Leading mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani advocates many ideas that have been tried – and recently failed – in other U.S. cities

The cities of Chicago, San Francisco, and St. Louis offer a cautionary tale to residents of New York City as well as for Democrats across the country: If you elect a far-left progressive or Democratic socialist to be your mayor, you should not expect effective governing; instead, you can anticipate declines in all the ways that matter to your residents.  

Chicago, San Francisco, and St. Louis all experienced an increase in lawlessness after electing mayors who ran on platforms that many critics considered anti-police or soft on crime.  It created a vicious cycle that likely led to a loss of population, businesses, and major conferences, which resulted in a reduction in overall tax revenue.  

Under Mayor Brandon Johnson, Chicago saw aggravated assaults at their highest level in two decades, and with arrests being made in only 1 in 7 violent crimes. 

Johnson, who was elected in 2023, increased Chicago Police Department funding but eliminated 833 street-cop vacancies. He also promised to hire 200 new detectives for the police force, but he has yet to fulfill this pledge. 

Chicago Public Schools saw violent crime increase 26% in 2023 as arrests hit a record low of 8% after police were removed from schools.

Many large companies  — including grocery stores, industrial and financial firms — announced they were moving their headquarters out of the Chicago area, citing growing crime in the city as one of the primary reasons for leaving.

San Francisco saw a similar exodus as several businesses left the city under former mayor London Breed, citing “unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees.” These businesses included Walgreens, Gap, Whole Foods, Abercrombie & Fitch, Office Depot, Nordstrom, Disney, and Crate and Barrel. 

Twilio, Workday, and Samsung all cancelled conferences planned for San Francisco in 2024 at the city’s largest event venue, the Moscone Center.  

The incumbent Breed lost reelection in 2024 after a single six-year term as San Francisco. The San Francisco Standard wrote “Yet when they (voters) finally flung open their apartment doors, they were aghast at what they saw: boarded-up storefronts, auto burglaries, encampments, and an exploding opioid crisis.

Former St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones faced a similar fate to Breed, in part due to the following.

Under Jones’ mayorship, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s staffing dropped to historically low levels, with a significant vacancy rate. The department lost nearly 120 officers between January 2022 and January 2023.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau data, the population of the city of St. Louis was 301,371 in 2020 and down 7.2 percent by 2024, with only 279,695 living in the city. 

The St. Louis Business Journal used data from the U.S. Postal Service with the downtown ZIP codes to identify a net loss of 542 businesses between 2019 and 2022.

As with the other cities, St. Louis residents and businesses cited crime as the major reason for leaving. Local television news station, KSDK, spoke with restaurant owners who were shuttering their businesses because of safety concerns and low foot traffic. 

While St. Louis and San Francisco have voted out their mayors, Chicago is stuck with Brandon Johnson until 2027, and residents don’t seem too happy about it. 

Nearly 80% of Chicagoans disapprove of the job that Mayor Brandon Johnson is doing, with only 6.6% approving. 

The experiences of Chicago, San Francisco, and St. Louis should be setting off alarm bells for New York City. A Mamdani mayoralty could spell disaster for New York City and the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party.