It wasn’t long before Republicans blasted Rhodes-Conway across social media. Many incredulous posters on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, questioned whether Madison’s mayor had been to San Francisco, Chicago, Portland and other cities experiencing high rates of crime and homelessness.

Others noted that Rhodes-Conway’s comments came before the debate in Milwaukee, a city where shootings left at least three dead and 20 injured between Friday and Sunday, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“It’s extraordinary to think about the violence that’s claiming innocent lives literally every week in every major city in this country,” former Vice President Mike Pence said at the debate. “And yet, Democrats and liberal prosecutors in major metropolitan areas continue to work out their fanciful agendas, to do bail reform and go easy.”

In her remarks, Rhodes-Conway encouraged critics to “come to places like Madison, Wisconsin, where we have the lowest unemployment rate — or damn near close to it — in the country. Where our population growth and our economic growth is driving the state of Wisconsin.”

Madison is the urban example of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards’ comment about George H.W. Bush that Bush was “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”

Despite the ongoing blowback, Rhodes-Conway said Thursday the past day for her had been interesting but normal. She stood by her Wednesday remarks.

“I think that the challenges that our country faces, challenges around homelessness and lack of housing, challenges around alcohol and substance abuse, challenges around violence, challenges that come from poverty — those are universal. They happen everywhere.

“Those challenges are not unique to one form of living or governance,” she continued. “And yet they get blamed on cities, which I think is patently unfair.”

Rhodes-Conway said some issues, like drug usage, are more visible in places like San Francisco than elsewhere only because people are more clustered in cities.

She named a long list of cities with policies she admires: The tiny home village in Olympia, Washington, built to address homelessness; Burlington, Vermont, sourcing all of its electricity from renewable sources; the effort in Springfield, Illinois, to bring broadband to every home.

Rhodes-Conway said that while some cities were declining in population, many of those people were flocking to other liberal cities, not rural areas.

“They’re searching out places like Madison because of our quality of life, and because of the work that we’ve done to invest in that quality of life,” she said.

In fairness, Madison may not be the most representative of Democratic-run cities (nor is it, technically, run by Democrats; local offices like mayor and City Council are nonpartisan positions, but the city is famously liberal and votes overwhelmingly Democratic).

The city’s violent crime rate is lower than the national average, and its average income is higher. And unlike many of the country’s cities with 250,000 or more people, Madison is growing.

Proof that state government is too large.

With a major university and thousands of government jobs, Madison’s economy has enjoyed a buffer against recessions and the globalization that crippled industries in many of America’s cities, especially in the Midwest.

Job stability and high income have been repeatedly linked to low crime. So has obtaining a high level of education.

The city’s median household income is about $70,500, just over the national average of $69,000. Here, 58.5% of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 33.7% nationwide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

There were five homicides in Madison in 2018, four in 2019, 10 in 2020 and 10 in 2021, according to the Madison Police Department.

Buffalo, New York, with a median household income of $42,000 per year, saw an average of 54 homicides per year between 2006 and 2022, according to city data. St. Louis, where the median household income is $48,750, saw around 200 murders per year between 2019 and 2022. In Toledo, Ohio, where the median household brings in $41,671, there were 36 homicides in 2018, 38 in 2019 and 57 in 2020, WTOL reported.

Safe or not, Madison is still a Democratic city, which presents its own reasons for conservatives to be dismissive of the mayor. The city has proudly worn the motto, “77 square miles surrounded by reality.”

In this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election, about 90% of the city’s voters went for the liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz. In the state’s other Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, she received about 80% of the vote.

The city has become increasingly important for Democrats in statewide elections. And given the few swing states left in America besides Wisconsin, Madison has also become increasingly critical in national elections.

Take the 2020 election, where President Joe Biden won Wisconsin by 21,000 votes after securing 136,000 votes in Madison to former President Donald Trump’s 23,000.

Now, with less than a year and a half until the 2024 presidential election, the political fortunes of those on the stage Wednesday — or of Trump, who skipped the debate — could again be determined in Democratic cities like Madison.