How red states are stripping power from urban voters

The Republican war on America’s greatest cities is not new. If Republicans are to be believed, Chicago is a “crime-ridden, corrupt, dysfunctional hellhole,” New York City is a hellscape of unchecked violence and chaos, and Seattle is a smoking ruin under the control of antifa militants. That big cities are often far safer than small towns never seems to come up.

But Republicans do a lot more to damage American cities than just keeping up the perennial fiction that no one wants to go there because they are so hellhole-y and hellscape-y.

In states where Republicans dominate legislatures, rural Republicans are using their power to punish cities—even when those cities are both home to most of their state’s population and the overwhelming source of income for their state.