The worst of the worst, utter incompetence will lead to bankruptcy and soon thereafter the de-chartering of these once great cities

Steven Malanga
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: the Failing-Mayors Trifecta

The dysfunctional politics of America’s three largest cities have produced elected leaders wildly unpopular with their own voters. What went wrong?


Has there been a time in recent memory when the mayors of America’s biggest cities are as collectively unpopular as they are right now? Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and Eric Adams in New York are all in their first terms, yet in their short time in office they have squandered so much of the support that got them elected that they now sport disapproval ratings that would have made President Biden blush. Bass and Johnson already face recall efforts, and the leaders of New York’s city council have discussed how they might remove Adams from office amid his legal troubles. Though their circumstances differ, the three mayors are alike in one key respect: they were elected in one-party progressive towns where reform has become increasingly difficult because large groups of citizens vote based on demographic categories like race, ethnicity, or gender, and then discover that they don’t like the results of the policies they chose. What, if anything, will voters learn from these mayors’ failures?

Of the three, Johnson won his position most recently, in an April 2023 election that saw voters dump incumbent Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot. She had angered voters by failing to stem rising crime, for the mounting social disorder in highly visible settings like Michigan Avenue (Chicago’s Magnificent Mile), and for her failure to reopen the city’s public schools after the teachers’ union helped shut them down for extended periods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lightfoot lost in the initial round of Chicago’s 2023 mayoral race, becoming the city’s first mayor in 30 years not to win reelection.

Johnson was an unlikely candidate to succeed Lightfoot, with crime ranking overwhelmingly as voters' top concern. A progressive former teachers’ union organizer who became a county commissioner with backing from the union, Johnson was a Chicago Police Department critic and branded as “racist” some of its crime-fighting strategies, including the ShotSpotter system for detecting gunshots. His progressive plan for addressing crime included erasing a gang database (he considered it discriminatory) and starting a “treatment not trauma” program that uses non-police personnel to respond to some emergencies. He also proposed raising taxes to fund “restorative justice” social programs in the city’s schools as a way of cutting youth violence. And he backed President Biden’s border surge, pledged to keep Chicago a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants, and even proposed establishing an Office of Migrant Protection. By contrast, Johnson’s chief opponent, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, preached a tough-on-crime agenda that included hiring some 700 new cops.

Johnson won narrowly. He took 88 percent of the black vote, but what sealed his victory was his corralling of 34 percent of white voters, in part by winning among whites in gentrified areas, according to an analysis by the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Since then, Johnson’s tenure has been entirely in keeping with his campaign. His “restorative justice” and various other interventions have failed to make a significant impact on crime. He shut down the gunshot-detection system, a decision for which he’s been widely criticized. He’s advocated borrowing $300 million to support a schools budget that gives big raises to teachers. Soon after taking office, he allocated $51 million of the strapped city’s resources to services for the migrants flooding into the city. His decision to turn local hotels into migrant shelters brought sharp blowback from the communities that voted for him. “You’ve got 73 percent of the people homeless in this city are black people,” one woman said at a community meeting. “What have you done for them?”

The result: by November of last year, just 18 months after Johnson’s election, a poll showed that just 14 percent of Chicagoans approved of the job he is doing. That’s the lowest approval rating on record for a Windy City mayor. Now residents are exploringhow they might change state law to recall Johnson.

As in Chicago, crime was overwhelmingly the most important issue in New York’s 2021 mayoral election. A former captain in the New York Police Department who had entered politics 15 years earlier, Eric Adams centered his campaign on reducing crime and talked tougher on the issue than many of the other candidates in the Democratic primary. (He even expressed support for the controversial policing policy known as “stop and frisk,” though some cops were skeptical of his enthusiasm for crime fighting.) Though Adams got just 30 percent of the vote in the first round of the city’s ranked-choice Democratic primary, by the time counting was done he had squeaked by former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia with 51 percent of the vote. Crucially, polls showed he won more than four times the backing from black voters as any other candidate in the primary. In November, he easily defeated Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa in heavily Democratic New York.

From there, it’s largely been downhill. Though Adams has notched a few victories, such as declines in homicides, other crimes rates have risen. In a Manhattan Institute poll last April, crime remained New Yorkers’ top concern, with 62 percent saying that the city was less safe than four years ago. New Yorkers also scorched Adams for his handling of the migrant crisis, with more than half saying they disapproved of his handing out debit cards to illegals to pay for services. Even most Democrats said that under Adams the city was headed in the wrong direction. Since then, Adams has also been indicted on federal bribery and corruption charges. Though he has promised to fight the charges, one recent poll found just 8 percent of Democrats would back him in a primary.

Like New York City, the Los Angeles 2022 mayoral race began with a crowded field of 12 candidates on the ballot for a nonpartisan election to succeed the term-limited Eric Garcetti. Karen Bass, a congresswoman representing Los Angeles County, stood out with a series of high-profile endorsements, including former California senator Barbara Boxer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a cluster of entertainment-industry glitterati such as Jane Fonda, Norman Lear, Steven Spielberg, and former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner. After she entered a run-off with real-estate developer Rick Caruso, Bass also boasted endorsements from Barack Obama, President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who traveled to Los Angeles to campaign for her (Sanders had also traveled to Chicago to support Johnson).

Bass focused on addressing homelessness—the leading priority among voters—pledging to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build new affordable housing. In polls, voters gave her the edge in fixing that problem; they rated Caruso stronger on crime. Bass won a convincing but not overwhelming victory against Caruso, a former Republican turned Democrat, by garnering about two-thirds of her party’s vote. Pre-election polls showed her winning two-thirds of the black vote and, significantly, about six in ten white votes in the liberal city. By contrast, Caruso garnered support from a majority of Hispanic voters. Bass’s victory was hailed as historic because she became the first woman elected the city’s mayor.

But even before the Los Angeles wildfires, Angelenos had begun to sour on her leadership. In an April poll last year, residents’ satisfaction with local quality of life had shrunk to its lowest level on record. Pointedly, 60 percent of those polled said that homelessness—the issue on which voters gave her the advantage over Caruso—was getting worse. Only 42 percent had a favorable rating of Bass. Around that time, Bass faced strong criticism of her handling of the city’s budget—the result of an unanticipated fiscal emergency triggered by the big pay raises she handed out to city workers. This led to widespread cuts in city agencies that, critics noted, would hamper the city’s ability to improve quality of life. The cuts included now-infamous reductions in the city’s fire department budget, contributing to the city’s lack of preparedness to fight wildfires. A memo composed by the fire chief prior to the wildfires warned of “unprecedented operational challenges” due to cuts affecting the department’s “capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, hazardous material incidents, and large public events.” Bass, who was also denounced for traveling to Ghana despite warnings from the National Weather Service of potential wildfires in L.A., now faces a recall effort that’s gathered more than 150,000 signatures.

Though Democratic politics have dominated many large American cities for decades, it wasn’t so long ago that a true diversity of ideas made reform possible. Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg won five successive elections in New York City on Republican and independent lines; on their watch, the city improved consistently for more than 20 years. Republican Richard Riordan won the Los Angeles mayoralty and served two terms in the 1990s, lowering crime and leaving the city “a better place,” as even those who disagreed with him attested. Today, however, the crowded mayoral fields in these cities are dominated by progressive politicians preaching variations on the same ineffective policies. What else could account for why Chicago voters, who named crime as their primary concern, opted for Brandon Johnson?

It’s one thing for voters to say they disapprove of the performance of someone for whom they voted. It’s quite another for them to decide that next time they’ll choose someone with different ideas. Until that day comes, change will remain impossible in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

The entity known as the city of Chicago will disappear and be replaced by metropolitan government. The populations Los Angeles and New York will shrink as its inhabitants are forced to migrate to less dense and more manageable locales.