Are Maryland voters worried about crime?
Yes, but their votes don't reflect seriousness about it.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post ran a story with the headline (paper edition) “Voters in Md. worried by crime.” A sub-headline asserted that these worries “are evident in the governor’s race.”
Maryland voters should be worried about crime. Baltimore, which has suffered from fast-rising crime rates since the Freddie Gray affair in 2015, has seen a 10 percent increase in gun violence in the past 12 months. And in relatively affluent Montgomery County, the D.C. suburb where I live, the homicide rate was up 29 percent last year, while carjackings rose by 126 percent.
Given these numbers, I don’t doubt that voters are concerned about crime. Even the liberals in my neighborhood are complaining about it.
But if voters are serious, their concern should be reflected in campaigns for state and local public office. Is it?
In the case of Democrats, I think the answer is, only to a very limited degree. I also think this state of affairs exemplifies the Democrats’ general relationship to the electorate as a whole. Dems increasingly are taking a step back from full wokeness, but the electorate would like them to just walk away.
Let’s look at yesterday’s Democratic primary for governor. Crime was an issue, and to my knowledge, no serious contender called for defunding the police. That’s progress, but only from an insane starting point.
Some Democrats went further. Peter Franchot, the state comptroller, called for deploying state police officers to bolster law enforcement’s presence in certain neighborhoods. And Doug Gansler, Maryland’s former attorney general, made fighting crime with firm measures the centerpiece of his campaign.
But Gansler never gained traction. The real contest was between Franchot, Tom Perez — the left-wing former Secretary of Labor and former DNC head — and Wes Moore — an author endorsed by Oprah Winfrey.
Neither Perez nor Moore had anything serious to say about crime. Both resorted to blaming Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan for the crime wave, grousing that he failed to “partner” with local leaders.
In fact, the Hogan administration provided resources to localities. But how could the governor effectively work with local leaders who, until recently, were demanding that we “reimagine” policing — a euphemism for cutting police forces, relying instead on “violence preventers” to talk gang members out of committing crimes, and other woke absurdities?
In Montgomery County, for example, the council voted to reduce the police force by 25 officers even as crime was soaring and officers were retiring and resigning in large numbers. There was no way Hogan could work with politicians that dopey.
The results of the Democratic governor’s race are now mostly in. Moore leads the field with almost 37 percent of the vote. Perez is second, nine points behind. Franchot received only 19.5 percent. Gansler was a non-factor at 3.5 percent.
Thus, the two candidates who made traditional “law and order” utterances garnered only 23 percent of the vote between them.
(Whether the winner ends up being Moore, which seems almost certain, or Perez, the Democrat almost certainly will win in November. The Republicans nominated Dan Cox. He’s Trump-endorsed and has called Mike Pence a traitor. I doubt Cox can win in a state where Trump captured only 32 percent of the vote in 2020.)
On the surface, results in two Montgomery County races are more encouraging than the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Our radical left-wing county executive Marc Elrich trails the more moderate David Blair by about 1,000 votes. If Blair holds on to win, it will be a welcome development, though not enough to halt the county’s slide.
However, Blair’s vote share is only around 39.5 percent. The combined share of Elrich and the even more radical Hans Reimer stands at 58.5.
Then, there’s the race for county prosecutor (Montgomery County State’s Attorney). The incumbent is John McCarthy. He’s no great shakes, but at a time when George Soros-backed prosecutors have prevailed in several suburban D.C. counties, we’re lucky to have a serious and reasonably competent prosecutor like McCarthy.
McCarthy usually runs unopposed in the primary, but this year he was challenged from the left by three candidates. I would describe two of them as far left.
McCarthy has prevailed. However, as things stand now, he’s short of a majority. His leftist challengers combined tally is 51.5 percent. The two far leftists combined for 37 percent.
But for the current crime wave and the fear it has generated, Soros might have pumped in money to support one of the far leftists. In that scenario, he or she might well have defeated McCarthy.
But as far as I know, Soros stayed out of this race and McCarthy won. So I think it’s fair to say that concern over crime is moving the needle from where it was two years ago, even among Democrats. This conclusion is bolstered by the near absence of “defund” rhetoric in the primaries.
However, it’s also fair to say that concern about crime among Democrat voters in Maryland has not translated into strong support for candidates prepared to move beyond left-wing platitudes and adopt the approaches to fighting crime that worked for decades — until wokeness came to dominate liberal thinking about the issue.