing and development, the latest in years’ worth of preemption laws in the state on topics such as guns and labor rights.
This state-level policy battle is unfolding in the context of a national anti-urban culture war being waged across conservative media and by conservative politicians. Fox News doles out a regular diet of horror stories about “crime-ridden cities” awash in blood and chaos. Gun advocates whip up fear of racially diverse cities as the source of danger and death. These supposed wastelands of misery are the result of liberal policies, or, as Tucker Carlson puts it, “The left’s ideology destroyed America’s cities.”
All this is happening while Democrats bend over backward to provide support to rural America, while being constantly scolded for “abandoning” rural citizens and not seeking their votes. In fact, it’s Republicans who have not just abandoned a large swath of the country but also are openly hostile toward it.
But if the GOP’s continued electoral losses in U.S. cities are any indication, waging war on these dynamic and fast-growing regions is probably not as clever as Republicans think.
Once Deegan takes office, only one of our 20 largest cities (Fort Worth) will be run by a Republican. Republicans also lost the mayor’s office in famously conservative Colorado Springs.
Is this producing soul-searching on the part of the GOP? Are Republicans asking themselves how and why they’re alienating urban Americans, or what they might do to reverse their poor performance in cities?
No. Instead, they are moving in the opposite direction: They’re escalating their political war on cities. They’re using the place where they have the most power — state legislatures — to exercise a kind of colonial control over urban America.
ADVERTISING
Republicans are doing this via “preemption,” whereby state governments enact laws that tie the hands of counties and cities. While preemption can happen in both liberal and conservative directions, these days it’s usually Republican state legislatures imposing their will on liberal cities, preventing them from passing their own laws to regulate commerce, politics and social life. This is possible because every red state contains blue cities, often many of them.
In Texas, the Republican-controlled legislature has passed a sweeping bill that represents the state of the art in “preemption.” The bill heading to the desk of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott would limit state and county governments from passing any ordinance more restrictive than state law in a wide variety of areas, from labor rights to property rights to payday lending and puppy mills. The Senate sponsor of the bill says it’s meant to rein in “activist cities.”
“This is a power play by the state leaders to take control of cities and become the de facto mayors and city councils,” Luis Figueroa, the chief of legislative affairs at the progressive policy group Every Texan, told me. If cities want to regulate in a whole range of areas, Figueroa said, cities “will now have to go to the legislature and ask permission.”
Though Texas is moving in the Democrats’ direction as it diversifies, Republicans have gerrymandered their way into ironclad control of the legislature. Yet most of the state’s biggest cities are run by Democrats, which seems to frustrate Republicans to no end. They have introduced numerous bills that take power specifically from Harris County, the home of Houston, the state’s largest city.
In the past year, about 600 preemption bills have been introduced in state legislatures around the country, according to the National League of Cities, on such hot-button issues as classroom discussion of race and on less headline-grabbing topics such as rules on evictions. Florida has been the most aggressive state in preempting local regulations, with Texas not far behind.
In Mississippi, the state essentially took over policing and judicial functions in the city of Jackson, over the objections of the city’s leadership. Oklahoma passed a bill banning cities from limiting “internal combustion engines and gas-fueled stoves.” Florida Republicans seized cities’ power to make rules on housing and development, the latest in years’ worth of preemption laws in the state on topics such as guns and labor rights.
This state-level policy battle is unfolding in the context of a national anti-urban culture war being waged across conservative media and by conservative politicians. Fox News doles out a regular diet of horror stories about “crime-ridden cities” awash in blood and chaos. Gun advocates whip up fear of racially diverse cities as the source of danger and death. These supposed wastelands of misery are the result of liberal policies, or, as Tucker Carlson puts it, “The left’s ideology destroyed America’s cities.”
All this is happening while Democrats bend over backward to provide support to rural America, while being constantly scolded for “abandoning” rural citizens and not seeking their votes. In fact, it’s Republicans who have not just abandoned a large swath of the country but also are openly hostile toward it.
But if the GOP’s continued electoral losses in U.S. cities are any indication, waging war on these dynamic and fast-growing regions is probably not as clever as Republicans think.
