What just happened in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and why didn't former reality tv star and social media darling Spencer Pratt live up to the incessant, breathless hype (so sorry for your loss, X)? Now that it’s clear that incumbent Mayor Karen Bass is going to face off in the general election with democratic socialist (and alleged political backstabber?) Nithya Raman, how much trouble is Bass in? What are Raman's strengths and vulnerabilities, and what does she need to do to prevail in November? And will Latino swing decide the outcome of the Bass-Raman establishment vs. insurgent showdown?

Mike Madrid, one of California’s premier political strategists and the author of the definitive book on Latino voters, The Latino Century, joins us to help unpack the soap operatic twists and turns of the LA mayoral contest. If you’re unfamiliar, Mike is a high profile Never Trump Republican who has served as public affairs director for the League of California Cities, co-founded the Lincoln Project and currently is a fellow at the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. He’s one of the rare political consultants who has prominently advised both Ds and Rs, having consulted on Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa’s 2018 California gubernatorial bid.

Regarding LA’s particularly juicy mayor’s race, Mike cuts through the noise with us to dish out the hard truths: as a Trumpy Republican, Pratt’s vibe-centered, harshly doom-and-gloom campaign painting Los Angeles as a hellscape may have wowed rich West-side Angelinos wound up about street disorder and made the hearts of social media influencers go pitter patter, but it was never going to get traction with the city’s core of progressive voters. That said, Mike argues, both Pratt’s and Raman’s relative success is a sign that voter dissatisfaction in the city is high. And the general election contest between Bass and Raman will likely turn into a high octane slugfest, where middle class Latino voters will be the swing bloc who will determine the outcome.

“When you’re in a very strongly Democratic city, a one party town… the questions become less about ideology and more about competence,” Madrid says. “LA is broken. LA is a mess. I love Los Angeles, but it’s broken. LA does not work, and can we say that’s about ideology or not? I don’t think that it is, I think it’s just about competence.“

As we go deeper into the episode, we also get Mike's broader download on why and how both parties have missed the boat when it comes to winning over Latino voters, and why Xavier Becerra was able to come out of nowhere to win the California gubernatorial primary, where he will (very likely) face off against Republican Steve Hilton, which will mean he’s all but assured of being the state’s next governor.

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Mike Madrid, The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, Simon & Schuster (2024).

Rogé Karma, “Why Democrats Got the Politics of Immigration So Wrong for So Long,” The Atlantic, Dec. 10. 2024.

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These days we associate the white working class with rural and small town red America, whereas big blue cities are perceived largely as the playgrounds of the educated and affluent. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the socioeconomics and demographics of blue cities were very different. As early Gen Xers, we vividly remember that during our youth the culture of urban America was indelibly associated with non-college educated white people, and their worldview was deeply ingrained within the broader cultural consciousness.

So for this episode we asked one of our favorite cultural commentators, Native American author and writer Sherman Alexie, to rejoin us on the pod to for a walk down memory lane as we remembered the lost world of the white urban working class. We were inspired to take up the topic by Sherman’s poem, “Ode to Tonya Harding,” in which he uses Harding as a symbol of the young white working class women he grew up around and interacted with in his youth, vibrant and talented women he laments were destined to be excluded from elite cultural spaces because of class divides, style differences and cultural codes.

We key off the poem to spark a wide-ranging conversation about class, race and the sharp cultural shifts within urban America since the days of our youth. Sherman reflects on growing up among poor white communities in rural Eastern Washington as a Native American, describing both solidarity and pervasive dysfunction across racial lines. He argues that poverty creates shared experiences across race, while criticizing modern Democratic Party politics for moving away from class-based concerns and decentering working-class interests.

We wax more than a bit nostalgic for 1970s–1990s working-class culture: restaurant and delivery jobs, service work, heavy-metal parking lots, bowling leagues, mall ice rinks, and the informal cross-racial friendships formed through shared labor, music, and youth culture. We don’t shy away from the racism that was prevalent in that era, but we nonetheless lament how deepening political divides, the rise of social media, and an increasingly insular elite culture have weakened those shared spaces and killed the social spontaneity and the capacity for joy that characterized youth culture when we were young.

“When I was delivering pizzas, it was a bunch of poor white kids. I was the only person of color, I was the only person with more melanin than average, and race wasn’t a part of it,” Alexie recalls. “Inside the place we were all working, we all smelled like pepperoni, we all hated the boss, we all had a crush on that one young woman who had no interest in any of us…”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Sherman Alexie, "Ode to Tonya Harding," April 10. 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Knuckle Sandwich," May 19, 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Billy Elliot," Jan. 24. 2024.

And if you haven't seen it, we highly recommend you watch the short (17 mins) documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," a cult classic.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com

In recent decades, no major American city can match the sharp ups and downs of Portland, Oregon. From a poor but pretty backwater burg of white gearheads and provincials in the 1980s, Portland underwent an exceedingly unlikely – and quite radical – transformation to become one of the country’s most distinctive and culturally vibrant urban renaissance stories in the 2000s (the New York Times memorably declared Portland “cool and refreshingly unneurotic” in 2007).

But then, in the 2010s, the self-described “weird” and fun city, experiencing a rapid influx of young and educated newcomers drawn by post-Portlandia “where young people go to retire” hype, experienced what writer and journalist (and former Portland resident) Nancy Rommelmann has dubbed “Portlandization.” As the decade wore on, she wrote, Portland became increasingly enamored with ostentatious displays of performative virtue signaling and the militant policing of increasingly narrow and rigid progressive orthodoxies. Then that all exploded into the seemingly endless – and endlessly destructive – protests that roiled the city in 2020, which combined with a failed experiment in the decriminalization of hard drugs to bring the city to its knees, and from which Portland still has yet to fully recover.

So we asked Nancy Rommelmann, who has written extensively about Portland’s travails for Reason and Tablet and on her Make More Pie Substack page (she also co-hosts the popular Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em podcast), to join us on BCB to unpack what went so wrong with Portland’s fairy tale rise and why, and where the city stands today (Rommelmann left Portland in 2019 but visits frequently and continues to write about the city).

In our conversation, we trace Portland’s evolution first into a creative, affordable, rising city and then into a symbol of blue-city political and governance struggles. We discuss Portland’s food and cultural boom in the 2000s, the growth of ideological conflict and “outrage culture,” debates around #MeToo and due process, the 2020 protests and attendant unrest, the impact of Oregon’s drug decriminalization experiment, and broader tensions within progressive urban politics.

While Nancy is largely critical of Portland’s recent trajectory, she also acknowledges the legitimate social grievances that have animated the city, and she sharply critiques right-wing and Trump administration efforts to distort and politically capitalize on Portland’s much more benign recent ICE protests, and she ends our conversation with cautious hope that Portland will fully recover.

“I get accused of being like a real naysayer about Portland, and I do have bad things to say about Portland, but I do wish good things for the city, because it's a beautiful city,” Nancy tells us. “The food is can be great, you can grow anything, and why would I not want it to fly again?”

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Nancy Rommelmann, "Portlandization: It Can Happen to a Place Near You," Tablet Magazine, July 11, 2019.

Nancy Rommelmann, "The Dream of the '90s Died in Portland," Reason, March 22, 2021.

Nancy Rommelmann, "Drugs 1 - Oregon 0," Make More Pie, Feb. 29. 2024.

Nancy Rommelmann, "Trump's Troops Return to a City That Moved On: Dispatch from Portland," Reason, Oct. 6. 2025.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com