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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Box Ox" data-source="post: 5569684" data-attributes="member: 48469"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/19/murder-rates-red-states-myth/" target="_blank">Opinion | Democrats' claims of a 'red states murder problem' are a myth - The Washington Post</a>October 19, 2022"With Republicans hammering them over rising murder rates, Democrats have come up with a new line of defense: Republicans, they claim, are the ones really responsible for the surge in homicides. The United States, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently <a href="https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1537519138398031872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1537519138398031872%7Ctwgr%5Ee2f335e39933a5c871a184841fa3c888359362d9%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fopinion%2Fnewsom-blames-republicans-for-homicides-in-democratic-cities" target="_blank">declared</a>, has a “red state murder problem.”No, it doesn’t. The bogus claim comes from a March <a href="https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem" target="_blank">study</a> by the Democratic think tank Third Way, which purports to show that, contrary to “the right-wing obsession over homicides in Democratic cities: murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states.” According to Third Way, of the top 10 states with the highest per-capita murder rates in 2020, eight (Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas) voted for Donald Trump, while just two (New Mexico and Georgia) voted for Joe Biden. “Republicans seem to do a much better job of talking about stopping crime than stopping crime,” Jim Kessler, an author of the report, told Axios.One problem with that: In most of these red states, the high murder rates are driven by the lethal violence in their blue cities."------------"Third Way does not provide city-by-city data for 2020 in its report, perhaps because this would undermine its red state murder narrative. But the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/dems-shameless-ploy-to-blame-crime-rise-on-red-states/" target="_blank">gathered</a> data on the 2020 murder rates in the 50 largest U.S. cities — 34 of which had Democratic mayors, while 14 were led by Republicans (two were led by independents). “The homicide rate in the blue cities was 15.8 per 100,000, compared to 9.4 per 100,000 in the red cities,” he found.And in a May <a href="https://www.manhattan-institute.org/breaking-down-the-2020-homicide-spike" target="_blank">report</a>, his Manhattan Institute colleagues Robert VerBruggen and Christos Makridis examined the growth in the homicide rate per capita in the largest U.S. counties between 2019 and 2020 — and then compared the rates in GOP-leaning and Democratic-leaning counties. They found that “counties with higher shares of GOP voters have a much lower homicide death rate and a lower number of deaths in 2020” and “also a lower growth in homicide rates.”To argue, as Third Way does, that “murder rates are actually higher in Republican, Trump-voting states” — without pointing out that those rates are driven by the slaughter taking place in Democratic-voting blue cities — is intentionally misleading.The fact is, the red state murder problem is really a red state murder myth."</blockquote>

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