9 Mayors on What Divides America, and What Will Save It

From left, Mayors Xay Khamsyvoravong, Jane Castor and Angie Nelson Deuitch.

Asked to assess the country’s political discourse, America’s mayors minced no words.

“It’s broken,” said Xay Khamsyvoravong, the Democratic mayor of Newport, R.I.

“The national political discourse is garbage,” said Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Mo., a Democrat.

“It’s horrible,” said John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Ariz. “And it splashes into school board meetings and to city council meetings. I hope we survive it.”

But despite deep concern about the country’s future, the view from city hall was not all bleak. In recent interviews at a meeting in Kansas City of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a nonpartisan organization of leaders of relatively large cities, mayors mostly described a country that was not as divided as the election year rancor suggested.

The New York Times sat down with nine mayors from nine states and asked them the same nine questions. They came from the West Coast, East Coast and points in between, and from different partisan backgrounds, though big-city mayors skew heavily Democratic. The mayors spoke soberly about problems facing their cities — violence, climate change, housing instability — but also hopefully about the people and places they led.

Here’s a selection of what they said, edited for length and clarity.

Anaheim, Calif.

Mayor Ashleigh Aitken, Democrat