Big city blues: How metro areas run by Democrats haven’t recovered from COVID-19

Major Democratic-led cities have failed to recover their pre-pandemic foot traffic, which has caused a decrease in economic activity for the blue cities, according to a new study from the University of Toronto.

Cincinnati, Raleigh, Chicago, Portland, Houston, Columbus, Seattle, Minneapolis, Louisville, and St. Louis make up the bottom 10 of 66 metropolitan areas that have seen the least amount of foot traffic recovery since 2019, according to the study. All 10 have Democratic mayors.

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“It’s almost all of these big blue cities. It’s San Francisco, it’s Oakland, it’s Minneapolis. It’s my home city of Chicago,” economist Stephen Moore said on Varney & Co. Monday. “These numbers are really distressing.”

Sacramento, New York City, and Detroit also ranked near the bottom, with all three cities only gaining 66% of their foot traffic back since 2019. The study measured the number of unique visitors via mobile device use from March to mid-June of 2023 and compared it to the same time frame in 2019.

Moore credited the loss in foot traffic to the recent surge in crime that has plagued liberal cities. The crime waves are the result of a decrease in arrests for nonviolent crime due to jails and prisons being overcrowded.

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“Why is that? I think it’s because of the fact that … the carjackings, the crime, the fact that you have these high taxes in these areas,” Moore said. “By the way, when you have fewer people going into the cities, think about the impact that has on the stores, the restaurants, and so on.”

Las Vegas, which has an independent mayor, ranked at the top of the list and is the only city to have an increase in foot traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic. Bakersfield, which has a Republican mayor, ranked fourth. St. Louis was last with just 53% of foot traffic regained since the pandemic.