How Socialism Captured the West Coast
Cities including Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles have become new political battlegrounds for a socialist resurgence.
New York’s far Left may think that it is the vanguard of an envisioned American socialist commonwealth, but the real action this fall will be on the West Coast, where socialist candidates have won the mayor’s office in Seattle, seem on track to take control of the Portland City Council, achieved a critical congressional victory in Denver, and, most importantly, could even triumph in the mayor’s race in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city.
The West Coast has long had a radical tradition, dating back to the Wobblies, who shut down Seattle with a general strike in 1919, and Upton Sinclair’s Depression-era End Poverty in California (EPIC) socialist campaign in 1934. Postmaster James Farley remarked two years later: “There are forty-seven states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington.”
In the recent past, West Coast Democrats had generally embraced mild redistribution as well as civil and gay rights but rarely waved the red flag. After all, they represented areas that appeared to be the prime winners in the emerging tech-driven economy. Today, however, Seattle, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, and San Jose suffer some of the nation’s highest office vacancy rates, sometimes higher than 30 percent. Seattle’s downtown is largely populated by “zombie buildings“ deserted by employers, while Portland’s once widely celebrated central core has become ever more dystopian.
Much of this reflects a radically changing job market. For years, West Coast cities lured young, educated professionals, particularly in tech and business-service jobs; in Los Angeles, the key attraction was, of course, the entertainment industry. Information jobs have since retreated to 2017 levels, and California has lost these positions faster than anywhere else in the country. In Seattle, Amazon and Microsoft have laid off more than 46,000 employees since 2023, accounting for 85 percent of layoffs by Seattle-area tech companies. In Los Angeles, entertainment has shed 42,000 jobs between 2022 and 2024. Since 2018, corporate headquarters have left San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, with many relocating to Dallas, Austin, Nashville, Phoenix, and Houston. Already-onerous tax and regulatory regimes have prompted some companies founded in the West, such as Starbucks and Amazon, to shift investment to less expensive and less socialist-leaning states, laying off employees even as they enjoy record profits.
Unemployment now exceeds the national average in Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, while labor shortages persist across the South and Great Plains. California alone has a worker surplus estimated at 500,000, and Oregon, meantime, ranks 48th among the states in per capita job growth over the past year.
The other key shift has been demographic. As in New York, the left-wing surge on the West Coast, particularly in the big cities, has benefited from increasing numbers of young, largely childless, and often well-educated voters. Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, and Denver have among the lowest birthrates of any American city. Many West Coast cities, once filled with newcomers, have lost population both to other states and their own surrounding suburbs.
A decline in opportunity is feeding the socialist rise. The “yuppie dream“ of yesterday has faded as young urbanites embrace New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism.” The “economic anxiety“ they feel is not imaginary; according to the New York Fed, 42 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. These young people, disappointed by reality, are driving the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
As Tom Edsall observed recently in the New York Times, this is not a working-class movement or driven by “people of color.” Portland and Seattle are among the whitest big cities in America, and most unions, particularly outside the government sector, remain tied to the more centrist Democratic establishment.
Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: Artur Westergren via Unsplash, Public Domain.
