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About a month ago, Bill Clinton said Democrats still had a chance to hold on to the House and Senate, but it’d be a real challenge. “We have to note the Republicans always close well,” the former president said. “Why? Because they find some new way to scare the living daylights out of swing voters about something.”
There is no doubt that this is a key chapter in the GOP’s election playbook, and the party follows it faithfully. The thing voters are supposed to be terrified of changes — the last time a Democratic president saw a midterm cycle, the scary thing was Ebola, which Republicans promptly forgot about after the 2014 elections — but the underlying strategy remains the same.
Headed into the 2022 cycle, the original plan appeared to be scare the living daylights out of swing voters by talking about critical race theory, immigrants, transgender athletes, or transgender athletes who are also immigrants talking about critical race theory. But as The Wall Street Journal reported this week, Republicans have instead settled on a message focused on crime.
Republicans in competitive House and Senate districts are hitting Democrats with a barrage of ads focused on voters’ increased fears about the surge in violent crime in recent years, with the issue playing a central role in many tight races. Republicans have called Democrats too tolerant of crime after social-justice protests in 2020 swept through the country over policing abuses, and they have criticized some Democrats’ support of measures such as eliminating cash bail.
If this sounds at all familiar, you’ve either seen the avalanche of ads, or you’ve seen some of the recent coverage. NBC News reported last week that Republicans “have unleashed a barrage of negative ads in the final weeks of the midterms that hammer Democrats on crime.”
The Associated Press added, “The issue of crime is dominating advertising in some of the most competitive Senate races, including those in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada, along with scores of House and governors campaigns.”
The thinking behind the strategy is obvious: Much of the public is concerned about an increase in crime rates — a trend that began during the Trump era — and since Democrats are currently in office, GOP officials and candidates are telling the public to simply blame the party in power for the fact that many are feeling less safe.
Take some hysteria from conservative media outlets like Fox News, add a hearty dose of “defund the police” lies from Republicans who know better, and we’re left with a potent election season message custom-made to “scare the living daylights out of swing voters.”
It’d be even better if it were fair and accurate, but it’s not. Let’s keep some factual details in mind:
1. The evidence of soaring crime rates is dubious. The latest data from the FBI actually showed a decline in violent crime, and while there are legitimate concerns about the figures being incomplete, there are other recent reports pointing in similar directions.
2. Republicans may need to take a long look in the mirror. As Dana Milbank explained in his latest column:
Earlier this year, the centrist Democratic group Third Way crunched the 2020 homicide figures and found that per capita homicide rates were on average 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than by Joe Biden. Eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates have been reliably red states for the past two decades. Republican-led cities weren’t any safer than Democratic-led cities. Among the 10 states with the highest per capita homicide rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee — most were in the South and relatively rural. The findings were broadly consistent with other rankings of states (and counties) by violent crime.
3. The GOP seems awfully selective about its crime-related interests. Many of the Republicans trying to leverage crime as a campaign issue are the same Republicans who appear wholly indifferent to serious crimes such as the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Donald Trump’s alleged felonies. Take Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, for example.
4. If Republicans were serious about crime, they’d have to get serious about guns. And the GOP simply has no intention of doing that.
5. The GOP has a credibility problem on the issue. Only one major political party in recent years has raised the prospect of defunding law enforcement while opposing increased federal funding to local police departments. I’ll give you a hint: It’s not the Democratic Party.
6. The role of race in this strategy is hardly subtle. Take one look at the kind of ads Republicans have aired in Wisconsin's U.S. Senate race — targeting Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black — and it becomes painfully obvious that race is playing a key role in the GOP’s strategy.
7. Republicans want to highlight crime without proposing real solutions. The House GOP’s “Commitment to America” offered some vague and dishonest platitudes, but voters expecting Republicans to actually address crime rates through meaningful governing solutions are going to be disappointed.