Atheists, agnostics, long-haired widows, short-haired widows, vandal,

gulagos.

I'm the government, hug the government, hug the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government.

Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy.

I'm Northern Kentucky University political scientist Michael

Baranowski. My guest today is Tim Murphy, a national correspondent at Mother Jones. Tim's written

a number of pieces on Zoran Mandami, the New York City mayoral race, and what it means not just for

America's largest city, but for American politics more generally, all of which we will be

discussing today. Tim, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I thought that before we

dove into the mayoral race, we could talk about Donald Trump, because there are definitely some

connections here. Specifically, I know you thought a lot about how he performed in the city in 2024 compared to his past presidential races and what's going on here. So could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I mean, I think when people looked at the presidential election results last November, you immediately look at the swing states. Donald Trump went seven for seven in those states. And obviously billions of dollars were spent to try and move voters. The reality is that the swing states were kind of a bit of an aberration. All of those campaign ads from Kamala Harris, they didn't fully work, but they kind of worked.

She actually overperformed in those states relative to the rest of the country.

The big story, other than the winner-loser, of what happened was what was happening in blue states and in blue cities.

The absolute nadir for democratic performance in 2024 was in New York City,

followed closely by places like Chicago, Los Angeles. What happened in New York was a kind of a

political earthquake. You know, Trump had improved this showing between 2016 and 2020,

and then the Republicans had done pretty well in New York

State and New York City in 2022. In 2024, the three biggest swings in the country at the congressional

level were all in New York City in the Bronx or Queens or both in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-District. All three of these districts

that I'm talking about shifted 22 points in their margin toward Donald Trump compared to 2020.

So this was Titanic shifts within the city. Trump picked up about a million vote.

Sorry, Trump picked up about 100,000 votes in the city overall compared to 2020.

...