Jacob Frey may have seen his political career unravel on Saturday at Minneapolis’s Target Center. The incumbent mayor, who’d spent four years trying to rebuild his reputation after George Floyd’s murder exposed him as ineffective, lost the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the state affiliate of the national Democratic Party) endorsement to state senator Omar Fateh by a crushing margin. When delegates raised their badges to deliver the 60% victory to the democratic socialist challenger, many of Frey’s supporters had already walked off the convention floor in disgust.

The chaotic scene, which was replete with electronic voting failures, quorum challenges, and Frey’s campaign desperately claiming the whole process was “flawed and irregular”, captured something larger than one mayor’s humiliation. This was yet more proof that Donald Trump, through design or accident, has succeeded in upending the moderate center that once governed American cities. What remains are two stark choices: full socialism or reactive conservatism.

Frey entered office as a typical center-left Democrat, the kind who’d dominated urban politics for decades. Young, good-looking (he had run track in college at William & Mary), and well-educated, he looked straight out of central casting for higher office. That is, until May 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd. Frey’s fumbling response — getting booed out of a protest for refusing to abolish the police department and watching parts of his city burn — turned him into damaged goods.

Fateh, by contrast, promises to end “the inhumane way we have been treating our unhoused neighbors” and represents the ascendant socialist wing of the Minneapolis DFL. His victory speech hit the expected notes: “Today we witnessed a rejection of politics as usual.” What he didn’t say, but what everyone understood, was that this rejection extends far beyond Minneapolis.

The convention itself descended into factional warfare between traditional Democrats and democratic socialists. A group calling itself “Protect Our Platform” tried blocking candidates from accepting both DFL and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsements, complaining that socialists want to “defund the police”, “disarm all law enforcement officers”, and “free all incarcerated people”. They failed, but the battle lines were drawn. Yet when state chair Richard Carlbom mentioned “democratic socialists” in his coalition-building speech, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported that he received the loudest applause of the day.

This pattern repeats across urban America. In New York, Zohran Mamdani just crushed Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary by mobilizing young (and largely white) voters with promises of free buses and rent control. However, Pittsburgh, a city that is trending Republican, went in the opposite direction, with extreme moderate Corey O’Connor defeating progressive incumbent Ed Gainey. He was backed by lots of Republican money and campaigned on hiring more cops and cost-cutting.

These aren’t random local variations. They represent cities making fundamental choices about their political identity in response to the Trump realignment. The moderate Democratic mayor — socially liberal but fiscally cautious — is fast going extinct. In their place, once-monolithic metros controlled by the national center-left party are choosing between Fateh-style socialism and O’Connor-style conservatism dressed in Democratic clothing.

The Minneapolis split between establishment Democrats and socialists mirrors the national party’s identity crisis. But while the national party can paper over these divisions with vague rhetoric about unity, city politics forces a choice. You either embrace the socialist platform or you don’t. You either defend the police or defund them. There’s no middle ground when you’re deciding whether to clear homeless encampments or provide them with clean needles and prophylactics.

Trump didn’t create these divisions, but his presidency crystallized them. By forcing every political question into a binary choice — with him or against him — he eliminated the space for mushy centrism that allowed mayors like Frey to thrive.

Fateh won’t necessarily become mayor — Minneapolis uses ranked-choice voting and the DFL hasn’t successfully endorsed a mayoral winner since R.T. Rybak in 2009. Frey is smart enough to appeal to individual power brokers within the state party, perhaps even fight through November like New York’s Cuomo and incumbent Eric Adams. But the endorsement itself matters more than the eventual outcome.

We’re heading for a world of pure red and blue cities to match our pure red and blue states. Minneapolis chose its direction on Saturday. Other cities will follow, one way or another. Trump may not have intended to reshape urban politics so dramatically, but he’s succeeded in creating the conditions where moderation equals political defeat.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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