A leftist examines crime as an issue in the midterms.

And gets it wrong.

Earlier this week, Bill Otis wrote about the role the issue of crime played in the 2022 election. He argued that crime was a winning issue for the GOP where candidates gave it the emphasis it deserves.

However, Nicole Narea, a leftist writer for Vox, contends that “Democrats mostly neutralized Republican attacks on crime in the midterms.” She admits that in New York Democrats “appear to have suffered acute repercussions” from rising crime rates. But “in many competitive races from where Republicans flooded the airwaves with their crime messaging, like in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it appears that the media was too hasty to believe that crime was a major deciding issue.”

Between Bill’s piece and Narea’s we can identify three states — New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — in which Republicans gave crime something like the emphasis it deserves as an issue. As noted, Narea doesn’t dispute that the issue was a big winner for the GOP in New York.

It was also a winner for Democrat Eric Adams in his race for mayor. Adams, a former cop, made crime his overriding issue in the primary, and it carried him to victory.

The fact that crime was a winning issue in New York is strong evidence that, if emphasized, it’s also a winning issue in many other jurisdictions. Why would residents of the New York area be more concerned about crime, and the soft-on-crime policies of so many Democrats, than residents of other areas where the problem is comparably acute and where Democrats refuse to crack down?

But let’s look at the other states where Narea says Republicans flooded the airwaves with “crime messaging.” The first is Pennsylvania, where Democrat John Fetterman defeated Republican Dr. Oz.

The problems for Oz’s candidacy were obvious. He was a novice politician with no knack for the gig, and an out-of-stater. His candidacy was the creation of Donald Trump who had lost much of his appeal to independent voters in Pennsylvania.

No one has claimed that the crime issue is powerful enough to pull bad candidates through in states that Democrats carry more often than not.

Wisconsin is a better test case. There, Ron Johnson, a ripe target for defeat, pulled out victory after his campaign focused relentlessly on the issue of crime. Narea acknowledges:

Johnson saw a rebound in the polls after his campaign and GOP groups spent more than $4 million on TV ads focused on crime in September alone, including some that claimed that Barnes supported defunding the police.

Yet, Narea strains to deny a causal relationship, presumably because it undermines her argument. She attributes the swing to Johnson to independents who oppose abortion and have a negative view of BLM.

But there’s no reason why opponents of abortion would suddenly swing to Johnson in September. As for BLM, Narea ignores the obvious fact that its signature issue is policing. BLM wants much less of it, or maybe none at all.

To say that opposition to BLM turned the election Johnson’s way is to admit that concern about crime, and especially under-policing, was the issue that will send the Senator back to Washington. Just as Johnson’s team thought it would when it blitzed the airwaves with messages about his opponent’s softness on crime.

Other portions of Narea’s article also undercut her thesis. For example, she quotes Jason Cabel Roe, a GOP strategist in Michigan, where Republicans saw some of their most devastating losses. He says the crime issue “is something we should have had an advantage on and we just never really exploited.”

This was Bill’s point, exactly.

She also quotes Keith Ellison, soft-on-crime prosecutor par excellence, who eked out reelection as attorney general of Minnesota. Ellison admits that his election was “closer than it should have been.” The fact that Ellison struggled so much in Blue Minnesota, (he won by less than one percentage point) is additional evidence that crime is a strong issue for Republicans.

So is the fact, as reported by Narea, that a number of Democrats felt they had to change their tune on the crime issue. Even Ellison, by his own reckoning, was able to win because he acknowledged “people’s legitimate concerns about safety.” (That was mighty big of him.)

The liberal left shouldn’t take much solace from the fact that some Democrats saved their careers by talking a better game on crime. Unless crime starts trending downward, these Dems will remain vulnerable, and voters will expect to see actions consistent with the incumbents’ words.

But we need not focus on the future. This year, crime was already a strong issue for Republicans (and some Democrats) who pressed hard on concern about it.