Republican candidates for every just about every office love talking about crime, and how Democrats are responsible for all of it, but when it comes to actually doing something about, they come up empty. It’s particularly true for Republicans running in the Senate battleground states, where ads like this one and this one from the Mitch McConnell-linked Senate Leadership Fund Super Pac in Pennsylvania dominate.
But if you go to Republican candidate Mehmet Oz’s campaign website and find your way to issues, you’ll find precious little on crime, other than his “law enforcement” page, which says he’s “a strong supporter of our law enforcement and will give them a powerful voice in Washington,” and a pledge to “support efforts to ensure they always have the resources they need to do their job.” That’s it. Oz’s anti-crime policy page.
That’s true of the battleground Republican Senate candidates, a Daily Beast review has found. Funding the police is just about all those candidates commit to, and the one who has tried to make his reputation on fighting illegal drugs—J.D. Vance—“does not have any crime platform on his website at all.”
Mr. Deputy Herschel Walker did not return the Daily Beast’s calls when they asked for his plans for combatting the crime he imagines he has been deputized to fight. That despite the fact that the nice blonde lady in her suburban kitchen in this ad from the McConnell Super PAC says that crime is “running rampant.” And it’s all Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D) fault, if you can believe it. Which of course you can’t.
RELATED: Republicans have big vulnerabilities on crime. Democrats just have to make the case
If we’re going to talk crime, let’s talk crime. Let’s talk about what the American public thinks about crime: “Mass shootings topped Americans’ list of crime-related concerns at 55%, a 6-point increase since July 2021, while 53% identified gun violence as worrying, a 9-point bump from last year.” That’s according to a survey released this month from the progressive consortium Navigator Research, reported here by Kerry Eleveld.
Guns. Murders by guns. That’s what has people worried in that survey, along with “hate crimes and domestic terrorism, issues number three and four, respectively.” Where is murder by guns happening the most? In the red states where Republican leaders have allowed guns to proliferate. Third Way (yeah, Third Way) decided to delve into the issue earlier this, and here’s what they found: “In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.”
Not just 2020: “8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.” The state with the highest murder rate in the country is Mississippi, and even if the city of Jackson, with its Democratic mayor, were taken out of the calculus, Mississippi would still have the highest murder rate.
Here’s a grim statistic from a blue state Republicans love to hate: California. For the last five years, Kern County in that state has had the highest murder rate in the whole state. The county seat is Bakersfield, which has a Republican county executive, a Republican mayor, and is represented by Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Speaking of Republican mayors:
“The way Republicans are talking about crime makes it sound like we’ve returned to peak violent crime in 1991,” one expert told the Daily Beast. “The reality is that violent crime is much, much lower… Politicians who play up violent crime are contributing to perceptions among the public that crime is out of control.”
What is out of control, and the Navigator poll reflects that, is gun violence and mass shootings because of the proliferation of guns, as well as the pervading concern of growing domestic terrorism coming from the far right—thanks in the main to Republicans.
That’s what Democrats can and should talk about in answering the soft-on-crime charge. Republicans have literally handed leadership to violent right-wing extremists and helped the gun industry create their army.
On Daily Kos’ The Brief, we speak with polling giant Drew Linzer, who runs polling firm CIVIQs and comes in to talk about a new poll his team conducted for Daily Kos. He is also here to explain, as a professional, how to not stress out every time you see a poll going your way or the other way. One thing is for sure, though: We are living in historic times, and what that means for these midterms cannot be easily predicted—so Get Out The Vote!
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