Ezra Klein is wrong about this
Plus why the air was disgusting all week, the big vote on the housing plan, and biking past the graveyard.
LA finally finished counting its votes this week. We now have actual precinct-level data. Nobody is that interested in looking at it, because all the smart people filed their takes a month ago. You can’t wait until all the data is available — you risk delivering your insightful commentary to an empty convention center while a janitor sweeps up everyone else’s discarded likes and shares with a big pushbroom.
But the tradeoff is that when you deliver the takes before the counting is even close to done, you get stuff wrong! One example: a widespread theory I saw a lot of big-name commentators pushing in the days after the election. In this theory, a large share of the blame for Trump’s win was pinned on worsening conditions in big Democrat-led cities.
Ezra Klein summarized the case on Pod Save America in this clip that a lot of people sent me.
“The thing that surprised me the least about the election was the sharp red shift in these big cities. Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. And this idea that, like, the economy is actually good, or crime is actually down, this is all just Fox News… like, shut the fuck up with that. Like, talk to some people who live near you… You just talk to people and they’re mad about it. They feel like it’s different than it used to be.”
Fears about crime and disorder in Democrat-led big cities, he says, drove the party’s failures nationwide, especially in the presidential election. He cites LA, New York, and San Francisco specifically. Other commentators have been hitting this same note, including Josh Barro:
I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services… It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post-George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem.
Like Ezra Klein, Josh Barro cites rising crime and homelessness (specifically in New York) as being local issues that turned people toward Trump.
(This post is about evaluating the electoral impact of crime fears, not about whether crime is actually rising. To anyone who wants to point out that LAPD’s data has both violent and property crime way down this year, Ezra Klein just asked you to “shut the fuck up with that.”)
Great news for us: we can actually determine whether there’s a connection between fears about big-city crime and disorder and how much voters turned against the Democrat running for president! We can do this because we have a pretty strong stand-in for LA County voter crime/disorder fears: George Gascon.
Gascon, the country’s most prominent progressive District Attorney, ran for office on the same days as both Biden and Harris. His win in 2020 was a referendum against the incumbent DA’s tough-on-crime policies, and his 2024 re-election race was a referendum on whether his soft-on-crime policies led to increased crime — his opponent, Nathan Hochman, made that connection explicit over and over again. Gascon lost, with his overall vote share in the County dropping by 13 percentage points compared to 2020.
Harris also had a very bad election in LA, at least compared to what she needed. She lost more than six hundred thousand votes compared to Biden in LA County — that’s about ten percent of all of her lost votes compared to Biden in the entire United States. (LA County is about 3% of the national population). Trump did not pick up nearly as many votes in LA between 2020 and 2024: about 45,000 votes. The story was Harris’s loss, not Trump’s gain. Harris still won the county by a wide margin, but her vote share of 65% was a six-point drop from Biden’s. She only finished about five points ahead of Hochman, who is not a Democrat.
So were these outcomes related? If the Klein/Barro thesis is correct — that anger about crime and disorder in big cities drove the “red shift” toward Trump — you would expect the parts of LA where Gascon lost the most vote share between ‘20 and ‘24 to also break harder against Harris compared to Biden. Did they? Let’s look?
The cities with 5,000+ voters in LA County that swung the most against Gascon were also among its wealthiest: Beverly Hills, Malibu, Calabasas, and Manhattan Beach. Wealthy, white precincts in LA City, like the Hollywood Hills and Hancock Park, as well as comparable larger cities like West Hollywood and Santa Monica also turned much harder than average against Gascon. That seems to line up with Ezra Klein’s “talk to some people who live near you” premise — it feels plausible the residents of neighborhoods like these are the people who commentators are mostly hearing from.
But these neighborhoods did not turn on Harris the way they did against Gascon. Harris actually performed a bit better than her county average in most of the cities where Gascon did the worst.
This trend was borne out in the bigger cities: Gascon dropped 16% in West Hollywood between 2020 and 2024 — worse than his county average of 13% — but Harris only dropped 1% compared to Biden, much better than the six points she lost countywide. The story is the same in Santa Monica, the hills, and other wealthy neighborhoods — in the places where Gascon lost the biggest share of his 2020 voters, Harris tended to hold Biden voters more effectively.
Meanwhile, the cities where Harris actually saw her worst numbers compared to Biden — Bell Gardens, Bell, Florence, and Cudahy, all lower-income Latino communities in the South/Southeast county — were all better than average for Gascon.
Again, if people in big cities being mad about crime and disorder had driven Harris’s vote loss, you would expect the places where Gascon saw his biggest drops to also have been uniquely bad for Harris (and vice versa). But that isn’t what happened at all. A simple linear regression shows that there’s just no relationship between their performances.
(Thank you Scott Frazier for helping me put together all this data.)
Everything that happened in LA is demographically consistent with the national picture. Harris was most successful holding on to wealthy white voters, and lost the most ground compared to Biden in lower-income Latino areas. But those groups saw an different response when it came to local fears about crime, with white precincts undergoing a more conservative shift than Latino precincts.
(The New York Times kind of beat me to this two days ago and found the same thing: the shift toward Trump in big cities was much more correlated with race than actually living in big cities.)
In conclusion, the crime/disorder panic in LA and comparable cities is real, and has had some big electoral impacts — but there’s just no evidence that those impacts powered Democratic failures in the presidential race. National pundits seeking explanations for what happened to Harris (coincidentally in a subject that they have spent a lot of time talking about before) should probably start looking elsewhere.
“Hope he sees this, king.” Thanks, me too!
ALL RIGHT WHAT ELSE IS IN THE NEWS
The air was soooo gnarly
We got hit with a couple of alerts this week: first a Dense Fog Advisory, then an Air Quality Alert that came with a wood-burning ban. These are related. When there’s fog, there’s bad air — smog means smoke plus fog. A weather event called a “shallow inversion” leads to warm air pushing down on cold air and creating the foggy marine layer. Without wind to blow it away it traps the smoke and makes you keep breathing it over and over.
Always very tempting to attribute bad air weeks like this to holiday driving patterns or some economic trend — the Port of LA is setting cargo records, that could be a fun explanation. But it’s really just the fog.
The air has been a little nastier all around in 2024. After three consecutive years of fewer bad air days, we've already had twenty more than last year.
But if you click through to LA Almanac (my favorite website), you can see how much worse things were in the 2000’s, and how much worse than that they were in the 90’s and 80’s.
The air is getting cleaned up by the wind, but the wind has given us another new alert today: a “Particularly Dangerous Situation” fire conditions warning starting Monday night. These normally come around once every three to five years but this is our second one of the fall. The last Particularly Dangerous Situation, from the day after the election, led to the Mountain Fire in Ventura County, which destroyed 240 buildings.
If you like this kind of thing, Tess Lynch does it better at LA Weather.
LA’s housing plan comes up for a vote tomorrow
On Tuesday, the LA City Council is going to vote to approve the city’s plan to produce more housing for the next half-decade or so.
I wrote about this plan a couple weeks ago, and why so many city leaders have agreed to pretend that it will get LA to its housing goals while knowing that it won’t (because they don’t want the political trouble of allowing apartment construction in single-family zones).
If you support opening up the plan for more housing and would like to email the Council offices about it, ACT-LA has a form email for you here, and the Southern California Association of Nonprofit Housing has another one here.
Bike lanes coming to your local cemetery
The city is getting ready to add some new protected bike lanes along a mile-long section of Forest Lawn Drive. This is currently a speedy stretch of road — a study/survey from last year found that 74% of vehicles go 42 mph or faster on this mile, and 80-plus percent of respondents said that cars go too fast and are too close to bikes.
The lanes would go by Forest Lawn Cemetery and take the road from two driving lanes each way down to one, plus a turn lane. The cemetery is very mad and has posted on Instagram about it.
I went to an open house that Council District 4 and the Department of Transportation hosted about the bike lanes on Wednesday (I worked at CD4 while this plan was being developed but to be honest was not very involved).
The event was held at the Junior Achievement of Southern California Center, a job training facility for young people in a building on the Forest Lawn grounds. Everyone was gathered in the Finance Park, a sort of business Epcot with a fake Chick-fil-A and Sports Chalet.
The bulk of the attendees were there to oppose the bike lanes. Things got heated. “You say the delay is only going to be fifteen seconds? Tell that to someone who’s waiting to bury their loved one!” I heard someone yell at a Department of Transportation staffer.
A bunch of people were giving out oversized anti-bike lane stickers. I overheard one of the sticker giver-outers tell someone he was working with Forest Lawn. I watched another guy put one of the stickers on a cardboard Jake from State Farm standee and then show his friend proudly.
Despite the opposition at this event, the earlier survey was much more favorable to the bike lanes, and they’re likely to move forward in the next couple of months. Once the bike-only lanes on Crystal Springs Drive in Griffith Park are finished, these lanes will be part of an actual protected bike connectivity network between the LA Basin and the Valley, something that has never existed in LA.
Thanks for reading.
Good headline. You got me!
I think pretty clearly what we're seeing in the precinct data is that inflation hit lower income communities much harder. Voters are a lot of infuriating things, but they aren't stupid. Most get that local politicians have more responsibility over crime in their neighborhoods and national politicians have more to do with the price of eggs. It's pretty hard to deconvolve the multifactorial nature of all of this. Like, there's the "Kamala is a cop" wrinkle.
My own take based solely on vibes synthesis is that inflation is the top line story, concerns about crime* are a distant second and culture war stuff is an extremely distant third. And the culture war problem seems to be less about "I don't want trans people to have rights" and more about "The impenetrable/preachy language of sociology departments makes me think Democrats don't like people who talk like me"
* I lump immigration into the crime category, because that's been pretty well fear mongered into being one and the same.
But tied in with inflation is Ezra's main concern. I think this is being overly simplified as "Democrats have failed to govern cities well". The culpability is much broader but the problem is more specific: All political leadership in successful urban areas going back to the 1960s has failed to plan for and accommodate a growing population on already built out geographies. This has meant that economic gains in these areas have redounded disproportionately to the landed gentry. It's gotten bad enough in recent years that many people are running the cost benefit of living in these areas and deciding to leave. What Ezra is absolutely right about is that if you're a resistance liberal in one of these high cost urban areas and you aren't focused on solving the affordability crisis, you have been helping Donald Trump.
"you risk delivering your insightful commentary to an empty convention center" is such a blight on our political discourse.