Violent crime: a winning issue for the Republicans?

It’s the oldest move in the Republican playbook, said Walter Shapiro in The New Republic. When you need a lift in the polls, conjure up “the image of a menacing black man”.

The classic example is the 1988 presidential campaign ad created by George H. W. Bush’s team, which attacked his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis for being soft on crime, by tying him to the case of Willie Horton – a black inmate who had stabbed a man and raped a woman while on weekend release. “By the time we’re finished,” boasted Bush’s campaign manager, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”

A genuine problem

As next month’s midterm elections approach, Republican candidates are once again trying to scare voters with racially tinged talk of out-of-control crime. They’ve seized on it as “an emotionally charged way to offset Democratic gains in the polls” in the wake of the overturning of the Roe vs. Wade abortion ruling.

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If crime has become a big issue in this election, it’s not just because Republicans are talking about it, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. It’s because violent crime is a genuine problem. The US murder rate jumped by an unprecedented 29% in 2020 and, far from falling back to pre-pandemic levels in 2021, homicide figures were worse.

This has left Americans feeling “rattled”. In a Gallup poll earlier this year, 53% of respondents said they worry “a great deal” about crime. Starbucks recently announced that it was shuttering 16 outlets in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, over safety concerns. Believe me: the crime surge is not some “Fox News creation”.

Liberal policies are in question

Democrat politicians need to engage properly with this issue, said Rafael A. Mangual in the New York Post. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, was being disingenuous when he recently talked of “America’s red-state murder problem”, noting that eight of the ten states with the highest homicide rate voted for Donald Trump.

This overlooks the fact that most of these murders are in big cities such as New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi – places overwhelmingly under the control of Democratic mayors. It’s liberal policies on policing, sentencing and early parole that are in question today. The Democrats should either defend those policies, or adjust them. “Telling the American public not to believe what they see on the news, however, is a losing strategy.”