What just happened in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and why didn't former reality tv star and social media darling Spencer Pratt live up to the incessant, breathless hype (so sorry for your loss, X)? Now that it’s clear that incumbent Mayor Karen Bass is going to face off in the general election with democratic socialist (and alleged political backstabber?) Nithya Raman, how much trouble is Bass in? What are Raman's strengths and vulnerabilities, and what does she need to do to prevail in November? And will Latino swing decide the outcome of the Bass-Raman establishment vs. insurgent showdown?

Mike Madrid, one of California’s premier political strategists and the author of the definitive book on Latino voters, The Latino Century, joins us to help unpack the soap operatic twists and turns of the LA mayoral contest. If you’re unfamiliar, Mike is a high profile Never Trump Republican who has served as public affairs director for the League of California Cities, co-founded the Lincoln Project and currently is a fellow at the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. He’s one of the rare political consultants who has prominently advised both Ds and Rs, having consulted on Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa’s 2018 California gubernatorial bid. 

Regarding LA’s particularly juicy mayor’s race, Mike cuts through the noise with us to dish out the hard truths: as a Trumpy Republican, Pratt’s vibe-centered, harshly doom-and-gloom campaign painting Los Angeles as a hellscape may have wowed rich West-side Angelinos wound up about street disorder and made the hearts of social media influencers go pitter patter, but it was never going to get traction with the city’s core of progressive voters. That said, Mike argues, both Pratt’s and Raman’s relative success is a sign that voter dissatisfaction in the city is high. And the general election contest between Bass and Raman will likely turn into a high octane slugfest, where middle class Latino voters will be the swing bloc who will determine the outcome. 

“When you’re in a very strongly Democratic city, a one party town… the questions become less about ideology and more about competence,” Madrid says. “LA is broken. LA is a mess. I love Los Angeles, but it’s broken. LA does not work, and can we say that’s about ideology or not? I don’t think that it is, I think it’s just about competence.“ 

As we go deeper into the episode, we also get Mike's broader download on why and how both parties have missed the boat when it comes to winning over Latino voters, and why Xavier Becerra was able to come out of nowhere to win the California gubernatorial primary, where he will (very likely) face off against Republican Steve Hilton, which will mean he’s all but assured of being the state’s next governor. 

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Mike Madrid, The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, Simon & Schuster (2024).

Rogé Karma, “Why Democrats Got the Politics of Immigration So Wrong for So Long,” The Atlantic, Dec. 10. 2024.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

These days we associate the white working class with rural and small town red America, whereas big blue cities are perceived largely as the playgrounds of the educated and affluent. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the socioeconomics and demographics of blue cities were very different. As early Gen Xers, we vividly remember that during our youth the culture of urban America was indelibly associated with non-college educated white people, and their worldview was deeply ingrained within the broader cultural consciousness. 

So for this episode we asked one of our favorite cultural commentators, Native American author and writer Sherman Alexie, to rejoin us on the pod to for a walk down memory lane as we remembered the lost world of the white urban working class. We were inspired to take up the topic by Sherman’s poem, “Ode to Tonya Harding,” in which he uses Harding as a symbol of the young white working class women he grew up around and interacted with in his youth, vibrant and talented women he laments were destined to be excluded from elite cultural spaces because of class divides, style differences and cultural codes. 

We key off the poem to spark a wide-ranging conversation about class, race and the sharp cultural shifts within urban America since the days of our youth. Sherman reflects on growing up among poor white communities in rural Eastern Washington as a Native American, describing both solidarity and pervasive dysfunction across racial lines. He argues that poverty creates shared experiences across race, while criticizing modern Democratic Party politics for moving away from class-based concerns and decentering working-class interests.

We wax more than a bit nostalgic for 1970s–1990s working-class culture: restaurant and delivery jobs, service work, heavy-metal parking lots, bowling leagues, mall ice rinks, and the informal cross-racial friendships formed through shared labor, music, and youth culture. We don’t shy away from the racism that was prevalent in that era, but we nonetheless lament how deepening political divides, the rise of social media, and an increasingly insular elite culture have weakened those shared spaces and killed the social spontaneity and the capacity for joy that characterized youth culture when we were young. 

“When I was delivering pizzas, it was a bunch of poor white kids. I was the only person of color, I was the only person with more melanin than average, and race wasn’t a part of it,” Alexie recalls. “Inside the place we were all working, we all smelled like pepperoni, we all hated the boss, we all had a crush on that one young woman who had no interest in any of us…”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Sherman Alexie, "Ode to Tonya Harding," April 10. 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Knuckle Sandwich," May 19, 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Billy Elliot," Jan. 24. 2024.

And if you haven't seen it, we highly recommend you watch the short (17 mins) documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," a cult classic. 

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

In recent decades, no major American city can match the sharp ups and downs of Portland, Oregon. From a poor but pretty backwater burg of white gearheads and provincials in the 1980s, Portland underwent an exceedingly unlikely – and quite radical – transformation to become one of the country’s most distinctive and culturally vibrant urban renaissance stories in the 2000s (the New York Times memorably declared Portland “cool and refreshingly unneurotic” in 2007). 

But then, in the 2010s, the self-described “weird” and fun city, experiencing a rapid influx of young and educated newcomers drawn by post-Portlandia “where young people go to retire” hype, experienced what writer and journalist (and former Portland resident) Nancy Rommelmann has dubbed “Portlandization.” As the decade wore on, she wrote, Portland became increasingly enamored with ostentatious displays of performative virtue signaling and the militant policing of increasingly narrow and rigid progressive orthodoxies. Then that all exploded into the seemingly endless – and endlessly destructive – protests that roiled the city in 2020, which combined with a failed experiment in the decriminalization of hard drugs to bring the city to its knees, and from which Portland still has yet to fully recover.

So we asked Nancy Rommelmann, who has written extensively about Portland’s travails for Reason and Tablet and on her Make More Pie Substack page (she also co-hosts the popular Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em podcast), to join us on BCB to unpack what went so wrong with Portland’s fairy tale rise and why, and where the city stands today (Rommelmann left Portland in 2019 but visits frequently and continues to write about  the city). 

In our conversation, we trace Portland’s evolution first into a creative, affordable, rising city and then into a symbol of blue-city political and governance struggles. We discuss Portland’s food and cultural boom in the 2000s, the growth of ideological conflict and “outrage culture,” debates around #MeToo and due process, the 2020 protests and attendant unrest, the impact of Oregon’s drug decriminalization experiment, and broader tensions within progressive urban politics. 

While Nancy is largely critical of Portland’s recent trajectory, she also acknowledges the legitimate social grievances that have animated the city, and she sharply critiques right-wing and Trump administration efforts to distort and politically capitalize on Portland’s much more benign recent ICE protests, and she ends our conversation with cautious hope that Portland will fully recover.

“I get accused of being like a real naysayer about Portland, and I do have bad things to say about Portland, but I do wish good things for the city, because it's a beautiful city,” Nancy tells us. “The food is can be great, you can grow anything, and why would I not want it to fly again?”

Our editor is Quinn Waller.  

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Nancy Rommelmann, "Portlandization: It Can Happen to a Place Near You," Tablet Magazine, July 11, 2019.

Nancy Rommelmann, "The Dream of the '90s Died in Portland," Reason, March 22, 2021.

Nancy Rommelmann, "Drugs 1 - Oregon 0," Make More Pie, Feb. 29. 2024.

Nancy Rommelmann, "Trump's Troops Return to a City That Moved On: Dispatch from Portland," Reason, Oct. 6. 2025.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

For decades, a handful of legacy media outlets decided what counted as news, how to frame it, and who got to report it. Now trust has collapsed, The New York Times is selling cooking apps to stay alive, and there is no consensus regarding what's real or what the truth is anymore. 

So what comes next?

Adam Penenberg has spent his career inside the journalism industry and inside the classroom training the young journalists who'll inherit it. He's a professor at New York University’s journalism school, the author of Blood Highways (2003) and Viral Loop (2009), among other books. Adam has also been a contributor to Fast Company, Forbes, Wired, The Economist, and more. In the late '90s, Adam famously broke the Stephen Glass scandal, the journalistic fabrication story later made into the film Shattered Glass.

In this latest BCB epsiode, Adam joins us to talk about what he's seeing: the new generation of aspiring journalists navigating a world of news influencers, fractured media ecosystems, and the death of "objectivity.” We discuss how media consumption has shifted dramatically from traditional outlets to digital platforms, fragmenting audiences and feeding a sharp decline in public trust of the media. Journalism education, he says, is adapting to the new world order: students are entering journalism school from non-traditional backgrounds – some are already social media influencers while others aspire to be – and are seeking skills to succeed on diverse platforms, not just what it takes to break into and rise within traditional media outlets. 

Our conversation dives into the hard structural trade-offs facing anyone still trying to report honestly and fairly in 2026, and what ethical, fact-based journalism looks like now. The future of media is uncertain, Adam says, but adaptability, ethical journalism and critical thinking remain essential. 

And that is in increasingly short supply. There has been a breakdown in our educational systems more fundamentally, Penenberg argues, one that is spilling over to impact the aspiring new entrants into the profession. “We’ve been getting to the point where most of the people coming out of major schools… can’t write an essay. They can’t write an essay that is structured like an essay, where you have a thesis statement and then you back it up with facts," Penenberg tells us. "If you’re talking about a crisis in journalism it’s a crisis in the public as well as it is journalism, the business."

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

What's the fundamental difference between an authentically cool city and a contrived, gentrified one? What makes a great music and arts scene, and can deliberate government action actually make a city cool? That’s the topic we take up with our guest (and Gen X contemporary), the legendary indie rock frontman of The Long Winters and one time Seattle City Council candidate John Roderick, now the host of the popular (and omnivorous!) Omnibus podcast that he founded with Jeopardy host Ken Jennings. 

In the episode, we nostalgia trip with John about the fading of the hipster scenes of our youth, starting with our cohort’s misconceived impulse to 'facilitate' an art scene, as if urban cool can be jumpstarted with a couple of free parking spots outside local music venues. Roderick calls bullshit: the scenes from the '80s and '90s that we wax nostalgic about weren't created. They gestated organically because kids were bored and had something to rebel against, space was dirt cheap, and the grittiness of the urban environment was real.

That more authentic youth culture, born in abandoned light manufacturing spaces in declining cities, has evaporated in this era of blue city affluence and progressive permissiveness, Roderick argues, adding that cosmopolitan adults’ indulgent embrace of 'pure justice' and 'absolute equality' has stripped teen life of its necessary friction. What's left, he contends, is a culture marked by 'disconnect and malaise and bitching.' 

As our paean to the past continues, we get into how Gen X, perpetually the punching bag, never stood up for itself, allowing Millennials to define new cultural rules that were simultaneously affirming and uptight. But true urban cool may be poised for a comeback: Roderick has hope that Gen Z, rebelling against the cultural conformism that took root in the 2010s, are starting to tell older generations to "shut up and leave us alone." That desire for distance and defiance is what cool cities are built from, from the bottom up, even if, all three of us conclude, we are entirely unqualified to opine on what the hell the kids are planning to do next. 

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

Support the show

This is a free preview of our latest Patreon-only episode of Blue City Blues, with writer David Rieff, a war correspondent, an essayist, and a leading cultural critic. David, the son of sociologist Philip Rieff, author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and author Susan Sontag, one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, is a formidable intellectual and critic in his own right. He is also a self-described cultural pessimist, who argues in his 2024 collection of essays, Desire and Fate, that the rise of woke ideas in blue cosmopolitan America heralds the decline of Western culture. 

In our wide ranging conversation – subscribe to Blue City Blues on Patreon to listen to the full episode – we discuss with Rieff why he fits neither on the political left or the political right, and why he has such antipathy to wokeness. Rieff tells us that woke is the cultural handmaiden to late stage capitalism, providing a moral fig leaf that acts as a legitimization mechanism for neoliberal institutions, as he further argues that it medicalizes grievance and prioritizes emotional safety and identity over political economy and universalist humanist claims. 

As we delve farther into David’s critique of wokeness, and what he describes as its censorious safetyism, he suggests that his father’s great insight about the rise of culture of the therapeutic has been superseded by what he calls a rising culture of the traumatic. And he says he sees wokeness ultimately as a form of kitsch, one that presents a grave risk to the Western tradition of culture and art.   

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE SOURCES: 

David Rieff, Desire and Fate, Columbia University Press (2024).

A recent profile of David Rieff referenced in the episode: David Klion, "Woke Obsessions," The Ideas Journal, Jan. 22, 2026

Is a return to good, effective governance not just a glaring need in blue cities but a key to saving liberal democracy? NYU law professor Richard “Rick” Pildes is the author of an insightful scholarly article that recently caught our attention titled, “The Neglected Value of Effective Government.” A leading scholar of constitutional law and democratic governance, Rick is a Guggenheim Fellow, Carnegie Scholar and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After reading his article, we asked him to join us on the latest BCB episode to make the case for making government work. 

If you’re a regular listener you’ll know that it’s been a recurring theme – and indeed a foundational premise – of this podcast that the quality of governance in blue cities has atrophied over the last 15 years. Blue cities were on a roll in the Obama years. But now, not so much. 

Well, it’s not just a problem at the local level, Rick tells us. Public dissatisfaction with governance has emerged as a global phenomenon in the liberal democracies of Europe as well as here in the US. And people who care about reinvigorating the liberal democratic center against the rising tide of extremism need to pay a lot more attention as to why. 

In our discussion, we unpack the forces that have been rendering American government, local and federal, so incapable of addressing the problems they are tasked with addressing. In alignment with recent much discussed arguments made by Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance, Pildes contends that rising mistrust in government on both the left and the right in the late 1960s and ‘70s led to the proliferation of processes and veto points that have made it much more difficult for governments to accomplish big things and address serious challenges. That needs to change, he argues. 

Moreover, we discuss with Rick the role of increasing ideological polarization and purism in rendering government brittle and ineffective, and he offers up intriguingly counterintuitive arguments about why the push for transparency in government process may have gone too far, and how social media's ability to turn politicians into “free agents” who can build bases of power and fundraising outside the party hierarchy and its power structures is a problem that makes it much harder to build coalitions of support for bold legislative actions. 

“We shouldn’t take liberal democracy for granted,” Rick tells us. “It has to show it can deliver. People need to see that it’s delivering for them.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Richard Pildes, "The Neglected Value of Effective Government," University of Chicago Legal Forum (2024).

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

There are the superstar cities that act as the seedbeds of American cultural cosmopolitanism and the great engines of blue America's knowledge economy: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle etc. These are the cities that we obsess over and that typically provide the grist for this podcast. And countering them, of course, is the red America of small towns and rural areas that powered the rise of Trump and MAGA.

Both the urban powerhouses and the rural heartland receive more than their share of attention. But then there are also the often overlooked or ignored second tier cities of blue America, big cities with large populations that no one outside of their regions pays much attention to. 

That’s a mistake, contends Halina Bennet, a reporter at Slow Boring, the Substack newsletter founded by Matt Yglesias. Bennet is the author of a provocatively counterintuitive recent piece titled, “The case for the ‘Solid B’ city,” in which she compellingly argues that these largely ignored second tier cities – places like Columbus or Indianapolis or Fayetteville – are leading the way on urbanist policy innovations while offering their residents a high quality of life in affordable environs. 

Halina's piece challenged some of our assumptions, so we asked her to come on BCB to explain why she thinks these "Solid B" burgs merit more of our attention. David and Sandeep launch the conversation with their reminiscences of Portland, Oregon in the 1980s. Back then Portland was very different, they say, an economically depressed “downscale Northwest gearhead” town with good beer and ultra-cheap rents, before its transformation into the “bougie emo twee” Portlandia we know today. We then quickly get into a discussion with Bennett about what these Solid Bs offer that differentiates them positively from the world class cities that dominate the national discourse.

She points first to Columbus, a city (as Sandeep mentions) disparagingly nicknamed “Cowtown.” But in reality Columbus is now the second-largest city in the Midwest, a fast growing metropolitan center with a burgeoning tech economy where the median home price is still a fraction of what houses cost in A-list megacities. And Bennett also praises Indianapolis, where the rapid spread of a bus-rapid-transit system is enhancing livability. And Fayetteville too, the first city in the country to experiment with eliminating all parking minimums.

As the conversation continues, we get into why these B cities are able to move so much faster than their higher profile counterparts in reshaping their urban landscapes in productive ways, building housing and infrastructure and innovating on policy. Often blue dots in vast red seas, these cities are shaped by a more pragmatic politics focused on results, rather than the ideological progressive monocultures of the A cities, where culture war purity tests, entrenched interests and the high cost of doing business militate against change and innovation. We close with Halina speculating that the salvation of the Democratic Party may be found in these B cities, which she suggests are well positioned to produce the next politician with broad enough appeal with normie Americans to capture the presidency. 

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Halina Bennet, "The case for the 'Solid B' city," Slow Boring, March 27, 2026.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

Keith Humphreys, a friend of the pod, is widely recognized as the country’s leading expert on drug and addiction policy. The Esther Ting Memorial Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Keith served as a senior advisor on drug policy in the Obama White House and on the White House Advisory Commission on Drug Free Communities under President George W. Bush. 

We had Keith on BCB last March for an insightful conversation about why the drug reform and decriminalization efforts that swept West Coast blue cities circa 2020 failed so spectacularly. So now, a year later, we invited Keith back on to share his insights about nascent moves by some prominent blue city mayors to turn away from a progressive-libertarian model of dealing with addiction, and instead embrace a more proactive, interventionist approach to street addiction that mixes therapeutic carrots with coercive sticks.

Over the last year, Keith has been meeting with and advising mayors like Philadelphia's Cherelle Parker, the city’s first African American female mayor, who herself grew up in a crack-ravaged neighborhood. Parker has made a concerted effort to clean up Kensington, one of the country’s most notorious drug neighborhoods; Keith explains how Parker has set up a wellness court where arrested addicts are given the opportunity for rapid diversion as well as a Wellness Village where recovery housing is available to people exiting in-patient treatment. 

In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie has also been moving to reimagine addiction policy, adopting a “recovery first” approach that prioritizes not just reducing harm but prodding the addicted towards recovery. Most recently, Lurie has launched a bold experiment with a RESET Center where arrested street addicts are detained until they sober up, with outreach workers attempting to engage them with services in the interim. And in San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan, a previous BCB guest now running for California governor, has pushed to establish new interventions to engage people suffering on the streets, including threatening arrest for those who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter.

“So if you have a failed War on Drugs followed by a failed libertarian policy, what’s going to be the next act?” Humphreys says. ”What I see the brightest, most creative blue city mayors doing is finding a new way… a city should aspire to more than just reducing overdoses, as important as that is, but should aspire to get people into recovery and back into work and back connected to their families, and some pressure is justified with addiction.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Keith Humphreys. "Blue Cities Are Finally Showing Sanity on Drugs and Crime," City Journal, March 30, 2026.

Keith Humphreys, "Forced Drug Treatment Isn't Horrific. It's a Relief," New York Times, Sept. 2, 2025.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

In late February, Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon, who have both had extensive careers in Democratic governance – Nicholas was Chief Legal Counsel for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer until 2022, Robert most recently served as a Deputy Assistant to the President on the Domestic Policy Council of the Biden White House – went where few left-of-center commentators have been willing to go: they directly called out what they see as the excessive political influence of public sector unions.

Those deep-pocketed unions are, of course, one of the major power centers within the Democratic Party, which may explain why even reform-minded commentators on the left, like the Abundance faction, have been noticeably reluctant to scrutinize their influence over governance in blue jurisdictions. But in a much discussed New York Times op ed titled, “Mamdani Will Need to Change How he Governs,” Bagley and Gordon broke ranks. 

“If blue-state governors and mayors want to get serious about delivering excellent public services, they will need to do more than battle billionaire elites or embrace abundant housing and energy,” they wrote. “They will have to push back against a core constituency within the Democratic Party that often makes government deliver less and cost more: unions representing teachers, police officers and transit workers.”

So we invited Nicholas, currently a law professor at the University of Michigan, and Robert, now a visiting fellow at Harvard, to delve into why they think public sector unions have too often become an impediment to effective Democratic governance, particularly in big blue cities like New York or Seattle. Over the course of our conversation, they argue that while public sector unions play a crucial role in advocating for their members, they can also hinder progress by prioritizing generous pay, pensions and seniority over efficiency, accountability, and results. 

They cite examples like Chicago's severe fiscal strain due to unaffordably generous pension benefits doled out to public sector workers, and we also get into the impact of police and teachers unions on efforts to reform policing and public education. We discuss the outsized role these unions play in electing Democratic politicians, and Bagley and Gordon emphasize the need for Democratic leaders to push back against unions in instances where they stand as an impediment to delivering better public services and governance.

“We wrote this piece because we think it’s important. If we want blue cities to achieve their promise, and if we want to have a viable and effective alternative to what the Trump administration is giving us, this is a conversation we need to have,” Bagley told us.  

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon, “Mamdani Will Need to Change How He Governs,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 2026.

Seattle Nice podcast: “Mayor Elect Katie Wilson says Seattle Nice is ‘Special,’” Nov. 20, 2025. 

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]