Why Didn't Crime Win More Seats for the Republicans?

It Did Win -- Where It Got the Emphasis It Deserved

It’s no secret that Republicans fared more poorly than expected in the midterms. They had plenty of issues — inflation, crime, race-huckstering everywhere, Woke-dominated education, COVID fumbling and quasi-tyranny, and others. Increasing violent crime and drug abuse in particular looked like they might drive voters. Why didn’t they?

The answer is that they did — where Republicans gave them unqualified first billing.

First a bit of a review. Republicans were expected to have a net gain of 25-30 seats in the House. They got a third of that, barely eeking out a majority. Virtually the entire Republican gain came from three states: Four pickups in Florida, four in California, and four in New York. The Florida explanation is easy: DeSantis won in a 19-point blowout, and with a margin that big, carried congressional candidates with him.

California and New York are different stories. They are deep blue states where Republicans hold not a single statewide office.

Q: So why the (relative) success?

A: Because all politics is local, and nothing is more local than crime.

The Financial Times spills the beans (emphasis added):

One issue has been particularly salient in the post mortem of the Democrats’ stumble in New York: “Crime,” said veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “Fear of New York City spilling into the suburbs.”

According to a Quinnipiac University poll in late October, crime was the top issue for New York voters, with respondents placing it well ahead of inflation and protecting democracy. Abortion rights may have been less of a factor in New York than elsewhere because they are enshrined in the state’s constitution.

Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor, made public safety the central focus of an unexpectedly robust campaign. He ended up losing by 5.8 percentage points to [Gov.] Hochul, who was thrust into the governor’s mansion late last year only after her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, resigned in a cloud of scandal.

It was the strongest performance by a Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York since 2002 — and even more surprising, considering that Zeldin is pro-life and an ardent supporter of former president Donald Trump.

“Fear of New York City spreading into the suburbs” is a golden insight as to where the Republican Party needs to be on crime. One might say the same of the pickups in Southern California: “Fear of Los Angeles (with progressive DA George Gascon) spreading into the suburbs.”

I’m nobody’s version of a political consultant, but just watching the landscape tells me that the other main issue we thought we had — inflation — just didn’t have the power many thought it would. It might have been that we’d seen the worst of it; or that gas prices were headed down by election day; or that consumers had in some sense come to terms with it.

It’s more difficult to “come to terms” when your favorite CVS or Walmart is getting ransacked while you scurry out, or buses and subways become bloody venues again, or some murder or yoking or carjacking happens in a neighborhood you visited last week and thought was safe.

Republicans have a natural advantage on crime (although one that was compromised in the Trump Administration, as I’ll describe momentarily). The reason, admittedly oversimplified, is easy to state. Republicans see criminals as victimizers and want to deal with them as such, while Democrats see them as victims (of callous social institutions that Republicans support, e.g. capitalism and the idea that you should work for a living), and think they deserve, not punishment, but therapy.

Democrats, being captives of this block-headed ideology, have been on the wrong side of the issue for at least 50 years, and have basically handed it to the Republicans. How starkly wrong the Democrats have been on crime, and murder in particular, is clear just from looking at the evidence. As I described it in an earlier post, the statistics for murder (and other crime) are stark.  They show that the murder rate surged for three decades, 1961-1991 when the “medical model” of crime ruled the roost; then fell off dramatically  --  by more than half  --  in the next generation; and has resumed a sharp rise over the last few years, as noted here. 

Many on the Left necessarily pretend to be mystified about how these trends  came about.  In fact, almost everyone in the field knows.  There were at least five important factors accounting for the decrease in murder.  The first two had nothing to do with how the government behaved, but the last three assuredly did.

The first factor in the falloff in murder starting in the early Nineties was the aging of the Baby Boom population bulge.  People age out of crime, particularly violent crime.  Boomer criminals became weaker, slower, and less willing to take risks.  So they committed much less violent crime, albeit not necessarily by choice.

The second factor was the dramatic growth of private surveillance and security.  You only need to go to the mall to see this.  Security guards are omnipresent, and everywhere you go, you're on camera.  People behave better when they know they're being watched, and behave better still when someone nearby might intervene in misbehavior.

But three other causes of the decline in murder were directly related to how we changed law and policy in response:  We hired more police; undertook more targeted, computer-assisted, and proactive policing (the most prominent example being New York City's "broken windows policing" under Giuliani/Bloomberg, during which murder fell by an astonishing three-quarters); and we adopted more sober and law-driven sentencing.

I want to look at the latter in particular, in part because it's such a popular target of "criminal justice reform,"  and also because, as I noted, it’s an area where President Trump let conservatives down.

Again, a short review. There are four goals of sentencing, all related to crime suppression:  just punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.  There’s plenty of controversy about what is "just" punishment, largely because it's so subjective.  Deterrence is also hotly debated, because it's hard to measure or even to agree on how it should be measured.  There is likewise no consensus on how to rehabilitate inmates, or even if rehabilitation is possible for most of them.  Sky-high recidivism statistics are not encouraging.

But incapacitation is relatively easy to agree upon.  When a violent criminal is taken out of civil society, civil society is going to be safer.  When the local strong-arm or Crips member is incarcerated, he won't be sticking a revolver in your ear to blow your head off if you don't hand over your wallet fast enough (or maybe to blow it off anyway depending on what drugs he's on at the moment).

As the Left relentlessly complains, more sober sentencing laws, including sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum statutes,  helped produce a significant increase in incarceration from at least the early Nineties through roughly the next 20 years  --  exactly the period during which the incidence of murder and other sorts of crime were plummeting.  

What a coincidence! 

The problem is that the Democrats (shrewdly) and some Republicans (foolishly) came to think, or at least to pretend to think, that our success against crime just fell out of the sky, and that we could, without consequence, go back to the very policies that caused 30 years of galloping crime starting in the Sixties. Hence the pro-criminal federal legislation known as the First Step Act. The FSA in one version or another had been bottled up in Congress for years, but finally made it into law in 2018 with the decisive backing of, most unfortunately, Donald Trump.

The FSA, among other things, lowers mandatory minimum sentences (which have been a significant constraint on liberal judges) and provides critically expanded leeway for prisoners to seek, and judges to grant, something called “compassionate release.” Under the text of the FSA, “compassionate release” was supposed to be reserved for the most unusual and compelling cases. I think you can imagine how it has actually been applied, particularly with more and more Biden-appointed judges taking the bench. A gigantic hole has been opened in the healthy idea of law-driven, determinate sentencing — one of the hallmark achievements of the Reagan Administration — and predictably, as random leniency has re-infected sentencing, crime has re-infected the country.

This was a needless, self-inflicted error by President Trump, who relied on the sentencing expertise of — ready now? — Kim Kardashian and Kanye West (the anti-Semite now known as Ye). The wiser voices of Ed Meese, Jeff Sessions, Bill Pryor and Tom Cotton (who courageously led Senate opposition to the FSA) were ignored.

So now we’ve taken a significant step backward in the law of sentencing and — what a surprise! — have more crime, as unreconstructed criminals who could have and should have remained in confinement get back on the street to do their thing.

Still, even with the stain of the First Step Act, crime fighting on the whole remains a Republican issue. And the last election, disappointing though it was, showed us that, where Republicans put it front and center, voters still listen.