Los Angeles Voters Know Their City Is Failing. They’re Not Voting Republican Anyway.
- 19 Los Angeles voters the Manhattan Institute convened in two July 2026 focus groups — nine registered Democrats, ten with no party preference — City Journal, Aug. 6, 2026
- $2,400,000,000 in homelessness spending a court-ordered audit found the city of L.A. failed to properly track or verify — Alvarez & Marsal / Judge David O. Carter, Mar. 2025
- 24% Mayor Karen Bass's (D) job-approval rating among L.A. voters, with 47% disapproving — Emerson College Polling, Mar. 2026
- 45,194 people counted homeless within the city of L.A. in 2026 — up 7.9% from the year before — LAHSA 2026 Homeless Count
- 25% vs. 45% Republican share of L.A. County's registered voters, against Democrats — with roughly a quarter registered with no party — California Secretary of State, June 2026
In July 2026, researchers from the Manhattan Institute sat nineteen Los Angeles voters down in two rooms and asked them, in plain language, how the city was doing. The voters did not hold back. They described a city that has become prohibitively expensive, increasingly disorderly, and persistently incapable of performing basic municipal functions — encampments, potholes, break-ins, government waste, a quality of life that no longer matches the cost of staying.
The resulting piece, published by City Journal on August 6 under the byline of Jesse Arm and Christopher F. Rufo, reached a conclusion that should unsettle Republicans banking on discontent alone to flip blue cities: the dissatisfaction is real, but it has not produced ideological reconsideration. Most participants diagnosed L.A.’s failures as evidence the city needs more of the progressive policy it already has — not less.
City Journal’s focus groups are a real, useful piece of qualitative research — not a statistically representative poll of Los Angeles. Nineteen people cannot speak for four million residents. What follows treats the focus-group findings honestly as one input, and puts hard numbers underneath them: audits, budgets, crime data, and the actual results of L.A.’s own 2026 mayoral primary.
The design was straightforward: one session of nine registered Democrats, a second of ten voters registered with no party preference, assembled with a range of ages, races, occupations, and neighborhoods. Cost of living came up first and hit hardest — participants described choosing which bills to pay, watching friends move to cheaper cities, and grading L.A.’s officials a C or worse. “Why are these our choices?” one participant, Ryan, said. “Most of the time, I end up picking the lesser of two evils.”
Crime came next, in specifics: shootings, burglaries, car break-ins, open-air drug use, a car set on fire by a vagrant. “I replaced four tires in one year because of potholes,” participant Kevin said. “This is basic stuff.” Many said they had stopped reporting crimes, assuming police inaction. On homelessness, participant Karmen argued for expanding services — “we know UBI, health care, ongoing substance-abuse treatment, harm reduction, and more housing help reduce homelessness” — a compassion-first framing that ran through both sessions even as participants conceded the current approach isn’t working. “It’s always gotten worse,” participant Glenn said. “It’s always just gotten worse.”
The focus group’s “government waste” complaint is not a feeling; it is documented. A court-ordered audit by consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, overseen by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, examined $2,400,000,000 in city homelessness spending and found roughly 2,300 supposedly funded housing sites with no documentation confirming they existed, 70% of reviewed contracts showing no verified expenses in a year, and $1,700,000 paid to a company employing the CEO’s husband with no performance reports on file. Judge Carter called the lack of independent review “ridiculous.”
The money kept moving anyway. LAHSA approved a $496,000,000 budget for 2026-27, down 40% from the prior year’s $829,000,000 largely because L.A. County pulled roughly $300,000,000 in annual funding out of the agency entirely, standing up its own Department of Homeless Services and Housing with more than $843,000,000 budgeted for FY2026-27. The city of L.A. closed a roughly $1,000,000,000 budget shortfall for FY2025-26 out of a $14,000,000,000 spending plan. And the crime picture is genuinely mixed: LAPD’s 2025 report shows homicides down 19% — the lowest count since 1966 — while property crime still runs 45.3% above the national rate, which tracks closely with what focus-group participants actually described: break-ins and disorder, not murders.
None of it has helped Mayor Karen Bass (D) politically. A March 2026 Emerson College Polling survey put her job approval at 24%, with 47% disapproving; a separate UC Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll the same month found 56% of likely voters viewing her unfavorably. She has acknowledged missing her own 2023 pledge to end street homelessness by 2026, citing “bureaucratic barriers,” while blaming federal funding cuts for the city’s 2026 homeless-count increase.
The Los Angeles City Fire Department has an entire "equity" bureau which hopes to "advance DEI within the fire service." Last year, LAFD cut $7 million from the overtime budget, which impacted air operations and disaster response, but kept the DEI department. Insane.
Here is the part that should worry Republicans more than it comforts them: Los Angeles County’s registered voters are 45% Democratic and just 25% Republican, with the rest largely no-party-preference voters who, per City Journal, still interpret the city’s failures through a progressive lens. Government waste proved “special interests” had corrupted city hall. Disorder proved social services were underfunded. Housing scarcity proved developers held too much power. Several participants named City Councilmember Nithya Raman (D), a Democratic Socialists of America member, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) as the kind of outsider who would “finish the job” establishment Democrats haven’t.
Candidates carrying a Republican label faced a skepticism the data confirms is well-founded. Reality TV figure Spencer Pratt, running as a Republican, actually led the L.A. mayoral primary field for second place on election night in June 2026. Then Los Angeles County spent a week counting mail ballots that broke overwhelmingly Democratic; by the following Monday the standings read Bass roughly 34%, Raman roughly 29%, Pratt roughly 26% — third place, eliminated. Even the county’s one elected Republican, Supervisor Kathryn Barger (R), has co-authored the same motions expanding the county’s homelessness bureaucracy as her Democratic colleagues. And DA Nathan Hochman (R-turned-independent), who ran as a Republican for state attorney general in 2022 before winning the technically nonpartisan D.A.’s race as an independent in 2024, is the exception that proves it: a single-issue, down-ballot win on crime, not evidence of a broader realignment.
Los Angeles spends over 1 million dollars a person to reduce homelessness, but 6 people a day die on our streets. It's criminal, tragic, & heartbreaking.
President Trump has made the case against Bass repeatedly, including after the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires and again amid the June 2025 National Guard deployment to Los Angeles — documented positions he has restated in similar terms multiple times.
Gross incompetence. The fire is spreading rapidly for 3 days — ZERO CONTAINMENT! This is what happens with Democrat leadership in Los Angeles.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrase of Trump's Jan. 2025 Truth Social posts on Bass's wildfire response, as reported by Forbes, The Hill, and NBC News.
The very incompetent 'Mayor' of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, should be saying, 'THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP, YOU ARE SO WONDERFUL,' instead of complaining.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrase of Trump's June 2025 Truth Social posts on Bass amid the National Guard deployment, as reported by Forbes and Western Journal.
L.A.’s actual 2026 election cycle already ran the City Journal thesis as a live experiment. The November runoff for mayor is Bass versus Raman — two Democrats, one an incumbent with a 24% approval rating, the other running to her left. There is no Republican on the ballot. Compare that with San Francisco, where voters in November 2024 ousted a progressive incumbent for Daniel Lurie (D), a moderate who has emphasized public order and cites former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a governing model. San Francisco moved toward competence within the Democratic Party. Los Angeles’s equivalent move, so far, is toward more of what produced the complaints in the first place.
“Voters know that the status quo is failing, but many believe that the answer is to move further in the direction the city has already been traveling.”
Jesse Arm & Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal, Aug. 6, 2026
None of this means Los Angeles is content. It means the city’s frustration has, so far, one exit and it does not run through the GOP. City Journal’s own read is that L.A. may need “one more phase of progressive experimentation” — a Raman-style administration testing whether more of the same finally works — before a reform coalition with any appetite for a different diagnosis can take hold.
City Journal’s focus groups are nineteen voices, not a poll — but the receipts underneath them are not qualitative at all. A court-ordered audit found $2,400,000,000in L.A. homelessness spending the city couldn’t document. Mayor Karen Bass (D) sits at 24% approval. Property crime runs 45% above the national rate even as homicides hit a 59-year low. And when Los Angeles actually voted in June 2026, the Republican in the mayoral field led on election night and finished third once the mail ballots were counted, leaving an all-Democrat November runoff. Frustration and realignment are not the same thing. In Los Angeles, right now, only one of them is happening.
