Politics
Trump takes the GOP hate for cities to a new extreme
The rural-urban divide is one of the defining features of the American electorate: Democrats dominate in cities, while Republicans rule in rural areas. But as the presidential race has shown, the two parties are treating the voters in their opponents’ favored territory in very different ways.
Democrats are working to attract rural voters and promoting policy initiatives to improve life for rural Americans. Republicans are heaping contempt and calumny on cities and treating their residents as deluded.
Conservatives have long disdained urban areas and those who live in them. But as Election Day approaches, Donald Trump and JD Vance are deploying a particularly nasty anti-urban strategy, seemingly driven by the belief that if Americans who don’t live in cities — or ever go there — look upon them with disgust and fear, then they’ll vote Republican.
We’ve gotten used to Republicans describing our cities as repulsive and frightening for so long that it no longer strikes us as unusual.
In rural Pennsylvania last week, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, unveiled a policy plan to address some of the challenges faced by rural Americans. It includes an effort to hire 10,000 desperately needed health care professionals to work in rural areas. The day before, Vance traveled to Minneapolis, but not to offer the Trump-Vance plan for urban America. Instead, Vance insulted and demeaned the city, falsely claiming that Walz let it “burn to the ground” in 2020 during protests against police violence and that the city “has now become overrun with crime.” Vance warned that “the story of Minneapolis is coming to every community across the United States of America if we promote Kamala Harris to president of the United States.” Never mind that Minneapolis was named the happiest city in America this year, just one of its absurdly long list of accolades.
Vance’s strategy of insulting the city he was in mirrored Trump’s approach last week in Detroit, where the former president told an audience that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Harris wins. In fact, Detroit is in the midst of a remarkable revival, with new economic development, plummeting crime rates and a population that is increasing for the first time in decades.
Imagine the thermonuclear freakout that would grip the entire political world if Harris or Walz went to, say, a rural Pennsylvania county, declared it a dystopia and its residents deranged, and warned darkly that the whole country would be gripped by that kind of rural horror if they didn’t win the election. They’d be pilloried for insulting the “heartland,” where “real Americans” supposedly live. Commentators of all ideological stripes would savage them for being so cruel to such a significant portion of the electorate. It would dominate coverage of the campaign for the rest of the election.
But we’ve gotten used to Republicans describing our cities as repulsive and frightening for so long that it no longer strikes us as unusual. When Trump says that in America’s cities, “you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped,” it’s easy to dismiss the ham-handed hyperbole, but we know that millions of Americans believe it.
That’s because conservative media’s efforts to regularly portray cities as chaotic and more dangerous amplify a long anti-urban tradition in America that dates back to the nation’s founding. Thomas Jefferson believed the countryside was where all good things could be found, while cities were as disgusting as the people who lived there. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue,” Jefferson wrote in 1785. “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”
In the picture Trump and Vance paint, every American city is in flames.
Conservatives have long portrayed cities as places of danger and corruption. Richard Nixon aired frightening ads focused on urban crime in his 1968 run for the White House. In 2016, Ted Cruz accused Trump of having “New York values” (he didn’t say exactly what those values were, but they had to be bad). Conservatives celebrated Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town,” a warning to urbanites not to bring their crime and chaos to small towns.
As Republicans have secured their hold over rural areas in recent years, they have only increased the shade they throw at cities. Democrats, said Sen. Tom Cotton in 2022, “want to make you live in downtown areas, in high-rise buildings, and walk to work or take the subway.” (The horror!) “Serious question,” tweeted Vance the year before. “I have to go to New York soon and I’m trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?”
For the record, New York is by some measures the safest big city in America. When he’s not in Washington, Vance lives in Cincinnati, a city of 300,000; he describes his posh neighborhood as “the perfect combo of proximity to the city and to nature.”
Yet in the picture Trump and Vance paint, every American city is in flames — and it’s no accident that they make constant reference to the protests against police brutality that swept the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Though 98% of those protests saw no injuries and there was no property damage in 97%, Republicans would have you believe that entire cities burned to the ground, as Vance falsely claimed about Minneapolis. You don’t have to be steeped in scholarship on race to grasp the racial subtext to the GOP attack on urban America and the people who live there.
It might be easier to assume goodwill on Republicans’ part if, like Democrats, they actually seemed interested in finding more votes in cities. Instead, they sneer at urban areas and the Americans who live there, hoping to generate anti-urban disdain and fear that will win them votes elsewhere. Given that Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, the evidence for this strategy’s success is thin at best. But whether it works this time or not, it’s one more iteration of Republicans’ larger strategy of winning through division. And it’s shameful.
WASILLA, Alaska — Three weeks out from Election Day, President Donald Trump took a helicopter to a plane to another helicopter to a motorcade to an ice hockey rink in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Valley, traversing nearly 4,000 miles over more than eight hours to turn out his base here to help Republicans defend the Senate.
But Trump’s trek might not be enough to save Sen. Dan Sullivan, who’s running in a tougher-than-expected race against Democrat Mary Peltola in a state where the president’s approval rating is underwater and independents outnumber both Republicans and Democrats.
Alaska strategists and voters who spoke to Blue Light News acknowledged that Sullivan faces a difficult path to reelection, despite Trump’s time investment and the outside money pouring in.
“Very conservative MAGA voters can’t vote for you harder,” said Scott Kendall, a veteran political strategist who worked on two of Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s campaigns and was chief of staff to former Alaska Gov. Bill Walker. “Donald Trump’s support in this current climate is both a blessing and a curse.”
Even some Trump supporters at the Tuesday night rally admitted the outlook appeared bleak.
“I think Alaska’s turning blue,” said Matt Niessink, a 45-year-old general contractor from Wasilla. He said he had voted for Trump three times and planned to support Republicans this year.
What did he wish the president would do differently? “I wish he’d shut his mouth sometimes and not be such a pompous ass,” Niessink said.
The president was in Wasilla — population 10,556 — because the outlook is darkening for his party in a state he carried by 13 points just two years ago. In a midterm year defined by the cost of gas and groceries, the Last Frontier has been hit particularly hard, with the average price of diesel nearing $7 per gallon. In the Senate race, Peltola is flush with cash and leads Sullivan in most polls. MAGA Inc., the cash-rich Trump-aligned super PAC, is increasingly focusing on Alaska as one in a slate of states that can help Republicans hold the Senate.
Enter Trump, who has been spending the cycle’s crucial final weeks holding rallies in red states to juice support among his base, which tends to see depressed turnout in years when he’s not on the ballot.
“That was a lot of flying,” the president said at the top of his remarks. “In fact, they were thinking about canceling. They said, ‘Sir, you’re very busy, this is very tough.’” But, Trump continued, he refused to cancel for a state he won three times.
Echoing his comments at other red-state rallies, Trump asked the roaring crowd for “one big favor” — to “pretend that I’m on the ballot, because every time I’ve been on the ballot, we win.” He repeated his promise that Americans will receive $5,000 dividends if Republicans hold both chambers.
“What this is about is getting out the vote,” Sullivan told reporters before Trump’s speech. “A rising tide of enthusiasm lifts all the candidates.”
Unlike some other Republican candidates in tight races, Sullivan has shied away from distancing himself from the least popular aspects of Trump’s presidency.
Sullivan proclaimed on stage at the rally that “the conflict in the Middle East is temporary. The true forever war is the national Democrats’ war against Alaska oil and gas and our jobs.” And although a campaign aide released a statement condemning Trump’s move to import Russian diesel, Sullivan did not join four of his Republican Senate colleagues, including Murkowski, who called on Trump to reverse the decision.
Art Hackney, a veteran Republican strategist in Alaska, said that “most of the people who support” Sullivan “think that he should” break more with the president.
Hackney, who runs a pro-Sullivan super PAC called “We Stand with Dan,” attributed that choice to loyalty — but suggested the president’s demand of fealty, and treatment of frequent dissenter Murkowski, could also be part of Sullivan’s calculus.
“A lot of his longtime supporters and the people who are in the industries that would benefit from that wish he would be more blunt,” Hackney said. “But with what Murkowski has done, if Dan did something considered a disrespectful trigger or something, what do you think would happen? It could well have implications for things that affect Alaska’s economy.”
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Some top congressional Republicans have privately concluded that it is likely impossible for them to keep control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, and they are now focused on limiting the scale of the defeat and salvaging the party’s Senate majority.
Five senior Republican lawmakers, all granted anonymity to speak candidly about their party’s dire position, told Blue Light News the House had all but slipped away.
One senior House Republican said the GOP’s goal at this point was to “save as many Republican seats as we can.” The president, this person said, was not helping.
“President Trump has made this election all about himself,” the lawmaker said. “Now we have to survive that political storm.”
A second Republican member of Congress said the movement of campaign advertising made plain which side was in control of the midterms. This lawmaker predicted Democrats would pick up about 10 seats, more than enough to take control of the chamber.
Even in newly redistricted red states like Florida and Texas, this person said, Republican candidates were “hanging on with their fingernails.”
Republicans have already fallen back from several contested House districts that they feel are no longer winnable, including those held by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey. Trump carried their districts just two years ago. The party last week gave up on an Omaha-based district held by retiring Rep. Don Bacon.
Trump officials and other top GOP operatives say more candidates may be cut off in the coming days, in order to shift advertising money to races where it can make more of a difference. Republican groups have already given up on multiple races where they once hoped to unseat Democratic lawmakers.
The Republican Party is under extreme pressure across the Midwest, where it is now spending heavily to defend Senate seats in once-reliably MAGA states like Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.
Bacon, a maverick often at odds with the White House, said there was no mystery in his party’s political tribulations.
“I’ve talked to some who are making these decisions: The biggest problem is the president’s polling numbers and unfavorables,” Bacon said.
White House officials insist they’re not giving up on either chamber of Congress. In a statement, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said Trump remained “committed to maintaining Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.”
As he departed on Tuesday to campaign in Alaska for embattled GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan, Trump professed optimism about the midterms but acknowledged that sitting presidents typically see their party lose seats in the off year.
“But I’m doing a tour right now and I’m doing rallies,” Trump added. “The level of enthusiasm for the Republican Party is way up.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson went even further, flatly declaring during a campaign stop in deep-red Texas that “the polling is wrong” in showing his party on the brink of a broad defeat.
Yet at a tactical level, the Republican Party’s moves to shift money away from defending the House and toward saving the Senate are clear enough. In recent days, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the top super PAC for House Republicans, canceled advertising for key House candidates in Nebraska and Iowa and allowed the Senate Leadership Fund – a Republican group focused on the upper chamber – to swoop in and claim the airtime to support Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa.
“These are not the moves of a party that’s going to keep the House,” a third Republican lawmaker said.
In statements to Blue Light News, both CLF and the National Republican Congressional Committee said they had no intention of giving up on the fight for control of the House.
NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said districts are won “one by one,” and that the GOP has “the financial firepower and ground game needed to win.”
Chris Winkelman, president of CLF, said his group would keep moving money around to maximize the impact nationally.
The goal, he said, was to “keep the pressure on the most vulnerable Democrats and preserve a path to 218 seats.”
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican who lost his swing seat in Trump’s first midterm election eight years ago, said his former colleagues were clear-eyed about where the election seemed to be headed.
“The environment is about as tough as one could expect,” Curbelo said. “There is no one who has privately stated that they believe Republicans can hold the House — not in recent weeks, anyway.”
Megan Messerly, Lauren Fedor, Lisa Kashinsky and Myah Ward contributed to this report.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff said Tuesday he will not run for president in 2028 and committed to serving a full six-year Senate term if reelected.
“I have zero interest in running for president. I’m not running for president. I’m running for reelection to the Senate,” Ossoff said during a Georgia Senate debate against Republican Rep. Mike Collins.
Asked by Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution whether he would serve his full term if he wins in November, Ossoff replied: “Yes, I will.”
The remarks are Ossoff’s most forceful rejection yet of a potential 2028 presidential bid even as his name has repeatedly surfaced in national Democrats’ conversations about possible contenders for the party’s nomination. His public commitment to a full Senate term on Tuesday is the latest of his campaign’s many efforts to tamp down that speculation.
Ossoff gained national attention this year given his strong fundraising numbers, his consistent lead in public polling against Collins and his ability to generate viral moments on the campaign trail, particularly through his attacks on President Donald Trump. Democrats are bullish about Ossoff’s ability to hold onto his Senate seat — so much so that the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC said Tuesday it was removing its ad spending in Georgia for the week.
He’s also taken steps to boost the state Democratic party in Georgia, a perennial battleground that has been and will be key to winning the presidency. If November brings historic wins up and down the ballot, Ossoff will get some of the credit — and he’ll have confirmed his status as a leader in the swing state.
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