The Democratic Party Has Had 60 Years in Every Major Black-Majority City. Grade the Results.

This is not an endorsement of the Republican Party. Let that sentence sit at the top of this piece like a flare in the darkness, because without it, the reflexive machinery of partisan dismissal will activate before the first paragraph is finished, and the data that follows will never reach the mind it was intended for. This is not about Republicans. This is not about ideology. This is a performance review. And when your employee has held the position for sixty years and every measurable metric has gotten worse — when the poverty rate has climbed, the schools have deteriorated, the population has fled, and the bodies have accumulated — you do not need to have a replacement in mind to know that this employee has failed. You simply need the honesty to say so.

The Democratic Party has governed virtually every major Black-majority city in America for more than half a century. This is not a contested claim. It is a matter of public record, verifiable in thirty seconds by anyone with access to a search engine. The question that Black America has never been permitted to ask — or rather, has never permitted itself to ask — is the simplest question in the world: has it worked?

The answer is in the data. And the data is merciless.

Detroit: The City That Disappeared

Detroit's last Republican mayor was Louis Miriani, who left office in 1962. Since then, the city has been governed exclusively by Democrats for over sixty consecutive years. In 1960, Detroit was the wealthiest city per capita in the United States. It had the highest rate of homeownership in America. Its population stood at 1.67 million people, and it was the engine of American manufacturing, the city that built the middle class with its own calloused hands.

Today, Detroit's population is approximately 640,000 — a loss of more than one million residents, a demographic hemorrhage that represents the largest peacetime population decline of any major American city. The people did not die. They left. They voted with their feet, and what they voted against was sixty years of governance that produced the following results:

• Poverty rate: approximately 33%, more than triple the national average
• Median household income: roughly $34,000, compared to a national median above $70,000
• Public school proficiency: in 2022, only 16% of Detroit third-graders were proficient in reading — the lowest of any large city in the National Assessment of Educational Progress
• Municipal bankruptcy: In 2013, Detroit became the largest American city ever to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, carrying $18 billion in debt

One million people did not leave a city that was working. They did not abandon functioning schools, safe streets, and economic opportunity. They left because every institution that was supposed to serve them failed, and the leadership that presided over that failure was re-elected, cycle after cycle, because loyalty had replaced accountability and the party label had become a substitute for results.

Baltimore: Where Money Goes to Die

Baltimore has been governed by Democrats since 1967. In that time, the city has become a national case study in a phenomenon that should trouble every taxpayer and every parent: the complete disconnection between education spending and educational outcomes.

Baltimore City Public Schools spend more than $16,000 per student per year, ranking among the top five highest-spending school districts in the entire United States. That is not a typo. Baltimore spends more per student than the vast majority of suburban districts whose parents would describe themselves as affluent. And the results of that spending are as follows:

In 2023, twenty-three Baltimore schools had zero students proficient in math. Not low proficiency. Not disappointing proficiency. Zero. In thirteen additional schools, only one percent of students met proficiency standards. The city is spending sixteen thousand dollars per child per year and producing, in a meaningful number of its schools, not a single student who can do math at grade level.

Meanwhile, Baltimore's homicide rate tells its own story. The city has recorded more than 300 homicides per year consistently since 2015, peaking at 348 in 2019. In a city of roughly 570,000 people, this produces a per-capita murder rate that rivals the most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere. In 2019, Baltimore's homicide rate exceeded that of Guatemala and Honduras.

The question is not whether the people governing Baltimore care. Many of them do, deeply. The question is whether caring is a substitute for results, and whether sixty years of caring without results constitutes a mandate for continued governance or an indictment of it. In any other field of human endeavor — medicine, engineering, aviation — sixty years of failure would result in a change of approach. In Baltimore, it results in re-election.

Chicago: Two Cities Under One Name

Chicago has not had a Republican mayor since William Hale Thompson left office in 1931 — nearly a century of uninterrupted Democratic governance. In that time, the city has developed into something that functions less like a single municipality and more like two separate nations sharing a zip code.

Downtown Chicago — the Loop, the Magnificent Mile, the gleaming lakefront — has received billions in development investment. It is, by many measures, one of the most vibrant urban centers in the world. The restaurants are world-class. The architecture is stunning. The corporate headquarters multiply.

And then there is the South Side. And the West Side. And Englewood, and Austin, and Garfield Park — neighborhoods where the statistics read like dispatches from a failed state:

• In Englewood, the poverty rate exceeds 40%. Life expectancy is roughly 60 years — twenty years shorter than in the Loop, a thirty-minute drive away.
• Chicago Public Schools spend approximately $16,000 per student. Districtwide, only 26% of students are proficient in reading and 17% in math, with far worse numbers in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
• In 2021, Chicago recorded 797 homicides, the most in a quarter century. The vast majority of victims were Black men between 15 and 35, killed in neighborhoods that have been governed by the same political party for nine decades.

The contrast is the indictment. The same city government that can marshal resources to build a gleaming waterfront, to attract corporate headquarters, to host world-class cultural events, cannot — or will not — deliver basic safety and functional education to the Black neighborhoods that provide its most reliable voting margins. The development money flows to the places that generate tax revenue. The loyalty flows from the places that receive nothing in return.

This is not neglect born of hatred. It is neglect born of certainty — the certainty that the votes will come regardless, that loyalty is unconditional, that there is no electoral consequence for failure. And a political party that faces no consequences for failure will, inevitably, fail.

Newark: The Laboratory of Good Intentions

Newark has been governed by Democrats since 1962. Its trajectory is perhaps the most instructive of all, because Newark has been the recipient of more interventionist goodwill than almost any city in America, and the results illuminate the limits of what money and intentions can achieve when governance itself is dysfunctional.

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark's public schools, matched by an additional $100 million in private fundraising. Two hundred million dollars — a sum that should have been transformative for a city with roughly 36,000 public school students. The result? A study by Dale Russakoff, published as the book The Prize, documented how the money was absorbed by consultants, administrative costs, labor negotiations, and political maneuvering, producing minimal measurable improvement in student outcomes.

Newark's poverty rate remains approximately 28%. Its median household income is roughly $37,000. Its violent crime rate is more than three times the national average. And the city's most reliable political product — voter turnout for Democratic candidates — remains robust, election after election, as if the act of voting were itself a form of deliverance rather than a transaction that demands a receipt.

The Accountability Deficit

There is a counterargument to everything written above, and it deserves a hearing. The counterargument is that Republican governance would not produce better results, that the problems of these cities are rooted in deindustrialization, in white flight, in federal policy, in the legacy of redlining and discriminatory lending — in forces that no city government, regardless of party, could overcome alone. And this counterargument contains truth.

But it misses the point entirely.

The point is not that Republicans would do better. The point is that the absence of competition is itself the disease. When a political party knows — with mathematical certainty — that it will win regardless of results, every incentive for performance evaporates. There is no need to deliver on promises when there is no penalty for breaking them. There is no urgency to reform schools when the teachers' unions deliver votes regardless of student outcomes. There is no pressure to reduce crime when the communities most affected by crime will vote the same way whether crime rises or falls.

This is not a theory. This is the basic economics of monopoly, applied to governance. A company with no competitors raises prices and lowers quality. A political party with no competitors raises taxes and lowers services. The mechanism is identical. The only difference is that consumers can switch brands, while voters in these cities have been convinced that switching parties is a betrayal of racial identity.

Black Faces in High Places

There is a deeper truth embedded in the data of these cities that transcends party politics entirely, and it must be spoken plainly: Black mayors, Black city councils, Black police chiefs, Black school superintendents have governed these cities for decades, and the outcomes for Black residents have not fundamentally improved.

This is not an indictment of Black leadership. It is an indictment of the assumption that representation alone produces results. Detroit has had Black mayors for most of the past fifty years. Baltimore has had Black mayors, Black police commissioners, a Black state's attorney. Chicago has had Black mayors, Black aldermen, a Black president who called the city home. And the South Side of Chicago, and the neighborhoods of West Baltimore, and the blocks of East Detroit remain what they were — or worse.

The lesson is uncomfortable but essential: representation matters, but it is not sufficient. A Black mayor who inherits a dysfunctional bureaucracy, a corrupt patronage system, and a political machine that rewards loyalty over competence will preside over the same failures as his white predecessor — and possibly with less scrutiny, because the racial critique is no longer available, and the only remaining critique is the one no one wants to make, which is that the policies themselves are failing.

The Cities That Changed Course

If the argument were simply that cities are ungovernable, that urban decay is inevitable, that poverty is a permanent condition, the data from these four cities might support despair. But other cities have demonstrated that decline is not destiny.

New York City in the 1990s, under a Republican mayor and a police strategy that was controversial but measurably effective, reduced its homicide rate by more than 70% — from over 2,200 murders in 1990 to fewer than 600 by 2000. The city went from being synonymous with urban decay to being one of the safest large cities in America.

Houston, Texas — a city with no zoning laws, a diverse population, and a political environment that includes genuine two-party competition — has maintained a lower poverty rate and higher economic mobility than comparable cities with single-party governance. It is not a paradise. But it is a place where electoral competition produces at least the baseline expectation of accountability.

The variable is not ideology. It is competition. When politicians know they can lose, they govern differently. When they know they cannot lose, they govern for themselves.

The Performance Review

If the Democratic Party were a corporation, and Black America were the board of directors, the board meeting would go something like this:

"You have managed our portfolio for sixty years. Our property values have declined. Our schools produce graduates who cannot read. Our streets are the most dangerous in the developed world. Our children leave as soon as they can afford to. Our per-student education spending is among the highest in the nation, and our outcomes are among the lowest. You have had six decades, unlimited political support, reliable voter turnout, and no meaningful opposition. Present your results."

No corporation on earth would retain leadership with this record. No sports team would keep a coach who lost every season for sixty years. No restaurant would retain a chef who poisoned the customers for six decades. And yet the suggestion that Black voters should hold Democratic politicians accountable — not even switch parties, merely demand results as a condition of continued support — is treated as heresy, as racial betrayal, as evidence of insufficient Blackness.

This is the most effective prison ever constructed: a prison in which the inmates defend the warden, attack anyone who questions the sentence, and call the act of walking out the door a form of treason.

What Accountability Looks Like

Accountability does not require a conversion to conservatism. It does not require voting Republican. It does not require abandoning every progressive principle. It requires one thing and one thing only: making your vote conditional.

It means telling your city councilmember: if my child's school does not improve, I will vote for someone else. It means telling your mayor: if the homicide rate does not decline, you will be replaced. It means treating the ballot not as a tribal loyalty oath but as what it actually is — a hiring decision, made by an employer who has the right and the duty to fire employees who do not perform.

Every great leader in Black American history understood this. Frederick Douglass left the Republican Party when it failed to deliver. A. Philip Randolph threatened a Democratic president with a march on Washington to force desegregation of the military. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to endorse either party, understanding that political independence was the precondition of political power. The current posture — unconditional loyalty to a single party regardless of outcomes — would have been unrecognizable to any of them.

The numbers from Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, and Newark are not opinions. They are not conservative talking points. They are not Republican propaganda. They are the exposed bones of cities that were once alive, cities that housed millions, cities that built the Black middle class, cities that now serve as monuments to what happens when accountability dies and loyalty becomes its own justification.

Sixty years is enough time to judge. The results are in. And loyalty without accountability is not loyalty. It is captivity. The door is not locked from the outside. It never was.