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More to the point, would NYC going to Hell even hurt the Democrats? Granting that John Lindsay was something of an inverse Bloomberg in terms of party affiliation, his tenure as mayor actually being a disaster didn't hurt the Democrats. They held the Mayorship continually until Giuliani, won the Governorship of New York immediately following his tenure, and Carter won New York in 1976.
I do think that the GOP is at risk of reading too much into '24 as it did in '04. '24 in particular was weird. Between the Biden drama and inflation the election was arguably the GOP's to lose, and they barely won it (See also: the 2022 midterms.). Trump is polarizing but at least some variety of popular. The rest of the GOP are almost as polarizing and lack the charisma.
More fundamentally, the GOP as a party (Trump sort of has a direction, but it's a largely incoherent and surface level imitation of Pat Buchanan, and the GOP has neither the numbers or the consensus to push anything through Congress.) hasn't answered its post '06/'08 dilemma. Educated Republicans (aka. the Mitt Romneys of the world) aren't a big enough coalition to win Presidential elections (and probably not the House since Democrats have caught up to REDMAP), their priorities aren't shared by anyone else (Hint: 2012 was as white, male, and boomer as the college educated will ever be again.), and 40 years of largely uninterrupted culture war losses mean that they hold no sway with the high school educated base. The hardest of copers can note that Reagan got smashed in the '82 midterms, but there isn't an incoming equivalent of the 1-2 tail wind of crashing interest rates and oil prices that juiced the economy in the mid 1980s. Even getting rid of tariffs returns us to the baseline of late-stage Biden.
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