Most recently, it has been applied to New York City, where socialist upstart Zohran Mamdani won a stunning mayoral victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a rival with decades of experience in government and a man widely perceived as a candidate of the political center even if he has generally tilted slightly to the left of that signpost.
Meanwhile in Seattle, Katie Wilson, another self-described socialist with barely a taste of political experience, unseated Mayor Bruce Harrell, a moderate Democrat who tacked to the center in an unsuccessful effort to build a citywide governing consensus.
Both of those victories came a couple of years after the striking mayoral victory in Chicago of another insurgent, Brandon Johnson, over Paul Vallas, who had amassed a record of many years in government management and sought to ascend to City Hall on the strength of a sterling résumé and a promise to institute a hard-line approach to the city’s violent crime.
How do these results relate to each other? Are they emblematic of specific frustration local to each of the three cities? Or do they tell us something about how America’s cities themselves are evolving?
Certainly each case has its own idiosyncrasies. But each reflects major changes in urban electorates over the past generation. Fifty years ago, New York, Chicago and Seattle were all largely white, working-class cities, populated by voters who held blue-collar or lower-level white-collar jobs. They were Democrats, but most of them were also conservatives, especially on social issues. Archie Bunker, the dubious blue-collar hero of the situation comedy “All in the Family,” worked on a loading dock in Queens. There are still a decent number of families like the Bunkers living in outlying New York neighborhoods of Queens and Staten Island, and most of them voted for Andrew Cuomo for mayor. But there were not nearly enough to elect him.
These days, the blue-collar majorities in New York and most other large cities have been replaced by Black and Hispanic voters and by left-leaning white professionals. This isn’t a naturally cohesive coalition, but it is loosely attracted to change-urging candidates such as Wilson in Seattle and Mamdani in New York who identify themselves as progressives, often as socialists, and make a pitch aimed at disrupting existing support for centrists and their allies in a moderate business establishment. There just aren’t enough voters attracted to the status quo, and the moderate candidates can go down to decisive and sometimes shocking defeats. It is a truism in American politics that elections are won in the center, and that may still be true in many places, often at the state level, but not in many of the cities where centrists used to win by comfortable margins.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS UNDOUBTEDLY THE BEST KNOWN of the anti-center mayoral candidates, but Katie Wilson is at least as interesting. Now 43, she had never run for public office before, but she was a left-leaning activist with a long pedigree. Born and raised in Binghamton, N.Y., at the age of 15 she co-founded a local chapter of an organization called Food Not Bombs. Almost from the moment she arrived in Seattle in 2004, she began agitating for progressive causes, feeding protesters at animal-rights rallies, co-founding the local Transit Riders Union and, in last year’s mayoral campaign, calling for penalties against landlords with vacant storefronts or homes. In 2020 she joined a call for defunding the Seattle police, though she later changed her mind about that.
Harrell, the incumbent she unseated, wasn’t a conservative by any means. His major initiative as mayor was an effort to improve the vitality and increase the influence of some of Seattle’s struggling neighborhoods. But he alienated much of the progressive electorate by opposing a tax increase on the wealthiest local companies. As the campaign developed, Harrell stressed his argument that Wilson was just too far to the left to govern the city. He gathered support and funding from the business establishment and the real-estate industry. But it didn’t really work. Wilson was picking up votes by calling for a local capital-gains tax, a $1 billion housing bond issue and new protections for renters. When the votes were tallied, she had edged past Harrell by about 2,000 votes.
In unseating Harrell, Wilson joined a cadre of anti-centrists who have won mayoral elections in the past several years. Brandon Johnson did it in Chicago. A little earlier, Michelle Wu did it in Boston, and she attracted enough support to win a second term.
WHAT DO THESE RESULTS TELL US about the future of centrist government in America’s big cities? One answer is that moderate candidates can’t afford to be seen as exemplars of the status quo. Comfortable as they may be with the local business establishment, they are best off presenting themselves as insurgents of some sort — not rabble-rousers but newly minted agents of change.
Is there a way for them to do this? Results from a few places suggest that it isn’t impossible. The most provocative evidence comes from San Francisco, where in 2024 an extremely wealthy businessman managed to convince voters he was an agent of change while allying himself conspicuously with the city’s more conservative high-tech establishment. This was Daniel Lurie, one of the principal heirs to the Levi Strauss clothing fortune and a novice candidate who portrayed himself as the newcomer needed to deal with the city’s seemingly intractable issues of crime and homelessness.
Lurie’s principal opponent, incumbent Mayor London Breed, had never positioned herself on the far left in local politics, but she took progressive stances in dealing with the problems of poverty and addiction. That would seem to be the right positioning in the city often described as the most liberal in America. But it wasn’t. Sensing her campaign wasn’t succeeding, she moved to a tougher stance against the city’s homeless population. But Lurie, corporate connections and all, managed to argue successfully that what San Francisco needed wasn’t an off-and-on progressive. He managed the delicate balancing act of persuading them that he was a kind of radical centrist, and that was enough to give him a decisive victory. On election night, he promised a “safer and more affordable city.”
It was not only a successful strategy in the campaign — it has been successful since then. At the end of nearly a year in office, one poll gave him an approval rating of 71 percent.
WHILE LURIE WAS ASSEMBLING HIS COALITION in San Francisco, another radical centrist was serving his third term as Detroit’s most popular mayor of the past generation. Running for the first time in 2013, Mike Duggan won election as a white mayor in a city nearly 80 percent African American. Proclaiming that the city had had enough of timid and incompetent leadership, he offered himself as the apostle of downtown and neighborhood revitalization.
He succeeded to a remarkable degree. And he did that without abandoning the centrist politics that had marked his long career in local government. Duggan isn’t a candidate for a fourth term — he is running as an independent candidate for governor in 2026. This year’s gubernatorial election will be one more test of his radical centrist approach.
What can we learn from this seemingly contradictory sequence of recent urban election results? We can learn that the progressive left has become a powerful force in big cities, one strong enough to win high office in perhaps a majority of situations. We can also learn that pounding on existing improvements, including impressive ones, is not a formula that is going to galvanize most of the electorate. We have learned that the left will be hard to beat — but that radical centrism has a chance to defeat it.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
