Will Crime Be The Biggest Issue Of The 2022 Midterms?

A trio of issues is lining up to make incumbents' lives challenging late next year when they're running for re-election.  Two of those three issues are entirely predictable based on the results of last November's election.....immigration/border security and race relations.  But the third issue is the return of a political concern that hasn't defined American elections for nearly a quarter century, and that's the recent insurgence of street crime, particularly in our cities.

Crime has been ticking upward for the last few years after a generation of remarkable decline that began in the mid-90s, so most people aren't entirely caught off-guard by the more high-profile surge in violence that's been going on in 2021.  For a variety of reasons, the uptick in crime seemed inevitable based on recent events, and I suspect the isolation of the pandemic has weakened mental health metrics for the population, creating a powder keg effect of hot tempers and idle hands.  Certainly a lot of politicians will try to shrug off the recent spike in crime as an inevitable--and ultimately temporary--consequence of COVID lockdowns.  Unfortunately, I suspect there's far more to the story.

For the better part of a decade now, an effort has been made to reduce the short-term and long-term burden of overzealous incarceration, particularly as it relates to nonviolent drug crimes.  In one respect, shrinking the footprint of our incarceration culture was good public policy, but as always, every action has a reaction.  In this case, many incarcerated felons have been given early release while others who would have been locked up in the past along more stringent sentencing guidelines either got lesser sentences or avoided incarceration altogether.  In some states, prisons gave early release to inmates to limit overcrowding during the pandemic.  The result has been a great number of people who have shown a prior propensity to commit crimes are now back in the general population.

Beyond that, the long-looming clash between law enforcement and social justice advocates came to a head last year after the George Floyd killing.  Some would argue this was an overdue moment of reckoning brought on after decades of racial injustice.  Maybe....but the realigning relationship between police and the communities they serve was certain to come with imminent sociological consequences of its own.  Anybody with a kindergarten-level understanding of incentives could see coming that police would become demoralized and criminals would become emboldened.  Given the rapid attrition of police officers on city payrolls across the country coupled with the COVID-era cabin fever of an isolated population, the only surprise here is that crime rates haven't spiked substantially higher.

And pandemic fallout is another reason I suspect the increase in crime isn't going away, even if the policing situation gets under control again.  Large number of urban students across the country, already at the highest risk of falling behind educationally, experienced an outsized disruption to their in-person classroom time and were least likely to participate in any meaningful way in online learning.  In the summer of 2020, it was reported that a full 40% of Minneapolis and St. Paul students never turned on their remote-study laptops even once during the pandemic.  The result is likely to be a generation of urban students lost to the streets, so far behind in their educational attainment after a year or more of school lockdowns that they'll never re-engage in a serious way.  Bottom line:  the kids who became criminals and contributed to the soaring crime rates in the past 18 months are poised to remain criminals.

So far, it's not clear if the rise in crime besieging our urban centers is being felt as strongly in the suburbs or in rural areas.   But given that those in the suburbs often work and recreate in urban areas, people there can be expected to respond to news stories of soaring crime in the cities.  Democratic Party analysts are reportedly petrified that the increase in crime will result in a wipeout for their party in the 2022 midterms, and I think they're right to be concerned.  While the number of elected Democrats who are onboard with the infantile "defund the police" framing of police reform is small, the right has successfully tethered the Democrats to the far left, and most mainstream Democrats are finding it hard to push back against this narrative and risk angering the activist base.

This puts Democrats in a precarious position heading into next year.  If they allow themselves to be defined as soft on crime, they lose the suburbs.  If they overcorrect and sound like law-and-order hardliners as they did in the Clinton era, they lose the activists.  Given that Democrats only won control of government by a collective 90,000 votes in the perfect storm of November 2020, they will clearly be crushed next year if they piss off either the center or the left.  

The recent New York City mayoral primary was quite the canary in a coal mine, with dark horse candidate Eric Adams, who ran on a law-and-order restoration platform, beating out three more conventionally leftist candidates and doing so with a multi-racial working-class coalition.  Even in New York City, the epicenter of American liberalism, voters are impatient with rising crime and not buying into the rudimentary framing of social justice activists vowing to shrink the law enforcement footprint in their beleaguered neighborhoods.

In one sense, it's still too early to tell what issues will be most motivating in the 2022 midterms or if the Democrats are in as bad of shape as they would appear to be based on the ridiculously narrow margin of victory on which they built their current majority.  If economic metrics remain strong next year and if Donald Trump refuses to yield the spotlight, Democrats have a chance of not getting wiped out.  I think even in the best-case scenario, they still lose the House and probably the Senate, but the firmly entrenched tribal fault lines could still keep most of the Democratic coalition intact and position Democrats for yet another comeback in 2024.

But even that best-case scenario still wouldn't be a particularly promising commentary on the state of the nation's politics.  If the only way Democrats can limp through this cycle without nasty battle scars is to make another election cycle all about Donald Trump--or if you prefer, to ride the wave as Donald Trump makes another election cycle about himself--crossing their fingers every step of the way that the economy maintains blistering growth, that the crime rate ebbs, and that Biden can get a handle on the southern border in a way that he hasn't thus far, in which case the Democrats could aspire to only narrowly lose next year, then the rot at the core of the party's messaging continues to not get addressed.

This is why I wish Eric Adams success in New York City.  If he manages to restore some order to the lawless streets and subways of Gotham, the electoral poison being sold to Democrats by screaming activists and social media wokesters can be more readily ignored.  Only by becoming culturally credible to the overwhelming majority of voters who are not part of the modern left can Democrats compete in a post-Trump world.  

The damage that the Democratic Party did to itself in Middle America at those 2020 Presidential primary debates was incalculable, the party's would-be rising stars attaching themselves to the furthest reaches of hard-left dogma and taking such wildly unpopular positions on key issues that they disqualified themselves from consideration among millions of people who were ardent Democrats just a few short years ago.  And if not for the grotesque personality of the opposition party's leader, the number of voters that the Democrats would have disqualified themselves with based on last year's platform would have been even larger.  In so many ways, Eric Adams' mayoral candidacy in the Big Apple represents the first step in reclaiming Democrats' credibility with the voters who lost faith in them in the last couple of years.  We'll see if the Democrats learn that lesson sooner or later, and if the legacy of Trump in the American political conversation outlives their inability to find messaging that sells beyond academia, the tech industry, and social justice activists with megaphones.