Consider these explosive headlines from Fox News over the past several months: “Democrat-run cities overwhelmed by crime surge,” “Murder and crime rates spike in Democrat-run cities – is it a control play?” or, “Democrat-run cities experience record breaking homicide rates.”
Ten days before Christmas last year House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy falsely blamed Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a “crime wave” that’s “spreading across the country.”
“Speaker Pelosi should look in the mirror to see what caused the ‘attitude of lawlessness’ spreading across the country,” he wrote. “Democrat politicians defunded police, raised money for rioters, and pushed policies that are soft on crime. They own this crime wave.”
And here’s McCarthy just days ago, again lying, claiming crime is “created by Democrats.”
A new report from Third Way destroys all these GOP talking points – and points out that “murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.”
About that claim Leader McCarthy made? He should look in the mirror – and at his own district before pointing fingers.
The report notes that “the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.”
In fact, in all of 2020, “per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.”
It gets worse for the GOP.
“8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century,” the report reveals.
The actual facts blow away what an average Fox News watching die-hard Republican voter would think.
“We found that murder rates are, on average, 40% higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts.”
“Mississippi had the highest homicide rate at 20.50 murders per 100,000 residents,” Third Way reports, “followed by Louisiana at 15.79, Kentucky at 14.32, Alabama at 14.2, and Missouri at 14. The national average was 6.5 per 100,000 residents, but the top five states had rates more than twice that high.”
These red states are not generating “murder is out of control” national headlines. They seem to generate no headlines at all. The rest of the top ten were filled out by South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee—all states rarely talked about in breathless media reports about rampant crime in Democratic strongholds.
The report does not even mention guns, which are a massive part of the problem, exacerbated by red state gun free-for-all policies.
And for those Fox News watching die-hard Republican voters who may say Third Way is a left-wing think tank, it’s actually been criticized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. And former bank regulator William K. Black has accused Third Way of being a “group that pretends sometimes to be center-left but is actually completely a creation of Wall Street.”
Read the full report here.