How urban crime could hobble Democrats in the midterms

The midterm elections are mere weeks away, and the Democrat Party is vulnerable on crime.

Rafael A. Mangual is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Nick Ohnell fellow and head of research for the Manhattan Institute’s Policing and Public Safety Initiative. He is also the author of "Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most" (Center Street, July 26, 2022).

Why might this be?

For one thing, serious violent crime and public disorder are much bigger problems in the urban enclaves of major metro areas (those with populations over 1M), which lean heavily Democrat. In more than thirty cities, homicides reached levels not seen since the 1990s in either 2020 or 2021; and the most recent National Crime Victimization Survey released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that "from 2020 to 2021, the violent victimization rate increased from 19.0 to 24.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons in urban areas while remaining unchanged in suburban or rural areas." In other words, crime is getting particularly bad in many of the cities where Democrats have been politically dominant in recent years.