To build liberal electorates, Democrats need to make room for more urban voters

Democrats reeling from their narrow electoral loss in 2024 have turned to many explanations, and also point to some worrying trends. The rising Latino share of the nation's voting population has long been a beacon of hope for the future of the party, offering a future where a much smaller white plurality no longer holds so much electoral power. Donald Trump's ability to make substantial inroads with Latinos, and outright win Latino men as a bloc, casts a serious doubt on this hope. However, there is a demographic trend much more in our control: the split between urban and rural populations. More than sex, age, income, or any ethnic or racial marker besides being Black, one's residence in a city strongly predicted a vote for Kamala Harris, and residence in a rural area predicted a vote for Donald Trump.

For students of liberal history, this should come as no surprise. In his account of libel evolution in 1911, LT Hobhouse remarks on two distinct periods of urban ascendancy. First, the Classical city states, the poleis, marked for him a unique confluence of interests, including the necessary cooperation of various clans and tribes. The poleis experimented wit ha variety of what could be called constitutions, as liberals do today, but were undercut - fatally, in Hobhouse's view - by the distinction between slave and citizen. Later, medieval cities "by welcoming the fugitive serf and vindicating his freedom...contributed powerfully to the decline of the milder form of servitude". Even though only a tiny portion of the medieval population lived in cities, they were centers for science and philosophy and also, through their guild structures, a sort of politics at least somewhat legible to modern readers. But these too were limited, both by internal inequality and disagreement, and by the fact that each was " but an islet of relative freedom" surrounded by centralizing monarchical states that gradually eroded many of these urban rights.

While there have been notably liberal movements in the countryside since then, it seems accurate to say that on the greater strength of liberalism - economic as well as related to civil rights and liberties - has been found in cities. In the 20th century, close presidential races like 1948 and 1960 were largely decided on the basis of Democratic strength in New York and Chicago, while Republicans like Nixon's 1968 campaign have found success when rural and suburban areas manage to drown out cities like Cincinnati or Milwaukee.

The liberalism of urban areas is likely to some extent selection bias - conservatives choose to live in areas with less diversity of culture and gender expression and greater levels of social conformity, while liberals congregate to areas of greater tolerance and diversity. But I think there is more to it than that - just as the poleis or medieval towns allowed for and indeed necessitated new forms of political cooperation, modern American cities introduce all kinds of people to one another at much greater physical proximity than less urbanized areas. Immigrants and native born Americans both live all over the country, in both rural agricultural areas and urban ones, but demagoguery designed to turn native born Americans against immigrants seems far more effective in the former. Years of casual interactions in stores and bars and ideally churches and schools help grow familiarity between groups. Moreover, cities generate a variety of jobs unconnected to natural resource extraction and benefitting from agglomeration effects, while in many rural areas additional population is seen as competing for what local resources (including pristine landscapes, or legacy capital like power plants and sawmills) might form the basis of the economy. And finally, if global climate change ever takes anything like the prominent position it should have in American politics, rural economies are going to be much more difficult to decarbonized and thus are likely to react angrily to any kind of mitigation efforts - as we've already seen with rural protests in Europe.

Unfortunately for Democrats' electoral chances as well as American liberal values as a whole, Americans themselves are abandoning cities. This trend has only accelerated since the pandemic - particularly among young families. What growth cities are seeing is usually driven by immigration from other countries - a powerful economic engine, of course, but one which adds relatively fewer voter to the urban ranks, as many of those immigrants will not be eligible for citizenship for years, if ever.

There are of course several reasons for this, and the pandemic cannot be discounted as a major one. However, a persistent issue is the relative lack of housing in urban centers, which drives up housing prices on a square foot basis and makes family life near impossible.

Ideally, this could be addressed by federal investment, both in new housing (this will require some legislative changes) and in transportation to make more of the city accessible to commuters. However, the incoming administration is extremely unlikely to take these kinds of steps, and so urban areas will have to make due with what resources they have on their own. Fortunately, those resources are also extensive. One is simply the powerful force of the housing market itself: allowed to invest in multi-family housing, developers will do so, allowing more people to move into cities and stabilizing prices. This strategy has long been doubted, but recent results, especially in places like Austin, Texas and Oakland, California, have born out its viability.

The other step will be finding ways to fund the investment needed to grow and serve urban populations. This will be needed not only to begin new projects, but to replace any fund the president withholds from cities, as he has threatened in the past to do to cities that do not cooperate with mass deportation and other presidential priorities. The ideal tax base for such funding comes from land value taxes. Unlike traditional property taxes, land value taxes (assessed as some percentage of the rental or sale value of land of unimproved land in a given location) does not create a disincentive for building, since the taxable value of an empty lot is the same as that for a home or a high rise. Furthermore, land value cannot flee the city; if some landholders sell, it merely frees up land for other residents (and in most cities there will be ready buyers). This makes it a more localizable tax than a local income or sales tax, both of which can be avoided to some extent by domiciling or doing business outside city limits.

Armed with steady tax revenue and a determination to embrace new residents, cities can once again stand out as bastions of relative freedom in a sea of reactionary national politics. More than this, though, functional cities can hope to bring together very different people and demonstrate to the rest of the country the folly of Trump's divisive rhetoric - or, barring that, at least flex their electoral muscles to have a more divisive impact on the next presidential election.