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PODCAST

Blue City Blues

David Hyde, Sandeep Kaushik

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer. America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.But as blue cities went their own way, as

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All Episodes

30:30

What Makes a Great City?

Blue City Blues ·

2025/11/26

This Thanksgiving week, Blue City Blues sits down with former traffic engineer and urban planner Ray Delahanty, better known as “CityNerd” on YouTube. We get into the essential question: “what makes a great city?” Ray also shares his insights on the concept of "affordable urbanism" and gives us his honest assessment of one of modern transportation's most divisive projects, the "Vegas Loop." Our editor is Quinn Waller. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gm...

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58:59

Danny Westneat on Why Seattle Can’t Seem to Solve Its...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/11/10

One of Seattle's most insightful chroniclers, longtime Seattle Times metro columnist Danny Westneat, joins us in this episode to discuss the blues that have settled on one of the country's bluest (and most educated and affluent) cities. For more than a decade now, Westneat wrote in a recent post-election column, both Seattle city hall and the voting public have seemed torn between the agendas of the city's two competing political camps: on any objective scale Seattle's left and center left ma...

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63:28

Nick Gillespie on Whether Socialism Is the Future of...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/11/08

In New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani routed scandal-tainted Andrew Cuomo, completing his at first unthinkable, then inevitable rise to become the next mayor of New York City. His David vs. Goliath triumph has vaulted Mamdani from backbench obscurity to political superstardom; progressives around the country are swooning, seeing his success as proof that the unapologetic embrace of bold redistributive policies and vastly expanded government interventions into the marketplace r...

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59:50

Can Blue Urban America Find Common Ground with Trump...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/11/04

On July 24, Donald Trump declared war on the homeless. At least that was how his Executive Order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” was received in blue urban America by many homeless advocates and Democratic elected officials. With billions in federal funding at risk of being pulled from Housing First providers, who operate on the assumption that helping homeless people address their underlying issues like addiction or mental illness is most likely to be successfu...

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53:10

Blue City Crime: What Both Sides Get Wrong According...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/10/28

Like almost everything else in present day America, crime in blue cities has become a deeply partisan and polarized issue. While progressives routinely downplay levels of urban crime and call for a singular focus on “root causes” like poverty and racism, Trump, with the enthusiastic backing of the MAGA law-and-order right, grossly exaggerates the dangers of blue cities. He has ludicrously referred to such cities as “war zone(s)” and "hellhole(s)" as, in a dangerously authoritarian escalation,...

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52:25

Hard Hats and Blue Cities: David Paul Kuhn on the...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/10/14

The modern Democratic Party has a class and culture problem. Blue city leaders struggle to understand their cultural and political disconnect with working-class voters. Why did so many, both within and beyond blue cities, cast their ballots for Donald Trump, who gives tax breaks to the wealthy? When and how did the Democratic Party lose the allegiance of the white (and increasingly of the black and brown) working class? In this episode, former politics reporter and author David Paul Kuhn join...

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53:37

Whitney Tilson on Why Kids in Blue City School...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/10/09

Children in urban public school districts are falling behind. While a handful of lower spending red states – Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and, most notably, Mississippi – have delivered remarkable academic progress over the last 12 years, high spending districts in big cities like New York and Seattle have seen test scores plunge. And it’s not just because of Covid. While over-long school closures in blue jurisdictions did wreak havoc on the educational attainment of children in those ...

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40:55

Has Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Cracked the Code on...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/09/29

Four years ago, a 36 year-old Harvard Law grad and City Councilmember named Michelle Wu rolled to victory as the first elected female, non-white mayor of Boston. Since then, she's racked up further governing successes: Boston these days is often touted as the safest big city in the country, and Wu has delivered progressive wins (albeit incremental ones) on free transit, fair housing and a municipal Green New Deal. Wu, up for re-election this year, provided an eye-popping demonstration of her&...

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54:07

Did Blue City America Get Covid Wrong, Too?

Blue City Blues ·

2025/09/22

This week we take a look back at the COVID-19 pandemic with Steven Macedo, a professor of politics at Princeton University and co-author of "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us." The book offers a self-critical examination of how blue leaders and institutions navigated the unprecedented crisis. Macedo makes a provocative argument: that cosmopolitan elites, influenced by political divides and class blindness, made some significant mistakes in pandemic response. The conversation h...

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54:27

Nicole Gelinas: Blue City Lessons from NYC’s 100...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/09/10

New York Times contributing opinion writer Nicole Gelinas, who writes regularly on New York City issues, is the author of a deeply researched and informative book, Movement: New York’s Long War to take Back Its Streets from the Car. In this fascinating account, Gelinas cogently argues that NYC’s unwinding of its robust early 20th century streetcar system, followed by decades of relentless effort by the city’s political elites to remake the landscape of the dense urban city to be car friendly,...

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47:37

Dispatch from an Urban Drug Market

Blue City Blues ·

2025/08/18

In this special episode we venture outside our respective basements to explore a sprawling open-air drug market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, which resembles similar drug markets in poor, blue city neighborhoods across the US that have been overrun by the urban fentanyl and methamphetamine crises. Whether it's the Tenderloin in San Francisco, or Kensington in Philadelphia, or Skid Row or MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, the well intentioned, largely permissive policies towards hard d...

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48:43

What’s the Matter with Chicago?

Blue City Blues ·

2025/08/10

The Windy City is not just a great American metropolis – the third largest in the United States – it is a world class city, recognized globally as a center of finance, trade and economic dynamism, and as a cultural and tourist mecca. But there is an emerging counter-narrative about Chicago, a declension story of a great and proud urban powerhouse now fallen to its knees, beset by incompetent governance, fiscal mismanagement, declining quality of life, and shocking levels of crime and vi...

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61:33

Trump Just Defunded Public Media. Did NPR Help Bring...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/07/25

In the latest installment of Blue City Blues, we welcomed Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, to join us in delving into the Trump-led defunding of public broadcasting. Zimmerman, whose incisive public commentaries have been published at the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere, is the author of a recent op ed at The Hill in which he called on public broadcasters (and elite universities) to “openly a...

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36:49

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on What Urbanites Get Wrong...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/07/18

The political gulf between educated urban progressives and rural and blue collar Americans has accelerated in recent decades. The consequences for blue cities - and for the Democratic Party - are profound. In this episode, we explore the evolving rural/urban divide with Blue Dog Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Washington’s State’s 3rd Congressional District in Southwest Washington. Outside the blue urban enclave of Vancouver, WA, the 3rd CD is largely red-leaning Timber...

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52:45

Celinda Lake on What NYC’s Political Earthquake Means...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/07/13

Zoran Mamdani's upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary wasn't just a win; it was a seismic event that's shaking the foundations of the Democratic Party. How did a self-described socialist unseat a political giant like Andrew Cuomo? And what does it mean for the future of progressive politics in America's blue cities? This week we spoke with leading Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake, who polled for Joe Biden in 2020 and polls for many progressives includin...

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50:54

Sherman Alexie: A Res Indian Take on Monsters,...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/07/04

In this episode of Blue City Blues, we invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities. Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, along with many short stories, essays and poems, Sherman has spent his life, and m...

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57:54

Katie Herzog on What the Decline and Fall of Twitter...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/06/18

In 2020, when the power of social media – Twitter, in particular – to police the boundaries of acceptable thought in blue cities was at its cultural zenith, journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal launched their boundary-shattering podcast, Blocked and Reported. BARPod, as it’s referred to by its growing legions of fans (us included), is focused on “scour[ing] the internet for its craziest, silliest, most sociopathic content, part of an obsessive and ill-conceived attempt to extract kernels...

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59:37

Is Abundance the Answer to What Ails Blue Cities?

Blue City Blues ·

2025/06/05

In January of 2022, The Atlantic published staff writer Derek Thompson’s manifesto calling for a fundamental reform of progressive governance. “We need an abundance agenda… focused on solving our national problem of scarcity,” he asserted. Fleshed out by New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and a small nucleus of like-minded, mostly Bay Area-based thinkers, including Misha David Chellam, the co-founder of The Abundance Network, that new progressive policy agenda – centered on how to unl...

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54:20

Defund/Abolition Is Dead in Blue Cities. What now?

Blue City Blues ·

2025/05/23

Public safety policy reformer Lisa Daugaard won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2019 for her work creating the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which has become a much touted national model for progressive criminal justice reform. . The idea is to help low-level homeless offenders arrested for crimes like shoplifting by connecting them with shelter and mental health and addiction services, as opposed to just jailing them before releasing them back onto the streets. But Daugaard ...

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45:45

Why Does Progressive Megadonor Nick Hanauer Blame...

Blue City Blues ·

2025/05/12

Seattle venture capitalist and Democratic megadonor Nick Hanauer doesn’t fit neatly into pre-fab boxes. He’s a wildly successful tech investor who denounces tech moguls as “narcissistic sociopaths.” He’s a billionaire “class-traitor” (his term) who’s been sounding the alarm about what he sees as the dangerous obliviousness of the ultrarich to the resentment their class privilege engenders. He’s a proud capitalist who rails against neoliberalism and who developed and popularized the concept of...

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33 results

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