Why Republicans Don’t Even Try to Win Cities Anymore

Ronald Reagan visited the South Bronx in the summer of 1980, when Charlotte Street was still lined with vacant lots and the rubble of toppling tenements. The place looked like London after the blitz, he said, and he wanted to do something about it.

The Republican candidate for president that year, Mr. Reagan wasn’t merely mugging for the kind of photo op that unnerves white suburban voters. Earlier that day, he spoke to the National Urban League in New York. Then he flew to Chicago to meet with the editors of Ebony and Jet magazines, pillars of the black press, and Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader.

He wasn’t always greeted warmly, but it was the kind of campaign itinerary that’s hard to imagine a Republican presidential candidate even contemplating in 2016. Mr. Reagan believed he could make a genuine play for urban voters in 1980. Today, his party has all but conceded them.

Only three of the 25 largest cities in America now have Republican mayors. In the House of Representatives, Republicans from dense urban congressional districts have become extinct. In the 2012 presidential election, the counties containing Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Washington, San Francisco and Philadelphia each gave less than 20 percent of their vote to Mitt Romney. In this coming election, Donald J. Trump is unlikely to do better — and may fare worse.

Even as much else about this election feels unprecedented, America’s urban-rural divide will be as strong as ever, continuing a decadeslong process in which the two parties have sorted themselves ever more clearly by population density.

The history of how the G.O.P. got here is partly about the ideological realignment of the two parties, and the disappearance of liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits, a senator from New York State, and John Lindsay, a mayor of New York City (a Republican who left the party, he said, when it left him). The party even moved away from conservative Republicans like Jack Kemp, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the George H.W. Bush administration, who spoke often about urban opportunity. But this history is also about the physical realignment of voters, as the rise of suburbia enabled Democrats and Republicans to move, literally, farther apart.

One Word: Race

In 1966, white voters in Chicago who’d long supported the city’s Democratic machine began to bolt for the Republican Party. They were alarmed by urban riots, by civil rights legislation in Congress and — much closer to home — by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign in Chicago that year for “open housing.”

Pamphlets soon began to appear on the stoops of the city’s middle-class bungalows: “Your Home is your castle — Keep it that way by Voting STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN.” This was the summer, the historian Rick Perlstein writes in his book “Nixonland,” when the party of Lincoln changed its mind.

Those newly converted Republicans in Chicago voted in 1968 for Richard Nixon. “But these were the people,” Mr. Perlstein said in an interview, “who largely would have left the city within 10 years.”

Those Chicago voters embody both trends — party realignment and white flight — that have remade political geography since then. In the 1950s, in presidential election results compiled by the Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, a county’s population density was a poor predictor of how its residents voted. Today, the pattern is remarkably consistent: The denser the county, the more overwhelmingly its residents vote Democratic.

“This story could be written in one word,” Mr. Perlstein said of that historical arc. “The one word would be ‘race.’ ”

In the early days of white flight, two federal policies — the construction of the interstate highway system and mortgage guarantees for the new suburbs — pulled whites out of cities even as they were getting pushed by racial tension, desegregation and school busing.

“The people who go to the suburbs are not a random selection,” said Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced. They were the middle and upper class. They became homeowners. They prized neighborhoods of single-family houses. Those characteristics today all correlate with leaning Republican. “These population shifts happen for reasons that are external to politics,” Ms. Trounstine said, “but politics is embedded in who goes.”

In many ways, it was becoming clearer over this time what each party stood for, whether on race or cultural cleavages or transportation or poverty. The basic party infrastructure Republicans would need to win in cities, at any level, disintegrated. Even the average congressional district held by Republicans today has a quarter of the population density it did in 1950.

As they have had less to say to cities, Republicans have come to talk, instead, about them.

Density Defines

The approaching election will look no different. Hillary Clinton’s strongest base of support — where adults surveyed by Gallup are most likely to say they hold favorable views of her — is in the densest counties. Mr. Trump fares the best in the sparsest places.

The anti-city strategy holds up today only because Democrats, with their tight clusters of urban support, are at a structural disadvantage in Congress.

“One of the most important implications of all this is that ignoring cities can be a winning strategy in House races,” Mr. Rodden said. “The mix of positions that the Republicans have taken has served them really well in winning the House. But it’s not working out so well in presidential elections.”

The seemingly cynical solution is to count on low turnout among urban voters. The alternative is to compete for them.

“If you compete in cities, you don’t have to win in them,” said Thomas Ogorzalek, a political scientist at Northwestern. “If you go 70-30 in Chicago, instead of 90-10 like Trump is going to do, you can win Illinois. That’s not a bad strategy.”

Mr. Goldsmith, the former Republican mayor of Indianapolis, says the idea isn’t far-fetched. Picture a Republican who runs on effective government instead of against government: a Michael Bloomberg type minus the nanny-state laws. Or a school-choice advocate, but not a culture warrior. Or someone who talks about crime without caricaturing the communities that confront the worst of it.

“I think that would work for a Republican candidate, if they could get nominated,” Mr. Goldsmith said. And cities short on conservative policy ideas would be better for it, he added.

The question, though, is what Republicans would lose if they tried. What if they didn’t evoke urban iniquity to excite exurban voters, or if they toned down the values overtures that play well in Utah?

Electoral necessity will demand at least a new round of Republican soul searching.

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