City of villains: Republicans stoke fears of Democratic-run cities

Atlanta is, from time to time, the center of the political universe.

Conservatives stoking fear of big cities would be a joke, if not for the damage it does.

In May, the FBI arrested Mark Adams Prieto, a 58-year-old gun show dealer from Prescott, Arizona, on firearms trafficking charges. Prieto had been on the way to Atlanta at the time, according to court documents, because he planned to kill as many Black people as he could at a Bad Bunny concert while planting Confederate flags and shouting white power slogans, to provoke a race war ahead of the 2024 election.

As a result, conservative state governments are cauterizing upstart municipalities, burning any pretense of respect for small-D democracy at the local level in the process. They fear those blue dots will bleed enough Black political power into red states to turn them purple and cost them the White House, not just in 2024, but permanently.

Race is at the center of the fear.

House Bill 2127 takes that power away from cities in a swath of policy areas, from managing climate change to labor law. The law is in legal limbo today. But the damage is already being done to municipal leaders, who are frozen in place waiting for the case to be resolved.

This story is playing out across the country, with red state governments seeing big blue cities as launching places for progressive ideas.

On top of all of this, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, signed Senate Bill 170 into law last July with almost no national media commentary. The law, with some exceptions for budgeting, automatically enjoins Florida cities from enforcing a municipal ordinance if that ordinance is being challenged in court, and awards court costs to challengers if they win.

In Jackson, Mississippi, lawmakers ostensibly concerned about crime attempted to create an entirely new court system, supplanting elected judges in Hinds county with appointees of the Republican chief judge.

But lawmakers are now pivoting this legislation toward the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who is prosecuting Trump and 18 others for interfering with the 2020 election.

The prospect of a Black Democrat empowered to hold white conservatives accountable to the law, without being accountable to white conservatives in return, is the political dragon to be slain. Willis has refused demands to testify before the state senate committee, describing it as an interference in her prosecution.

Biden won Harris county, where Houston is located, by about 218,000 votes in 2020, while losing Texas 52-46 by about 630,000 votes. Pedersen estimates that Harris county needs to turn out about 1.1 million Democratic voters to flip the state.

Republicans have been able to make gains among Latino voters, particularly those along the southern border, with appeals to patriotism, faith and safety.

The grievance lives on.

The Trump campaign had been trying to coax Black voters into their camp, with events like the launch of his Black voter coalition group at a historically Black church in Detroit in June. Even then, in an audience packed with almost exclusively white supporters, he once again railed against cities and crime.

Trump, trying to counter-program against the Democratic national convention, made a campaign stop in August to Howell, Michigan, a city 40 miles (64km) west of Detroit with historical ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Even there, he unloaded on cities.

His comment left people wondering what could be so horrible about Milwaukee, a city filled with people who by and large are known for avoiding offense. Crime? Traffic? Bad schools? High costs? Homelessness? Liberals?

Mayor Cavalier Johnson shot back, Milwaukee-style.