No one’s ever going to vote for a candidate who promises lower taxes on billionaires, dirtier air and water, unlimited exposure to Ted Cruz, and a fetus in every uterus. So knowing that their natural constituency is pretty much limited to piggish plutocrats, overzealous forced birthers, Donald Trump’s caterwauling orc horde, and the semi-cognizant knockwurst inside Mike Lindell’s head, Republicans do the same thing every election cycle: misrepresent the dangers ordinary Americans face in their daily lives.
During the 2014 midterm cycle, the big bugaboo was Ebola. (Say, remember when Donald Trump claimed that Democrats and the media would suddenly stop discussing COVID-19 after the 2016 election? That didn’t happen, but golly, Republicans did stop talking about Ebola—a trifling problem compared to the novel coronavirus—after the 2014 midterms. Weird how that works.)
In 2018, Trump and his confederates played up the “threat” of so-called migrant caravans that were inexorably marching toward the heartland to lower both the crime rate and inflation. (Republicans, of course, implied they were coming to murder Grandma, but the only retinue of ruffians I can think of who want to endanger elderly people is the GOP itself.)
Now? Republicans are scaring the bejeezus out of voters with talk of rising crime. Of course, there’s some question about whether crime, as a whole, really is on the upswing. And while homicides certainly have increased, they first shot up in 2020 when—let me just double-check this; oh, right—Donald Trump was president.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped everyone from Dr. Mehmet Ooze to RoJo the Clown (sorry, Senator Rojo the Clown) from painting their Democratic opponents as soft-on-crime radicals whose ideas would unquestionably ensure your violent death at the hands of weed-besotted hoodlums.
But a new study shines a harsh light on Republicans’ latest mound of meretricious merde. Turns out jurisdictions with progressive district attorneys have actually seen less of a spike in crime than those run by more traditional DAs.
Ronald Brownstein, writing for The Atlantic:
These [Republican] attacks assume that the changes in criminal-justice policies that some states and many cities have pursued over the past few years are undermining public safety and fueling higher crime rates.
But an exhaustive new study released [Oct. 20] by the Center for American Progress refutes that allegation. Conducted by a team of seven academic researchers, the study compares cities that have elected so-called progressive prosecutors with places whose district attorneys continue to pursue more traditional approaches.
Countering conventional wisdom, the study found that homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys. It also found no meaningful differences between cities with progressive or traditional DAs in the trends for larceny and robbery. “I think it’s really important to emphasize the extent to which we looked for a relationship and found none” between a prosecutors’ commitment to reform and crime rates, Todd Foglesong, a fellow in residence at the University of Toronto and one of the co-authors, told me.
Well, there’s some nuance you won’t see on Fox News.
And as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently pointed out, while Republicans would love to lay the crime problem squarely at the feet of soft-headed, bleeding-heart libs, the rise in crime rates is actually a problem that preceded President Biden and affects both urban and rural areas of the country, not just liberal redoubts.
While the crime surge was real, however, the perception that it was all about big cities run by Democrats is false. This was a purple crime wave, with murder rates rising at roughly the same rate in Trump-voting red states and Biden-voting blue states. Homicides rose sharply in both urban and rural areas. And if we look at levels rather than rates of change, both homicides and violent crime as a whole are generally higher in red states.
So why do so many people believe otherwise? Before we get to politically motivated disinformation, let’s talk about some other factors that might have skewed perceptions. [...]
[One] factor may be the human tendency to believe stories that confirm our preconceptions. Many people feel instinctively that getting tough on criminals is an effective anti-crime strategy, so they’re inclined to assume that places that are less tough — for example, those that don’t prosecute some nonviolent offenses — must suffer higher crime as a result. This doesn’t appear to be true, but you can see why people might believe it.
Yeah, I can sort of see why people might believe it, but why do Republican politicians, many of whom no doubt know better, keep repeating it?
Ah, never mind. I know why. The answer is as clear as the Ebola blotches all over my face.
We’re heading into the homestretch before the all-important midterm elections, but it’s not too late to Get Out the Vote or rush a donation to a worthy Democratic candidate of your choice. Let’s do this, people! Roevember is just around the corner!
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.