Taps Coogan – June 4th, 2021

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Back on June 1st, we published a graphic showing the population and party control of Chicago, noting that the city hadn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1927 and that its population had declined by 25% between 1950 and 2021.

Today, we take a look at Philadelphia.

The City of Brotherly Love was the largest city in America during the colonial period and briefly the nation’s capital after the Revolutionary War. Philadelphia was also the second largest city in America from 1790 to 1820 and again from 1860 to 1880.

In more modern times, Philadelphia has struggled economically, becoming somewhat notorious as America’s poorest ‘Big City.’ Its population peaked in the 1950 census at 2.07 million and has since declined by 21% to 1.59 million as of 2021, the same population it had in the mid 1910s.

As the following chart shows, Philadelphia also hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1948. In other words, in the 60 years since Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor stepped down, the city has fallen from the third largest in the country to the fifth.

Next up, we’ll look at Detroit.

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