“As you go from the center of cities out through the suburbs and into rural areas, you traverse in a linear fashion from Democratic to Republican places,” observed Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political scientist. According to an estimate from Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution, the electorate is typically equal parts Democrat and Republican at about 900 people per square mile. The exact number is higher in more Republican and lower in more Democratic states, but majorities tend to flip from blue to red roughly where commuter suburbs give way to “exurban” sprawl. [...]
Higher population density doesn’t just predict higher Democratic vote share. It also predicts a less white population and a better-educated, higher-skilled, higher-productivity work force. Immigrants and minorities have long congregated in big cities, attracted by the opportunities, services and safety in numbers they supply. [...]
Institutionalized cruelty and systematic fear are precisely what the Trump presidency, and the rigged political system that made it possible, have brought us. The administration’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown has separated thousands of parents from their children, inflicting unspeakable grief and permanent trauma to deter “improper entry,” a misdemeanor of no more gravity than “disorderly conduct.” Many of Mr. Trump’s victims are asylum seekers who have trekked thousands of miles to protect their children from sexual violence and gang conscription, only to have their extraordinary fortitude and love rewarded with sadistic abuse justified by a fake immigration crisis spoken into being through dehumanizing lies. [...]
But cities have few such rights with respect to their state governments. Instead, a wave of Republican states have used “pre-emption” as a tool of control over Democratic municipal authority. Red states have banned their blue cities’ sanctuary policies, minimum-wage hikes and civil rights protections for their gay, lesbian and transgender residents. Democratic state legislatures and big-city mayors should fight back, pressing for statutes and state constitutional amendments that would strengthen municipal “home rule” rights and embody new federalist principles of city-state power sharing.
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