Maggie's Farm

Ed Glaeser has a fine essay up, The GOP and the City - Conservative policies have greatly benefited urbanites. Why won’t Republicans seek their votes?

I doubt that even Rudy Giuliani, to whom a generation of New Yorkers owe gratitude, could have won NYC in a national election. As Glaeser notes,

The Republicans’ abandonment of the city is good neither for their party nor for urban America. The GOP clearly needs a heftier percentage of the urban vote, but winning it by means of fiscal pandering or redistribution isn’t the way to go—partly because such a strategy would cost rural and suburban votes and partly because it would be wrong. A better approach is to offer the good ideas that cities desperately need. Republicans have plenty.

Why is that, when Republicans have demonstrated effective answers to urban issues in the cities in which they have had influence while most deep blue cities are either dying or drowning in red ink?