‘Irrelevance’ is the word the Times is using for the state into which the Republican Party has lapsed in our cities. It argues, in a page one dispatch, that the GOP has grown “irrelevant” in big city elections and that this has come at a “cost to Conservatives.” It issued the dispatch the day before the election that, once the ranked choices are sorted out, will have determined the Democratic nominee and likely next mayor of New York.

Then again, it depends on the meaning of irrelevant — or Republican. Or Democrat. With the outcome of the primary still unknown, a Times headline is announcing: “Democrats Show New Urgency on Crime, Signaling a Shift.” The paper reports that Eric Adams, a former Republican and the plurality winner in the primary first tally, and President Biden “point to a new move by Democrats toward public safety.”

The story says: “Facing a surge in shootings and homicides and persistent Republican attacks on liberal criminal-justice policies, Democrats from the White House to Brooklyn Borough Hall are rallying with sudden confidence around a politically potent cause: funding the police.” It reminds us of Reagan’s immortal line about how there’s no limit to what one can accomplish if one doesn’t care who gets the credit.

Or blame. The Times is, don’t forget, an author of the de Blasio fiasco. It endorsed him in a notorious editorial in 2013. “We’re electing a mayor here,” it boomed. It wanted “someone to keep streets plowed and safe, budgets balanced, schools working well and constituents of five boroughs satisfied. Someone to sustain and build on the 12-year legacy of Michael Bloomberg . . . Luckily, Mr. de Blasio is up for it.”

Mr. Bloomberg had gained the mayoralty as a Republican, succeeding, in Rudolph Giuliani, another Republican, who proved that crime could be conquered in New York. Mr. Bloomberg used stop-question-and-frisk policing to keep crime at bay. Federal appeals judges might have sustained that legacy, but Mr. Bloomberg failed to press his case aggressively enough, and Mayor de Blasio backed off on crime.

It was inevitable — and many warned — that crime would begin a comeback. Even so, it was hard to imagine quite the combination of old fashioned criminal violence and political rioting such as New York has seen in the past couple of years. And a demonization of the police as horrifying as what has gone on in New York during the years that the Democrats became the only party that is “relevant” — meaning guilty.

Mayor Bloomberg himself repudiated his own policing strategy in an effort to win the Democratic nomination for president. That got him a handful of votes — at American Samoa. New York’s mayoral campaign, though, hasn’t heard much about how, say, a Democratic-led anti-crime push would be constrained by the kinds of handcuffs the Democrats and their allies in the press got the courts and Mayor de Blasio to put on the police.

Our former colleague, Errol Louis, writing in the Times, suggests that the contrast between Mr. Adams and another candidate still in the running, Maya Wiley, reflect a split among Democrats. We’re going to wish good luck to whoever wins. Our guess is that once this paragon is installed in City Hall, the Republicans, or their ideas, will start looking more relevant than they appear to the press that plumped for Mr. de Blasio.

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Image: Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist. Correction: American Samoa is from where Mr. Bloomberg won a handful of delegates in the 2020 Democratic primary. The place was given incorrectly in the bulldog edition.