To explain the Trump shift in cities, look beyond demographics and exit polls.

Ever since Donald Trump came down that escalator nine years ago, the geography of American politics has been moving in one direction: blue cities, red country. Whole Foods counties and Cracker Barrel counties.

Until last week.

Scandals and all, Trump pulled off double-digit gains in and around the country's largest cities. He picked up 19 points in Miami-Dade County, 16 points in New York City, 14 points in Los Angeles County, 12 in Suffolk County (Boston), 11 points in Cook County (Chicago), 10 in Dallas County, and 9 in Wayne County (Detroit). Nassau County, on Long Island, voted for a Republican for president for the first time in decades; Orange County, California, also voted red for the first time since 2012.

The Trump turn was so dramatic it made him the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years, while tight margins in places like New Jersey and Virginia reduced the Electoral College/popular vote split.

It confounds an idea that the nation's biggest cities, with their prosperity, opportunity, diversity, social tolerance, public services, and community institutions, are immune to the alienation and pessimism that Trump galvanized in "left-behind" rural areas eight years ago. The nation's biggest cities were supposed to be the places where the economy was working. That political divide is clearly dissolving, even if all the dislocations of the past eight years have barely budged the metropolitan economy from its perch.

The most popular explanation for this shift has nothing to do with the big-city experience. Rather, it's that cities are diverse, and minority voters are increasingly likely to vote for Republicans wherever they live. This is a powerful explanation of the left's declining performance in and around cities: That's where the Latino ideological shift was concentrated. According to a Washington Post analysis , the more diverse the county, the further the shift toward Trump. Some urban counties with relatively small shares of Hispanic voters that bucked the national Trump shift include King County (Seattle), Multnomah County (Portland), Fulton County (Atlanta), Hennepin County (Minneapolis), and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh).

Another factor is that so many of the country's largest cities are in noncompetitive states. Trump swings were smaller in Philadelphia than in New York, in Milwaukee than in Chicago, in Charlotte and Atlanta than in Dallas and Orlando, and in Las Vegas and Phoenix than in Los Angeles. That might mean that exposure to Democratic organizing and advertising worked in the swing states where it was especially prevalent. Or it might mean that Trump does better in places where people think their vote doesn't matter.

But each of these explanations ignores the more intriguing possibility: that there is something afoot in metropolitan America drawing voters toward Donald Trump. According to the same Post analysis, "The correlation between a county's non-White voting population and its shift toward Trump isn't nearly as strong in suburban or rural areas."

Indeed, big cities have struggled visibly with basic governance issues over the past four years, including keeping schools open, fighting crime, reducing homelessness, and managing the arrival of international migrants. They are also run (mostly) as single-party Democratic jurisdictions.

Which leads to a different theory of Trump swings: Voters are fed up with lousy metropolitan governance. Josh Barro writes about the view from New York City, where:

" Half of bus riders don't pay the fare , and MTA employees don't try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system ... even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don't do much about it, and I can't entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep these people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets. ... [S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated . Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything—and it's really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels ."

And just wait until you hear about Eric "First Stop Is Always Instanbul" Adams .

This is a version of a common right-wing complaint about Democrats. Why should they be trusted to run the country when they can't run a city? Or, as Trump put it at a speech in Detroit last month: If you elect Kamala Harris , "our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she's your president. You're going to have a mess on your hands."

This theory elides the structural disadvantages of Detroit and other cities, but that doesn't mean that voters won't subscribe to it. It's true that the COVID-19 pandemic wasn't kind to the American city, and no one would argue that big U.S. cities are currently case studies for government-solving problems. Some downballot results seem to confirm this anti-incumbent fervor: Voters in California, for example, tossed out the progressive L.A. prosecutor George Gascón, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao.

But there are some issues with this theory too. If the big bad city is the problem, why is the biggest Trump swing in the tri-state area in the exurban towns of Connecticut's majority-white Naugatuck Valley? If crime and disorder is the problem, why did Boston—which recorded just 15 homicides in the first nine months of the year, making it the country's safest big city—move toward Trump faster than Philadelphia did?

Perhaps the greatest self-made Democratic governance problem with an obvious solution is the housing shortage, but there is no correlation between housing inflation over the past five years and the way people voted. Furthermore, if high housing costs and urban disorder are the problem, why were Seattle and Portland the nation's only two cities where Harris increased her vote share? Why did Trump's only precinct victory in Manhattan encompass an affordable housing complex ?

There is another trend that has made its mark in cities since the first Trump election in 2016: the dramatic change in the way people consume information. Traditionally, big cities aren't just places where people share concerns about school districts, sports teams, homeless shelters, and tax rates; they're also media markets, where television, radio, newspapers, and blogs have kept residents informed and shaped their understanding of politics, the economy, and reality. Those sources provided common ground for the everyday conversations through which most information about the world is transmitted.

The replacement of professional news with TikTok and YouTube is often thought of as an axis between facts and bullshit, and polls do show a correlation between being wrong about major issues and voting for Trump. For example, respondents to a Reuters/Ipsos survey last month were much more likely to support Trump if they believed untrue statements about crime, the border, the stock market, and inflation. Supporters of the Biden administration's economy felt the economic record was competing with bad vibes on social media, as even survey respondents who said they were doing well were convinced that others were not.

But there's another axis here, between national happenings and local ones. Ironically, the fragmentation of news delivery has also delocalized us, as events near and far flow toward us in a torrent of collapsed context. The hell with Tip O'Neill; these days, no politics is local.

Perhaps, then, the story about big cities softening up on Trump reflects not the salience of place and an attention to local governance, but a decline of those things, and a regression of the metropolitan voter toward the national mean. We residents of big-city America now walk in the same rain of atomized, influencer-driven information as everyone else. There may be problems and progress in the places we live, but reality is happening on our phones.