How Republicans Stopped Talking About ‘Neighborhood,’ And Why Democrats Should Make That Term Their Own

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

For more than a century, the Republican Party’s conservative wing has run against cities. Early in the twentieth century, their animus was rooted in nativism and religion. They mobilized small-town Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as beholden to popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish machines. Several generations later, during Richard Nixon’s ascent, the party’s right wing roused white voter antipathy toward escalating urban crime and civil uprisings, both supposedly fostered by the federal War on Poverty.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

But this component of Republican rhetoric eventually evaporated. In recent years, Donald Trump and his allies have moved hard in the other direction, portraying urban areas solely as dangerous alien enclaves and as menaces to the “American Dream” anchored in the suburbs. In refusing any reference to neighborhood ties and social virtues, the MAGA compulsion toward urban demonization concedes rhetorical ground that Democrats can occupy to their advantage. Right now, we believe, Democrats should assertively bring neighborhoods back into the conversation, but this time fully on their own terms.

By crafting an unabashedly progressive vision for the importance of urban neighborhoods to national health, they can draw upon the deep-seated affection many Americans have for their local communities and environments. At the same time, Democrats can potentially forge bridges to a segment of small-town and rural voters for whom neighborhood ties also play an emotionally resonant role. But to do this, they need to know something about how this term once percolated through, and now has vanished from, their GOP opponents’ political worldview.

Reagan’s Urban Rhetoric: Yoking Neighborhoods to the Conservative Agenda

It’s seldom remembered today how thoroughly discussions of urban neighborhoods permeated American political campaigns in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Over the postwar decades, U.S. cities had been badly battered by social forces and policy choices that left large swaths of the urban fabric in tatters. What anxious 1960s commentators discussed as an “urban crisis” had come by the 1970s to seem a permanent state of affairs.

Yet amid the urban gloom of the 1970s, a countervailing force took shape: a diffuse yet powerful grassroots movement dedicated to bolstering the redeeming social ties and lifeways that urban neighborhoods still offered. Known simply as the neighborhood movement, this activist upsurge adopted an anti-technocratic ethos and a populist rhetoric. Participants portrayed neighborhoods as “the little guys,” facing off against the vast, neighborhood-destroying machinery of profit-hungry corporations, indifferent city halls, and a disdainful cosmopolitan media. Meanwhile, the authenticity, local relationships, and plucky self-advocacy of historic urban communities became fodder for innumerable newspaper features, from the style and real-estate sections to the city and national political pages.

While most of the movement’s national leaders leaned in a progressive direction, the movement didn’t sit easily on the Left-Right spectrum. In some guises, local affiliates showed the influence of the counterculture, Black or Chicano nationalism, or the labor movement. In other guises, activists wielded the language of neighborhood stability and values to oppose initiatives such as school integration, scatter-site public housing, or disruptions to what 1976 presidential candidate Jimmy Carter — in a much-pilloried gaffe — called the “ethnic purity” of a community. The movement was always an ideological crazy quilt. Yet it fostered an upsurge of grassroots organizing that percolated through the nation’s older cities.

By the time Ronald Reagan embarked on his 1980 White House bid, the word neighborhood had taken on a central role in national politics — one that would only grow that year. At the campaign’s outset, Reagan strategists were highly attuned to the slow-motion splintering of the New Deal coalition. Several came to believe that a domestic focus not solely on workplace and economic issues, but rather on the sanctity of local residential environments, could accelerate the coalition’s final demise.

Indeed, the 1980 Reagan neighborhood strategy was designed to win over a specific chunk of voters within the larger group that would later be dubbed “Reagan Democrats.” The targeted voters here were mostly white, generally lower-middle class, culturally conservative, disproportionately though not exclusively Catholic, suspicious of federal antipoverty and racial justice initiatives, but still rooted in either older city districts or blue-collar inner-ring suburbs rather than the burgeoning suburban periphery.

Moreover, to a substantial segment of these voters, neighborhood wasn’t simply a warm and fuzzy word evoking friendly sidewalk greetings and block-party cookouts. At this moment, to speak of defending neighborhoods from outside meddling — even when done in apparently race-neutral terms — often had a powerful racial charge. “Neighborhood schools,” after all, had been the rallying cry of white urban opposition to busing and redistricting for school integration.

To create an urban rhetoric based around local community life, Reagan’s team had to take the protean language of the diverse neighborhood movement and bend it to their political agenda. This movement’s language was not automatically conservative; it had to be made to resonate in that fashion. This task was taken on by two key campaign speechwriters and strategists, who sought to hitch the term neighborhood to bigger conservative ideological goals.

On the libertarian side was John McClaughry, who had become enamored by the “Small Is Beautiful” philosophy motivating the previous decade’s enthusiasm for experiments in grassroots institution building. Though generally understood as an outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture, McClaughry thought, these impulses could be harnessed to promote an anti-statist economic vision. This was especially true when applied to urban neighborhoods, where government could be portrayed as the great disrupter of organic forms of human-scale organization.

Meanwhile, a conservative cultural component was refined by William F. Gavin, an advocate for a sharp-elbowed urban Republicanism that would be at home in blue-collar Catholic neighborhoods like his boyhood haunts in Jersey City. Neighborhood loyalties could become an even more potent national electoral force, Gavin insisted, when leftist activist movements were saddled with the blame for the decomposition of local traditions and lifeways.

The outcome in 1980 was a candidate with no real experience in traditional urban neighborhoods — and no apparent affection for the struggling cities of which they were a part — who sang their praises in almost romantic terms. This Reaganite theme first emerged in 1978, in a syndicated radio address where the future candidate gauzily pronounced: “The neighborhood scale is a human scale — a place where the real spirit of a community can develop. Many neighborhoods are rich in tradition and memories. And in many, there is a mixture of generations and functions, so that activity is continuous. This in turn works to keep crime down when, as one urban planning critic described it, there are ‘eyes on the street,’ eyes of grandparents and shopkeepers who watch the passing parade.”

And what was to blame for neighborhood decline, in this telling? Virtually every public program — good, bad, or indifferent — that had touched the nation’s urban fabric. As Reagan continued: “Building codes, zoning laws, highway construction, urban renewal, federal mortgage insurance, the so-called Model Cities program, forced school busing — these and other factors have often combined to depress the value of neighborhoods and undercut the fullness of their life.”

These themes offered one anchor for the GOP’s 1980 appeals. It was Gavin who devised Reagan’s resonant five-word campaign slogan: “Family, Work, Neighborhood, Peace, Freedom.” The rallying cry covered giant banners at the Republican National Convention and infused the candidate’s speeches. The appearance of “neighborhood” on that list was no accident. As Reagan pollster Richard Wirthlin later explained, each word was aimed at a coveted bloc of swing voters — with neighborhood meant to especially woo white, blue-collar voters, particularly Catholics. The ensuing adoption of neighborhood symbols was so thoroughgoing that Harry Boyte, a noted left-wing organizer and scholar, would remark in astonishment: “From the campaign rhetoric, one might have wondered whether Reagan had spent recent years involved in some neighborhood renewal project or seeking to get the local savings and loan to give more loans to the community.”

Surprising some observers, Reagan won slightly more votes in urban counties than did his Democratic opponent, President Jimmy Carter. While it’s difficult to tell what role the neighborhood theme played in that outcome, staffers were confident that it helped. By this time, however, the neighborhood movement was already waning in strength as an organized political force. This decline was evident four years later by the comparative absence of “neighborhood” talk from both Reagan’s and Walter Mondale’s presidential campaigns.

But as the 1980s dawned, the Reaganite adaptation of the neighborhood movement’s basic social vocabulary had accomplished at least two things. First, it meant that Republican talk about older cities did not appear entirely hostile and aggressive. The party’s essentially anti-urban policy aspirations were sprinkled over with praise for a specific type of urban social organization recognizable to voters. The story this conveyed to many voters and journalists was that — despite planned GOP slashes to a host of programs crucial to beleaguered municipalities — Republicans admired and sought to augment the urban environments that mattered to everyday people.

Second, these invocations turned neighborhood itself into a contested political term, one that couldn’t be fully owned by the Democrats. This was true even though congressional Democrats, in their 1970s legislative output, had been far more supportive of pro-neighborhood regulations, such as anti-redlining laws, favored by the nation’s leading networks of neighborhood organizations. Now, if Democrats wanted to center pro-neighborhood initiatives in their rhetoric about urban issues, they would need to fight Republicans over that term’s very meaning and importance. As it turned out, this wasn’t a fight that many Democrats of the 1980s were interested in mounting.

Trump’s Urban Rhetoric: The Enemy Within

The current Republican presidential candidate’s political stance toward cities was also forged during the 1980s, but it was one shorn of the paeans to neighborhoods that Reagan crafted so skillfully. Its contours are best captured by Donald Trump’s intervention in the well-known Central Park jogger case of 1989, referenced by Kamala Harris in the recent presidential debate.

In April of that year, a white female investment banker was raped and left for dead in New York’s Central Park. Trump, then known as a real-estate developer, reportedly spent $85,000 on ads in four New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty and the execution of five teenaged defendants — four African American and one Hispanic — collectively known as the Central Park Five. After charging that “roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods,” Trump wrote, “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer.” The teens were found guilty and sentenced to prison.

Thirteen years later, however, DNA evidence and another man’s confession compelled the New York Supreme Court to vacate the convictions. In 2014, the freed prisoners were awarded about $40 million in civil damages. By then, Trump was flirting with runs for political office. Asked if his confrontational style would harm his political prospects, Trump referred to the exonerated Central Park Five. Far from apologizing for calling for the execution of innocent men, Trump boasted that his stance on the case “will help me. I think people are tired of ‘politically correct.’”

For 35 years, Donald Trump has based his political appeal partly on blaming liberal politicians for urban neighborhoods becoming cauldrons of chaos and crime. In some ways, Trump’s rhetoric resembles Reagan’s. When Reagan visited the South Bronx during the 1980 campaign, he famously remarked that he had “not seen anything that looked like this since London after the blitz.” Like Trump, Reagan blamed failed federal policies and recommended tax incentives and private business as the way to revive urban neighborhoods. And like Trump, Reagan supported a get-tough, law-and-order approach to crime.

The similarities, however, end there. In Reagan’s rhetoric, cities had a chance for redemption: if they embraced small government, neighborhoods would thrive again, people would look out for each other, and neighborhoods would become safe and prosperous once more. Trump, on the other hand, sees little room for redemption. Cities are the enemy. You do not redeem your enemies, you defeat them.

Trump is often viewed as totally lacking in verbal discipline, meandering aimlessly between vindictive tirades and self-important bluster. But from 2016 to the present his talk about cities and neighborhoods has demonstrated remarkable consistency. Across the nine years of speeches, press conferences, and tweets that we examined, Trump has hammered home the same message time and time again: cities are enemy territory.

Consider the following quote (odd even by Trump’s standards) from a 2016 meeting with the Washington Post’s editorial board where he questioned the need to fund military alliances like NATO. “So I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that. But at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities.” Note how Trump segues almost effortlessly from discussing international military commitments to supposed urban decay at home.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

To understand Trump’s view of cities and urban neighborhoods, you also need to understand how he views suburbs. Suburbs, in his speeches, are home to the “real” America. They are where the “American Dream,” a phrase Trump turns to repeatedly, is realized. For Trump, the American Dream is not about participating in community structures and projects but about the pursuit of material wealth, primarily through the ownership and defense of single-family homes.

By contrast, cities are the American nightmare, the place where the American Dream dies. Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods. During the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Trump called Chicago “a war zone that’s worse than Afghanistan.”

Under this view, sanctuary cities — whose policies, according to Trump, “force prisons and jails to release criminal aliens directly into your neighborhoods” — are the archenemy. As he boasted at a 2017 rally: “We are cracking down strongly on sanctuary cities that shield criminal aliens. And in order to stop the drugs, gangs, and traffickers, we are building a wall on the southern border.”

And this war metaphor is not just talk. In 2020, Trump repeatedly mulled sending federal troops into cities to confront racial justice protests. In August 2022, shortly before announcing his third White House run, Trump returned to that theme, contemplating sending the National Guard into cities: “In places where there is a true breakdown of the rule of law, such as the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order — and, if necessary, that includes sending in the National Guard or the troops,” he said.

Such talk has policy implications, too. Trump repeatedly attacked the Obama Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which required local governments to develop plans to promote greater integration. While laudable, AFFH has few mechanisms to compel local governments to act. That did not stop Trump, however, from charging that AFFH will “abolish the suburbs.” As Trump tweeted in 2020: “The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low-income housing invaded their neighborhoods.”

In short, Trump views cities as enemy territory. If he could, it seems, Trump would build a wall around cities to protect the suburbs. Trump does at times talk about “saving” cities, frequently touting his Opportunity Zone program, which cut taxes for investors in low-income neighborhoods. In fact, the Opportunity Zone program is a boondoggle for wealthy investors and has generated few benefits for residents of economically marginalized communities. In any case, Trump’s aggressive rhetoric about how cities need to be contained and ultimately repressed drowns out any discussion of policies to help neighborhoods.

Trump’s Rhetorical Retreat: An Opportunity for the Democrats

Undoubtedly, Trump has won political support by stoking suburban fears of urban crime and neighborhood decline. His “get tough” approach to policing has surely won him votes. Many citizens are afraid. Some cities do have higher levels of crime than suburbs. Many central-city neighborhoods face overwhelming challenges. Meanwhile, television and social media exaggerate urban dangers.

Every rhetorical strength, however, has a weakness. Trump’s strategy is a glaring vulnerability that Democrats can exploit. The key is not to focus exclusively on attacking his fortress of lies and exaggerations, but rather to seize the rhetorical ground on urban neighborhoods that Republicans have abandoned and then to imbue it with progressive principles.

One explanation of Trump’s extreme anti-city rhetoric may be that, unlike Reagan, he has conceded the urban vote to the Democrats. As noted earlier, in 1980 Reagan won more votes than Jimmy Carter in urban counties. Forty years later, however, Biden won twice as many urban-county votes as Trump (nearly 31 million to just over 16 million).

The urban rhetoric of presidential candidates, however, cannot be understood in isolation from the broader story they are telling about the nation. Reagan always had a sunny, optimistic narrative. In his 1989 Farewell Address he talked about a “shining city on a hill,” “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace. … And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Even though Reagan and Trump share a faith in unfettered markets, tax cuts for the rich, and hostility to federal social programs, the contrast in their language could not be more striking.

Trump’s neighborhood rhetoric reflects a much darker vision of the nation than Reagan’s. His political appeal is based on activating fears about people who look and speak differently from his target voters. Trump gins up his political base by stoking anxiety about dangerous “others,” a category that includes immigrants, Muslims, and LGBTQ people, but also residents of central cities. In this view, outsiders (abetted by liberal politicians) are driving American society into chaos and decline. Only he, Donald Trump, can save God-fearing native-born Americans from being pushed aside and humiliated in their own country.

It is tempting to respond by countering Trump’s rhetoric with facts: immigrants are not criminals and rapists (in fact, they commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans); cities are not cauldrons of chaos (in fact, crime is down); and suburbs are not uniformly bastions of the American Dream (in fact, many inner-ring suburbs are struggling). Yet if exasperated pro-city commentators end solely by debunking Trump’s anti-cities invective, this may only reinforce Trump’s rhetorical framing (“don’t think of an elephant!”). Facts never trump (pun intended) emotional rhetoric. Democrats need an alternative urban rhetoric that draws from the deep progressive traditions in American politics.

In recent decades, centrist Democrats have utilized a pro-urban rhetoric, but it is a thin rhetoric rooted in a technocratic vision of cities as centers of the new knowledge economy. Journalists and academics are fond of pointing out that urban areas voting heavily Democratic are the most productive and innovative in the American economy. This is true, but such an appeal just underscores the difference between cities and the rest of the country. We need a rhetoric that does not divide cities from the rest of the nation but unites them in a common project.

Given its positive emotional resonance, the word “neighborhood” could sit at the center of that rhetoric. Reagan cannily linked Americans’ affection for strong neighborhoods to his small-government, free-market agenda. Trump’s inability to comprehend the positive resonance of urban neighborhoods has created a rhetorical vacuum that Democrats can fill to their advantage. Democrats can broaden their political appeal by drawing on Americans’ attachment to local communities. But it should not be an appeal to the homogeneous tightknit European-ethnic neighborhood that Reagan and Carter fought over and that Trump has updated with his defense of fortified, predominantly white suburban subdivisions.

Today’s urban neighborhoods are much more diverse, containing not only different races and ethnicities but different lifestyles and family types. Pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods foster face-to-face encounters in shared public spaces that nurture tolerance and a sense of interdependence. They cultivate community without conformity. Strong neighborhoods help people to get along at the same time that they help them to get ahead. They help to reconcile the longstanding tension in American life between individualism and community.

For several key voter groups, this kind of place-based appeal could have meaningful resonance. For instance, in the highly scrutinized Blue Wall states, many neighborhoods — whether in major metropolises or in smaller cities like Erie, Lansing, and Racine — are still suffering from legacies of industrial job loss, which massively destabilized everyday local environments and institutions. In the same states, the prospects and perils facing individual neighborhoods are of concern for many urban and inner-ring suburban Black and Latino voters, especially given how neighborhood health often correlates with opportunities for economic mobility. Responding explicitly to those concerns could counteract minor but real erosion among these two traditionally Democratic voter blocs.

In short, engaging voters on why neighborhoods matter, paired with policies explicitly crafted to nourish fragile communities at the most local scale, can help Democrats expand majorities among current coalition partners while making small but useful inroads in economically precarious Republican-leaning regions.

Besides appealing to specific places and demographics, the language of neighborhood can resonate more broadly with many Americans who yearn for strong and diverse communities. Speeches at the Democratic National Convention contained seeds of a robust language about the crucial role neighborhoods can play in enhancing freedom and equity. In his acceptance speech, vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz used the term “neighbor(s)” seven times. “That family down the road,” Walz said, “they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do. They may not love like you do. But they’re your neighbors. And you look out for them. And they look out for you. Everybody belongs. And everybody has a responsibility to contribute.” At their best, Walz suggested, neighborhoods support the freedom to live as one chooses while also instilling a shared sense of community responsibility: again, community without conformity.

In a powerful DNC address earlier in the week, Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia invoked the language of neighborhoods for similar purposes: “I need my neighbors’ children to be okay so that my children will be okay. I need all of my neighbors’ children to be okay. … I need American children on both sides of the track to be okay.” We should reject the GOP’s zero-sum vision, Warnock was suggesting, that helping disadvantaged neighborhoods threatens the well-being of those doing somewhat better. Strong neighborhoods support shared prosperity.

Such invocations of mutual responsibility and intertwined futures played little part in the Republican anti-statist appropriation of neighborhood themes during Reagan’s ascent. Today, Donald Trump’s dystopian portrayals of cities demonstrate that he is temperamentally incapable of even hollow gestures toward the support that strong neighborhoods can, and often do, offer urban inhabitants up and down the class ladder.

The opportunity for Democrats is clear: their MAGA opponents have vacated the public discourse over what neighborhoods mean for modern American life. Just as Democrats with their defense of diverse families have redefined what it means to be “pro-family,” they also need to reframe what it means to be pro-neighborhood. Neighborhoods that are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse can be successful neighborhoods. They exist in suburbs and small towns as well as big cities.

Many neighborhoods are struggling, however. An appeal to the importance of neighborhoods needs to be more than just talk. Democrats should emphasize that strong neighborhoods are too important to be left to the vagaries of the free market. Neighborhoods need help from government. The expansion of social insurance and safety-net programs like Social Security, Medicare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and childcare subsidies is crucial for the health of economically precarious neighborhoods, but this is not enough.

Many of the policies of the Biden-Harris administration, as well as Harris’s more recent housing policy proposals, can rightly be framed as pro-neighborhood. Addressing housing affordability will help to stabilize neighborhoods, as will programs like the eviction moratorium during COVID. The federal government can support the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement by encouraging communities to eliminate exclusionary zoning. A diverse neighborhood policy agenda could include increased funding for community development block grants that target fiscally stressed communities, stronger enforcement of anti-redlining laws, more funding for home repair, increased support for grassroots community development corporations — and much more.

Whatever policy choices might ensue, placing neighborhoods closer to the center of their vision for our national future will allow Democrats to move beyond cold neoliberal defenses of the American city, while aligning themselves with daily relationships that many voters experience as vital and deeply meaningful.

The authors would like to thank Jake Shaw for helping with the research.