There was a popular bumper sticker in the 90’s in Burlington, Vermont (my hometown) that read:
At least the hippies plowed the streets
It was an inside joke and a clever political campaign slogan.
In 1981, when Independent Bernie Sanders first won the mayor’s race in Vermont’s largest city, many folks didn’t know what to make of him or Burlington’s new “Progressive Coalition” party that supported him. The city’s old-guard Democrats weren’t happy. As you might expect, there was some red-baiting — this was still the Cold War era, after all. But it turned out that Bernie and his team were quite good at their jobs. He was re-elected again and again, and over the years many of his Progressive supporters won seats on the city council. After four terms, the Independent mayor set his sights on higher office.
Following Bernie, a Progressive won the mayor’s office, but in ‘93 lost his second re-election bid to a Republican. The major controversy was the Progressive mayor’s support for health benefits for unmarried partners of city employees. The new Republican mayor aimed to bring a more conservative approach to City Hall. It didn’t work out so well, and one failure that hit everyone was under-budgeting for snow removal. (Who could have predicted snow storms in Vermont?)
Hence the bumper sticker. The Progressive who had lost, won back the mayorship and was re-elected four more times. Currently, Burlington has a Democratic mayor again, but in all these intervening years — decades actually — a Republican has never again been elected mayor.
On the national level, we’ve also seen time after time that conservatives are lousy at the nuts and bolts of governing. People don’t normally excel at things they don’t like, and conservatives as a rule don’t like government. Progressives tend to be wonks who love the nuts and bolts of governing. It’s not surprising that if you care about something, you tend to do much better at it.
With Washington now thoroughly under Republican rule, it’s just a question of how long will it take, and how bad will it get, before the incompetence is so replete that voters will no longer put up with it.
Smart messaging on the part of the Democratic Party is one thing that could help hasten that.