The Democratic National Committee on Tuesday announced that the party has decided to hold its 2024 national political convention in a city that has been ravaged by decades of one-party Democratic rule: Chicago.
The Windy City has been run by Democratic mayors for 93 consecutive years. The 50-member City Council currently includes zero Republicans. The Cook County Board of Commissioners has 17 seats; 16 are filled by Democrats. So totalizing is the city's unipartisan political culture that recently vanquished mayoral finalist Paul Vallas, a lifelong Democrat, could not overcome the campaign criticism that he was a "Republican in disguise."
So what has all this unobstructed Democratic governance produced? Population flight, for starters. From a peak of 3.6 million residents in 1950 the city has tumbled down to an estimated 2.7 million in 2021. What for a century had been the "Second City" in the United States has been #3 since the 1980s; what was the fifth-largest metropolis in the world in 1900 is now #5 just in North America.
