I too live in an extremely democratic leaning city and the only time my waste has not been picked up was when I forgot to push it out to the curb.

Even the brightest among the HN crowd can fall into the trap that "The other side is incompetent." There are geniuses and idiots on both sides. If your city is poorly run, its not because your city is run by one party over the other. It's because the people running your city is competent at running a campaign and incompetent at running a city. There's not much more to it than that.

BTW, the people picking up trash in our neighborhood are bleeding heart liberals.