Republican politicians often treat it as an established fact: Where they are in power, crime is low. Where Democrats are in power, crime is high.
“Republican-run cities are doing very nicely because they arrest people when you have crimes,” Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson last week.
“The cities and these left-wing states allowing criminals to run wild on our streets, that doesn’t work,” Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, said in March, citing New York in particular.
But party rule does not drive crime. Consider DeSantis’s state, Florida. Its homicide rate was roughly 50 percent higher than New York’s in 2021. Florida’s two most populous cities, Jacksonville and Miami, each had a homicide rate more than double New York City’s last year, even though both had Republican mayors.
This is not to say Republican leadership leads to more crime. You can find examples of blue states and cities doing worse than Florida, and of other red states and cities doing better. Looking at all the data, it is hard to make much of any connection between political partisanship and crime. To put it another way, prominent Republicans are misrepresenting the country’s crime problem.
Comparing places
The Republican claim is rooted in a real pattern. Big cities generally have higher crime rates than rural and suburban areas, thanks to their density and other factors. Democrats run most big cities because urban areas tend to contain more liberal voters. So when looking at the places with the most murders, you’ll often find Democratic-run cities. But that is not the whole story.
Take the 20 largest U.S. cities. The 16 run by Democratic mayors had 12.3 murders for every 100,000 people. The three Republican-run cities — Jacksonville, Fort Worth and Oklahoma City — had a rate of 11.4. There is a difference, but it is small. (I’m focused on murders because the data for them is more reliable than for other crimes, which go underreported.)
Those rates mask a lot of variation. In a ranked list of murders for all 20 cities, the three Republican-run cities fall around the middle. Some blue cities — such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle — have roughly half the murder rates as their red counterparts, while the rates in other blue cities, like Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Chicago, are two to three times as high.
That variation is the point: Whether a big city is run by Democrats or Republicans has little influence on its murder rate.
The same is true at the state level for homicides, as this map by my colleague Ashley Wu shows:
Once again, it’s hard to see a strong link between party rule and killings. The four deadliest states are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and New Mexico. Two have Democratic governors, and two have Republican governors. Some red states look bad, and some look good. The same is true for blue states.
Deeper causes
So what drives higher crime rates? The state map offers a few answers. Rural areas tend to have lower crime and murder rates. (But when murders surged and then fell across the U.S. starting in 2020, rural places experienced a similar pattern.) Poverty and race play a role, both of which are historically linked to violence in cities.
Access to guns is another major factor, particularly for murders. Guns make any conflict more likely to escalate into deadly violence, and they can embolden criminals. On this issue, there is a partisan divide — Democrats are more comfortable regulating firearms — and that could help explain higher levels of violence in Republican states, especially in the South. It can also explain violence in cities, which get a lot of guns from Southern states with laxer laws.
There are many more variables. It is a point that this newsletter has made before: Crime is a complicated issue, touching on personal disputes, the economy, social services and, really, almost every other aspect of society. Only a few factors are significant enough to make a big difference by themselves — and partisanship is not one of them.
Related: Tennessee held a special legislative session on gun violence after a mass shooting at a Nashville school. Lawmakers enacted no major policy changes.
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