This is not only due to Trump’s unique style of politics. Many Democratic writers have observed that voters in big blue cities are angry. They voted for the highest taxes in the country, but the Democrats who run their state and local governments have proven unable or unwilling to deliver the high-quality government services promised. Public transportation systems are unsafe and unhealthy. Homeless people and vagrants, often on drugs, are everywhere. There aren’t enough police officers to respond to calls. Garbage spoils the urban landscape. Public schools are a complete disgrace.

Soft-on-crime district attorneys funded by Democratic megadonor George Soros are partly to blame, and two such district attorneys were defeated in leftist strongholds Los Angeles and Oakland. But the Democratic Party’s inability to govern goes deeper than that. There is a cancer within the party that is incapable of governing effectively outside deep red states.

The problem preventing Democrats from governing effectively is public sector unions – Big Labor.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, government employees were specifically excluded from the law’s protections.

“All Government employees must understand that the process of collective bargaining as generally understood cannot be transferred to the civil service,” Roosevelt wrote.

“It has its own unique and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management,” he continued. “The nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to fully represent or bind the employer in mutual negotiations with public employee organizations.”

Despite this logical and clear warning about the danger of unionization in the public sector, Democrats began granting collective bargaining privileges to government unions, first in New York City and then throughout New York state. Later, other states began to adopt this practice, including California in 1968.

Today, the California Democratic Party, and thus the California state government as a whole, is entirely controlled by public sector unions. Nothing happens in the government without their approval. Public sector unions, including the California Teachers Association, the California Department of Corrections Peace Officers Association, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the California State Employees Association, collect over a billion dollars in dues each year.

Not a penny is spent to improve the delivery of government services to taxpayers. All of this goes to either increasing what government employees get from taxpayers in the form of higher wages and more generous health and retirement benefits, or reducing the payments government employees have to give to taxpayers by limiting work hours and extending vacation time.

When private sector unions suck too much value out of a private company and that company can no longer offer a good product at a competitive price, the company loses market share and is forced to negotiate a better deal with its union employees or go bankrupt.

But governments are monopolies. When a local government fails to maintain law and order, repair roads, or provide good public education, taxpayers have limited or no options. If they are rich, they can send their children to private schools or move to gated communities. Many wealthy Democrats have done this in California and elsewhere.

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But for the average taxpayer, if a Democratic Party-controlled government runs state and local governments and those governments cannot provide basic services, there is no recourse other than the ballot box. There is no choice but to leave the state altogether, which millions of California families have chosen to do.

Until the public sector unions’ stranglehold on California and other Democrat-run states is broken, the Left will be unable to provide good services at reasonable prices, cities will continue to lose population, and Democrats will lose elections.