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FiveThirtyEight Politics

How The Politics Of Cities Shape The Democratic Party

FiveThirtyEight Politics

ABC News

Politics, News

4.620.6K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2021

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2021, cities around the country are choosing mayors to try to lead them through a long list of challenges, both pre-existing and brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week, we began to explore the most high-profile of those mayoral contests -- the New York City Democratic primary. In this installment, we put that primary in context by looking more broadly at the relationship between urban centers and the Democratic Party. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drouk. Last week we started to take

0:13.6

a closer look at the New York City mayoral primary and we're going to continue that

0:18.1

coverage today. There's an assumption embedded in that primary that whoever wins is going

0:23.7

to become the next mayor of New York City and that's because New York is heavily democratic.

0:29.6

Many quarters of the city voted for President Biden in the 2020 election.

0:33.9

And New York isn't alone, of course. The Democratic Party dominates in cities large and small

0:39.7

across the country. While the Republican Party dominates in rural and exorbitary. That

0:45.4

dynamic is one of the most iron clad trends in American politics. Population density

0:51.1

can seem to trump just about everything. Today we're going to put the New York City primary

0:56.6

in context by looking more broadly at the relationship between urban centers and the Democratic Party.

1:03.4

Cities have huge concentrations of democratic figures. But what does that mean for the party

1:07.6

nationally and how will the race like the one in New York shape and be shaped by national

1:12.8

democratic politics? We've asked two experts to come on the show and help us answer those

1:17.6

questions. Both have done a lot of thinking on the past, present and future of urban political

1:23.3

power and what New York might pretend. To kick things off here with us is political

1:28.0

science professor at Stanford University, Jonathan Rodin. He's the author of the book, Why

1:33.3

Cities Lose, the deep roots of the urban rural political divide. Welcome to the podcast.

1:39.2

Thanks for having me. Nice to be here. I know that the answer to this question could and

1:44.5

has spanned an entire book. But we'll go broad and then we'll get into some of the details.

1:51.2

Why is democratic political power concentrated in cities? This is something that started around

1:58.5

the New Deal era when the Democrats became an urban party. Mainly as a function of trying

2:04.0

to mobilize urban, kind of densely populated working class of voters associated with labor

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