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Culpeper County sheriff’s deputies are seen at an early-vote rally for Yesli Vega, Republican candidate for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District, on November 1, 2022.
Democratic candidates faced a barrage of ads on crime starting in September and early October, a barrage aided by Fox News dramatically increasing its crime reporting.
And it worked. It stalled and reversed the momentum Democrats had gained with the Supreme Court decision on abortion, the January 6th hearings, the Justice Department search of Mar-a-Lago, and Democrats passing the Inflation Reduction Act.
The 2022 midterms will be remembered as a toxic campaign, but an effective one in labeling Democrats as “pro-crime.” When voters in our survey were asked what they feared the most if Democrats win full control of the government, 56 percent rushed to choose “crime and homelessness out of control in cities and police coming under attack,” followed by 43 percent who chose “the southern border being open to immigrants.” Those two outpointed voters’ worries about Congress banning abortion nationally and women losing “equal rights.”
While Democrats were still competitive in the congressional ballot throughout the fall, they trailed Republicans by 13 points on which party would do better on crime. A quarter of Democrats in October said Republicans would do a better job. That included a quarter of Blacks and a stunning half of Hispanics and Asian Americans.
So, I was asked repeatedly by colleagues and campaigning Democrats, “What should we be saying on crime and when I’m attacked for ‘defunding the police’?” To be honest, Democrats were in such terrible shape on crime at this late point, I said, speak as little as possible or mumble. Nothing they’ve said up until now was reassuring and helpful.
Obviously, they should respond if attacked, demonstrating respect for the police and rejecting defunding. But they should move as quickly as possible to change the subject, preferably to the cost of living, where Democrats have a real policy offer and pose a real electoral choice.
But Democrats cannot change the subject for long.
They have to go back to the choices they made in the tumultuous year of 2020—moral, ideological, and strategic choices that I believe branded the Democrats in ways that alienated them from key parts of their own base.
I wrote after the 2020 election in the Prospect that we just witnessed a “race war,” where Donald Trump did everything possible to heighten racial conflict and focus the country on the “breakdown of law and order” and rising crime in African American cities. I accepted that Democrats had no choice but to defeat Trump’s “racist campaign” and “win a mandate to address racial justice.” I knew that suited Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon, who was counting on America’s racism to fuel Trump’s Republican Party.
The battle to defeat Trump’s race war, however, blinded many from seeing the priorities and needs of working-class African American, Hispanic, and Asian American voters. Those were the voters who pulled back from their historic support for Democrats. To be honest, many assumed that battling long-standing racial inequities would be their top priority. But that assumption becomes indefensibly elitist when it turns out these voters were much more focused on the economy, corporate power, and crime.
That is why the crime issue is so revealing.
AMERICA WAS A MESS DURING THE PANDEMIC and the halting year of getting back to normality. One part was the rise in crime in American cities. They experienced rises in violent crime and murders. In 2021, New York saw an 11 percent increase in overall crime, including a near 16 percent increase in robberies. Detroit witnessed an almost 5 percent increase in violent crimes from 2020 to 2021. Philadelphia set a homicide record in 2021 with 562 deaths, up 13 percent from 2020. Atlanta had a two-year total of 315 murders, which accounts for a two-thirds increase compared to the two years prior to the pandemic.
When Trump put the spotlight on high crime rates in Democratic-run cities, we retorted with the high crime rates in Republican-led cities. But where was the worry about community safety? Where were our plans to address crime? We were stymied by our rightful outrage over the repeated examples of police abuse and need to bring reforms. Yet if you ask our own voters, as I did after the election, they think our plan was “defund the police.”
Voters and our base hated the idea of defunding the police. So, virtually every Republican ad in 2020 depicted African American looters, attacks on police, and Democratic members of the “Squad” calling for “defunding the police.”
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From early 2020 onward, Democratic leaders showed no interest as far as voters could tell in addressing crime or making communities safer.
Why are Democrats not trusted on crime? It’s not rocket science.
In 2021, I created a multiracial and multigenerational team of pollsters funded by the American Federation of Teachers and the Center for Voter Information to look at how to raise Democratic support with all working-class voters. It included HIT Strategies and Equis Labs.
They conducted the research in the African American, Hispanic, and Asian American communities. All of those communities pointed to the rising worry about crime. And they worried more about the rise in crime than the rise in police abuse. Yet Democrats throughout 2021 focused almost exclusively on the latter. Clearly, these communities wanted political leaders to address both.
Despite Democrats’ seeming indifference to community safety, we found that Democrats in 2021 could make gains if they reassured voters on the police. Voters believed Democrats were for defunding the police, so messages that showed respect for the police and advocated for funding got heard. The message also included “urgent reforms, including better training and accountability to prevent excessive force and racial profiling.” And since the principal doubt was about the police, the message had to focus only on the police.
This Democratic crime message was preferred to the Republicans’ by 8 points, and hearing it gave the Democrats another 2-point lift in their congressional vote margin.
But crime rates in the major cities grew well into 2022. New York City has seen citywide shooting incidents increase by 13 percent compared to July 2021, and the number of murders increased for the month by 34 percent compared to this time last year. Philadelphia and Chicago experienced prominent shoot-outs on the subway, and in Philadelphia overall shootings have increased by 3 percent and violent crimes are up 7 percent.
As a result, crime was a top-tier issue in the midterm election, and that included Blacks, who ranked it almost as high as the cost of living in poll after poll. For Hispanics and Asian Americans, crime came just below the cost of living as a priority. And Republicans continued to remind voters that Democrats continued to support “defunding the police,” even by linking candidates to organizations they took money from, like Planned Parenthood, which back in 2020 called for defunding.
The Democrats had so little credibility on crime that any message I tested this year against the Republicans ended up losing us votes, even messages that voters previously liked.
Here is the Democratic message I tested in July, culled from Democratic campaigns: It included Democrats declaring “gun violence” a “public health crisis,” allocating billions to state and local law enforcement, prosecuting more criminals, banning assault weapons, and not defunding the police. It lost to the Republican crime message by 10 points and cost us 2 points in the Democratic margin. Democrats can only be heard if they address their police problem.
In my Labor Day survey, I tested the exact police message that I developed with the team of pollsters last year, focusing again on respecting and funding, not defunding the police, including urgent reforms. It defeated the Republican crime message by a stunning 10 points, yet we still lost a point in the margin among those who heard it.
With Democrats so out of touch on crime and the police, just discussing crime cost Democrats.
In a mid-October poll, I was able to test a crime message that got heard. It got heard because it dramatized more police, said Democrats heard our communities on violent crime, and also called out the small minority of Democrats who failed to address violent crime, and said, “Democrats in Congress are mainstream” and support our “first responders.”
To be honest, I didn’t want to open up this debate during the campaign when Democrats could do little to address it. That is why I am writing this article now, being published right before the election.
Our effective crime message began with respect for police, but this time, the Democrat proposes to add 100,000 more police. That is a pretty dramatic offer that says, my crime plan begins with many more police. The message includes the same urgent reforms, but also adds, “those very communities want us to get behind law enforcement” and “fight violent crime as a top priority.”
This crime message defeats by 11 points a Republican crime message that hits Democrats for defunding the police, being with Biden who is soft on crime, and presiding over Democratic cities with record homicide rates. Democrats are in so much trouble on crime, yet this message wins dramatically in the base and competes with working-class targets.
But the message gains even more support and shifts which party you trust better on crime when the Democrats call out the small minority in the House who supported defunding the police and voted against all efforts to fund law enforcement. This message had some of the strongest results in the survey, with the positive reaction outscoring the negative by 16 points.
The margins in favor of this message topped 30 points with Blacks and Hispanics and 20 points with Asian Americans, Gen Z and millennials, and unmarried women.
In this polarized time, it dropped the Republicans’ advantage from 13 to 10 points.
THE FAILURE OF ELITES TO SEE what was happening in these communities on crime was matched by their failure to see how much the economy trumped racial inequality.
2020 was the two-decade anniversary of most Americans not seeing any pay raises, and that was even more true for African Americans and Hispanics. After the CARES Act in March of that year, Congress gridlocked on giving further pandemic relief until after the election. Not surprisingly, 35 percent of voters in exit polls said the economy was the top factor in their vote. Only 20 percent said racial equality.
In Democracy Corps’s 2020 Election Day survey, the top reason by far for supporting or considering Trump was “the strongest economy” and “getting us out of the [pandemic] recession.” The economy did not make it into the top four reasons to vote for Biden, other than preserving the Affordable Care Act.
In all my research since 2016, our base of African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, millennials, and unmarried women, these were the voters who rallied to attacks on the rigged political economy. And in leading up to the 2020 election, Democrats were not attacking those inequalities, but the systemic racism that produces police abuse and threatened their right to vote.
That message did not motivate African American voters, consolidate Hispanics, or motivate Asian Americans. That is why Democrats got disappointing turnout in 2020 in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
What got the attention of the Democratic base voters was the Democrats providing direct payments to households, the Child Tax Credit, the proposed expansion of Medicare, reduced health care premiums, the federal government supporting unions, a $15 minimum wage for contractors, and enforcing labor protections. These were all things that help make life affordable.
In 2022, we have also tested the priority of the Biden administration to address racial inequalities with this impressive set of actions:
But that scored at the bottom of the list of ten actions of the administration. Blacks ranked it third, but well below empowering workers and Medicare. It was the lowest-ranking accomplishment for Hispanics and Asian Americans.
Perhaps the most telling are the results for each community that were conducted by the team of pollsters. In a test of five policies, measures to address racial inequalities always tested in the middle or the bottom of the priority list for Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.
Those graphs are a hammer that smash the idea that America’s elites know what should be the top priority for Democrats in government.
Whatever happens on Tuesday, Democrats should start by listening to the voters again and show that they know how to make communities safe, while raising the power and well-being of all working people.
