By Ethan Epstein
“The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party,” The New York Times op-ed page declared after the 2012 elections, a contest that saw the GOP trounced in city after blue-tinged city—and not just at the top of the ballot. Last year, Politico’s Alexander Burns dubbed urban Republicans “perhaps the nation’s most severely endangered political species,” and noted that the largest America city to elect one of these rare creatures recently was Indianapolis, Indiana—all the way down at 13th on the population charts. Cities have long been Democratic Party strongholds, but in recent years Democrats have run up the score to an unprecedented degree, posting lopsided results that almost make Bashar al-Assad’s or Kim Jong Un’s numbers look bad.
