The fear of rising crime was a key focus for many Republican campaigns, and the popular narrative suggested that those fears would play a big role in how Americans made decisions in this midterm election. But that doesn’t seem to have panned out. The national exit poll found crime near the bottom of a list of five top issues. Just 11 percent of Americans called it their top concern — a full 20 percentage points below inflation and 16 points below abortion. And you can see some reflection of that in the outcomes of some races where crime was a major point.
In Minnesota, for example, crime was actually up in 2021 compared with 2019, and voters had lived through unrest following the murder of George Floyd. Just last year, they voted against a ballot measure to reorganize public safety in the city of Minneapolis that was branded a “defund the police” measure. Crime — and Democratic incumbents alleged failures to control it — were a major part of advertising in the state. But voters reelected governor Tim Walz and even state Attorney General Keith Ellison — whose Republican challenger described his own platform as “crime, crime, and crime” — is still narrowly in the lead in a race that’s still being counted. Meanwhile, crime-focused Republican incumbent Senator Ron Johnson won his race in Wisconsin — but by only 2 points. And Republican Mehmet Oz, in the Pennsylvania Senate race, made crime a major part of his case against his Democratic opponent John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, but Oz lost his race.
Data on crime itself, meanwhile, has also been pretty unreliable. It’s hard to say whether crime is up or down nationally because only about 63 percent of law-enforcement agencies submitted data to the FBI in 2021 — the lowest rate in decades. Ultimately, Republicans managed to prove that Americans are afraid of crime but not that this fear overwhelms other concerns.