Election post 2: What was the role of crime in this election?

Continuing in my mini series, here are some reflections on the role of crime in the November elections.

WHAT WAS THE ROLE OF CRIME IN THIS ELECTION?

The short story, as far as I understand it presently, is that crime was not a driving force behind Trump’s win, but was a driving force in certain local elections.

On local results (covered in more detail below): I highly recommend reading Radley Balko’s substack post on the results. He compares crime vibes to economy vibes, where impacts of the pandemic plagued dems who didn’t have enough time to recover. Here are the opening paragraphs:

The 2024 election was a complicated one for criminal justice reform. The narrative now emerging is that voters soundly rejected reform. That narrative is driven in large part by Trump winning on a tough-on-crime (and lying-about-crime) agenda, along with some high-profile setbacks in California, including losses by two progressive prosecutors and voter rejection of reform on a couple ballot initiatives.

But that narrative also isn’t quite right. Reform fared well in much of the country. A more accurate narrative is that reform won in places where voters were left to choose based on their own experiences, and it lost in places where a new generation of high-dollar Republican donors spent heavily to spread misinformation and stoke irrational fear about crime.

Crime was an election issue that in some ways paralleled the economy. On both fronts Democrats and the Biden administration inherited a mess created by the pandemic and the Trump administration’s exacerbation of its effects. On both fronts, Democrats appear to have been punished at the polls because of the lag between what’s actually happening on the ground and voters’ perception of what’s happening (crime has been dropping, and the economy has recovered). Finally, on both fronts, the effects of that lag were amplified by poor messaging from Democrats and dishonest fearmongering by these neophyte Republican donors — led by tech figures like Musk, David Sacks, and Mark Andreessen, who have been red-pilled in the years since the pandemic.

Indeed, partisan differences in perception of crime have never been so stark as now. Jeff Asher reports that “the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats went from a very high 34 percentage points in 2023 to an astounding 61 percentage points in the 2024 survey.”

As this graph shows, it’s long been the case that when the other party is in power, people think that crime is higher than when their party is in power. But the distinction has never been so stark as now. This is part of the larger trend of fractured realities in American society, and I think we need to prepare for that to intensify in the next administration.

The analysis will be complex, however. The Blueprint polling research initiative published polling right after the election that tried to capture what moved voters’ decision at the end of the day. They asked about 25 possible reasons, and Harris being “too soft on crime” was number 17 on the list, with basically zero impact on the outcome, whether measured by all voters or voters who swung to Trump. That only tells us what people were consciously thinking about, not what emotions swung their vote, but it’s data we have to take into account when parsing the results.

A final thought: did Harris’s message of being a tough prosecutor drive away voters, including the millions of people who’ve been directly impacted by the criminal justice system? Given that 1 in 3 Americans have a criminal record, and tens of millions have felony convictions, it seems quite possible.