New York City’s imminent Democratic primary on June 24th, which is most likely to select the next mayor of the city, and features a cast of borderline criminals, progressive grandstanders, and city government careerists and apparatchiks, has got me thinking. Why do America’s biggest cities have terrible mayors? The ultra-partisan answer is that America’s big cities are Democrat-run, and the Democratic Party is traditionally more focused on big national legislation than on governance, administration, or executive leadership. But that answer doesn’t strike me as fully explanatory: there are structural reasons why urban voters in the United States must choose between transparently terrible candidates.
Urban dysfunction is a failure of professional class incentives and party machinery that mistake symbolic performance for potential competence. NYC’s entrenched machine politics, for instance, prioritizes loyalty and connections over competence, while campaign finance systems that appear to be democratizing still put candidates’ name recognition before fresh talent and perspective (Andrew Cuomo is the most painfully obvious example). Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, across the country, has become shrill and performative, rewarding candidates who can deliver the most dramatic progressive rhetoric rather than those who can manage budgets, coordinate services, and solve practical problems, or even develop a consistent, unifying message.
The Democratic Party has become shrill and performative, rewarding candidates who can deliver the most dramatic progressive rhetoric rather than those who can solve practical problems.
In Chicago, Brandon Johnson’s approval rating has been below 15% (14% as of January 2025). Los Angeles’s Karen Bass has watched her city burn (twice now). Michelle Wu’s progressive policies in Boston—particularly her sanctuary city stance—have put her at odds with the city’s business leaders, and her reelection campaign against Josh Kraft has grown contentious as a result, even though she is likely to win re-election. Portland is experiencing civilian flight and depopulation (though recent efforts to increase police staffing and implement data-driven crime reduction strategies have shown some positive effects). Seattle is grappling with budget reallocations (cuts to police and human services), ongoing housing policy battles over zoning and rent control, and increasing tension between a ideological progressive city council and the more pragmatic Mayor Bruce Harrell, who has pushed for a public safety agenda and a rollback of some earlier left-wing initiatives.
At this point in the 2020s, Democrat mayors seem corrupt and incompetent (as the response to the LA and Chicago riots is making clear). But the issue isn’t that we’re getting Democrats per se, it’s that the party itself has been selecting for most partisan, most bought, most insider Democrats, while talent moulders (Zohran Mamdani’s relative success in his candidacy for NYC mayor is proof that there is an immense hunger for earnestness, youth, and authenticity); and equally, that most big cities do not have meaningful opposition parties: so the Democrats face little pressure to promote candidates who can pass the test of a competitive election. Cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and LA have ultra-high concentrations of talented and able Americans, but politics doesn’t attract that talent; local public service seems to attract sociopaths who seek a path for self-advancement.
Why? I would suggest that the concentration of professional political operatives—people working in and for politics, messaging, consulting, and the broader professional-managerial class—in cities like L.A., Chicago, San Francisco, New York, or Boston (or indeed Philadelphia, D.C., and Atlanta) creates a filter through which it’s very hard for non-neurotic, non-careerist potential politicians to pass; too many professional political operatives control practical access to city politics. You have to run their playbook to run for office and have to be willing to play dirty. City politics is arcane, complex, and in many ways captured by an insider class. Because there are so many better, higher-paying jobs available, we end up with a mixture of career insiders like Lander, Cuomo, or Stringer, or Democratic Socialists like Mamdani, who run on slogans and “visions”.
City politics is arcane, complex, and in many ways captured by an insider class.
Some of Mamdani’s major talking points and policy proposals are vague and poorly thought through. Free citywide buses seem like a fair reward for hard working citizens, but bus fares are a basic check against vagrancy on buses. I’m not sure bus drivers want to lose a legal control point for who gets on. Again, low-cost grocery stores run by the city are possible—but it’s unclear how these stores would be implemented: whether they’d be built on existing city-owned property, or if the city would need to acquire property or leases; whether they’d be unionized; whether they’d be competitive with existing social welfare options; and whether cheaper, healthier groceries would go to the people who need them most.
Mamdani also talks about the price of housing and food scarcity in New York’s school-age population, but rent-control laws like the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA)—though they undeniably strengthen tenant security—tend to reduce the supply of available housing, creating perverse incentives for landlords to keep units off-market. And while New York City’s schoolchildren deserve much healthier and more nutritious meals, it’s hard to imagine city-run initiatives fully mastering the supply chains—procurement, storage, preparation, equitable distribution of fresh food—when the DOE already moves about 230 million meals a year and only ~60 percent of school kitchens can cook from scratch; a school-meals fix therefore need not entail a Soviet-sized food bureaucracy but rather focused kitchen upgrades and the use of Albany’s “30 % NY-grown” reimbursement bonus.
Progressive campaigns just haven’t resulted in good governance. I’d like to believe that Mamdani is the exception, but I’m skeptical. Career hack Andrew Cuomo doesn’t deserve his pole position, which is based on name recognition and the deep roots of the Cuomo machine that is nested inside the larger Democratic machine. Cuomo’s campaign handlers don’t want to let him speak publicly—and for good reason. Cuomo is just a free floating signifier whose brand pays the salaries of PMC operatives. They want him to run so they can get paid. And yet, Cuomo’s track record on COVID politics, when he mashed emergency laws like video game buttons, should disqualify him from citywide office.
America’s cities deserve better. Bad urban governance is one of the major reasons Americans are feeling pessimistic right now (many New Yorkers are just happy that Eric Adams has managed to increase the number of not-overflowing trash cans on city streets–having learned to expect that nothing will get better, only worse). Granular increases and declines in quality of life have massive second order, holistic effects.
So I think cities would do well to adopt two basic filters, or radical changes, to the process of electing mayors.
Cities would do well to adopt two basic filters, or radical changes, to the process of electing mayors.
One, raise executive salaries to competitive levels—levels competitive with corporate executives or near enough to draw talent and competence—but let voters, not bureaucrats, select thresholds for the mayor’s paycheck on the same ballot that chooses the candidate. If pay now flows from a collective verdict, candidates must persuade the electorate that their track record and plan justify the figure; compensation becomes a referendum on trust and results. When an incumbent runs again, voters revisit the same mayor’s pay, and, if the mayor has actually delivered, the public can reward that record by raising the candidate’s pay, or signal disappointment by sliding the pay back down. This provides a mechanism, I think, for voters to say: “you’re the best choice we have right now, but you’re not doing a good enough job”. This system also creates a stronger accountability loop: the paycheck is re-negotiated in public, the campaign narrative shifts from party politics to concrete deliverables (“Did the streets get cleaner, did crime fall, did housing approvals speed up?”).
Second: cities should employ a system whereby two mayoral spots on the ballot are reserved for ordinary residents who volunteer, clear a simple eligibility screen, and are then chosen by public lottery. Each citizen-slot entrant receives the same public campaign grant which the top-funded insider would get, and a place in any debates, guaranteeing real exposure and a fair fight. These candidates would be a public option hedge against insiders.
Finally, urban civic pragmatism does not have to be expressed in technocratic terms. There’s a rich tradition from Lewis Mumford to Jane Jacobs to Christopher Alexander that champions human-scale governance: cities designed around what works for residents rather than theories of political economy or bureaucratic efficiency. Good city policy should feel intuitive and responsive to human needs, not require specialized knowledge to navigate or understand; city bureaucracies must serve and not be served. If incentives were structured along the lines I’ve suggested above, then it’s possible that mayors themselves would finally start to govern in the human-scaled ways that voters reward, and that pull creative, original political souls into the political arena and off the sidelines.
