When it comes to the difficult issues of modern urban governance, it’s not hard to conclude that something is glaringly missing: a calm and rational Republican voice.
When the century began, half of America’s dozen largest cities had Republican mayors. Those days are over. Now, when the GOP is far more dominant nationally and in the states, there are hardly any Republican mayors left, at least in the big cities. Among the nation’s 32 largest cities, there are exactly three Republican mayors, all of them either in Texas or Oklahoma. The GOP has virtually disappeared as a source of moderate influence on the urban side of the ledger.
Zohran Mamdani, the highly progressive Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, is still being shunned even by some leaders of his own party. Yet there’s no chance that his Republican opponent will defeat him in November. In Pittsburgh, left-leaning Mayor Ed Gainey was defeated by Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor, a moderate who campaigned on fiscal and public safety issues, but O’Connor could only win running as a Democrat.
The election in Pittsburgh took place just a few weeks after voters in Omaha — one of the few moderately sized cities with a Republican mayor — turned her out of office. Jean Stothert, who had first come to office in 2013, was a relatively moderate Republican voice, but there just wasn’t enough GOP support within the city to maintain her in power.
Whatever you may think of these events, they are enough to recall the noteworthy Republican mayors of the past generation and the role they played in leavening American politics. Many of the most important new ideas in urban American government over the past half-century have come from the Republican side.
Actually, the legacy of innovative, articulate Republican mayors goes back a lot further than a single generation. At the turn of the 20th century, while the two parties were arguing over myriad policies in Washington, GOP leaders such as Hazen Pingree in Detroit and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones in Toledo established a record of progressive reform that forced itself into the national political debate. New York’s Fiorello LaGuardia, perhaps the nation’s greatest 20th-century mayor, was a staunch ally of President Franklin Roosevelt but he remained a Republican all his life.
In the later years of the last century, Indianapolis, a politically competitive city, had a series of remarkable Republican mayors who provided clear evidence of just what can be done with urban government from either side of the spectrum. Richard Lugar, mayor from 1968 to 1976, used his GOP allies in state government to push through a merger with Marion County that gave his city a more important place on the political map. His successor, William Hudnut, promoted a downtown redevelopment plan that made Indianapolis a sports mecca and tourist attraction, bringing it to a new level of local prosperity.
In his turn, Hudnut’s successor, Stephen Goldsmith, was a technocrat who focused on streamlining the city workforce and installing competition in key areas of management. All three demonstrated what simple competence can accomplish in almost any political environment.
Richard Riordan served as a moderate Republican mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001 and, while his years in office were laced with controversy, it’s fair to say he brought a measure of stability and efficient management to a violent and troubled city.
Then there is Michael Bloomberg. Maybe it’s not fair to call him a Republican mayor at all, since he was a Democrat prior to his decision to run for mayor of New York in 2001 and became a Democrat again after he left City Hall. But he did win the mayoralty under the Republican label, and it was as a Republican that he promoted the development that gave the city a decade of continuous prosperity. It seems beyond dispute that without some semblance of a functional two-party system, his mayoralty wouldn’t have been possible.
Something similar can be said for Rudy Giuliani, who before he became a Donald Trump acolyte served as a competent and relatively nonpartisan Republican mayor of New York. He achieved dramatic success in bringing down the city’s crime rate, albeit while raising civil liberties questions that are still being debated. Without a two-party system of some sort, there wouldn’t have been a Giuliani, just as there wouldn’t have been a Bloomberg. As Mamdani shows, New York doesn’t have that now; nor do most large American cities.
There are plenty of other Republican mayors I could cite, and I know I have left out some very good ones. What I’m curious about is why the decline of urban Republicanism has taken place, and what might be required to restore it in some meaningful context.
The simplest explanation would seem a purely demographic one: There just aren’t enough Republican voters residing in cities anymore. But this doesn’t really work. Republicans began deserting cities for suburbs close to a century ago. When centrist GOP mayors such as Hudnut and Riordan won election in politically competitive urban territory, it wasn’t by mobilizing a solid GOP vote. It was by persuading independent-minded voters that they had something important to offer.
The fact is, current residents of American cities, whatever their registration, are showing a growing tendency to vote Republican, at least at the presidential level. In 2024, the Republican presidential vote was up 12 points in Brooklyn, five in Philadelphia, nine in Wayne County (which includes Detroit) and nine in Miami-Dade County. It’s not as if all urban residents are unwilling to pull the Republican lever. So why aren’t we getting Republican mayors?
I think the real answer to that question lies with the cadre of urban Republican activists who generate their party’s nominations for local office. They are taking cues from the Trump-dominated, populist national Republican Party, not pursuing the pragmatism that could put the GOP back in city hall again.
It’s sometimes argued that political ideas flow from localities to Washington. Here we have the opposite: a small cluster of urban Republican activists taking their cues from what they see their party doing at the national level. If they stopped to think what pragmatism can accomplish in city government, they might elect a few mayors on their side of the aisle. And they might come up with a Bill Hudnut or a Richard Riordan.
