Taps Coogan – June 13th, 2021
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First we looked at Chicago, then Philadelphia, then Detroit, and now our tour of Rust Belt cities takes us to Milwaukee.
Brew City is the largest city in Wisconsin and was once home to the largest brewing capacity in the world.
After the Great Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed rival Chicago’s beer industry, Milwaukee took the crown as the biggest brewer in the nation and eventually the entire world thanks to massive Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, and Miller breweries in the city. Milwaukee held on to the title of ‘World’s Biggest Brewer’ until a worker strike at the Schlitz plant led to its closure in 1981 and the breakup of the company, kicking off a period of closures and consolidation in Milwaukee from which production never fully recovered.
More recently, Milwaukee is vying to become ‘Murder City,’ USA, boasting the fastest rising murder rate of any large city in the nation and the 6th highest violent crime rate.
Milwaukee’s population peaked in the 1960 census at 741,000 people. It has declined 21% since then to 587,000 today, the same population it had in 1940, and the population is still dropping. The last time Milwaukee had a non-Democrat Mayor was also in 1960, Socialist Frank Zeidler. The last time Milwaukee elected a Republican mayor was 1906, a whopping 115 years ago.
The next stop on our tour will be… Baltimore.
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The demographics of a lot of these cities make it an electoral. impossibility for modern republicans to be elected. It would appear that the future of the Republican Party will continue to be rural. With post-covid remote working and population declines in large cities, that could be a winning recipe but probably not for several years.
IMO it’s a circular problem. Republicans don’t run competitive candidates in most of these cities because they can’t recruit competitive candidates. Why? Because nobody thinks a Republican can win. Nobody thinks they can win because they don’t have competitive candidates and the associated political machinery needed to win and haven’t for closing in on a century. Just look at the current New York mayor’s race. It’s a fait accompli that whoever wins the Dem. primary is mayor and that’s despite the outgoing mayor being wildly unpopular. That’s actually quite new for New York, but it’s been going on in these… Read more »