Opinion | ‘Law and Order’ Has Worked for the GOP Before. This Crime Boom Might Be Different.

Will crime be the Republican Party’s ticket back into power in 2022?

One of the peculiar side effects of the Covid pandemic has been a sharp rise in violent crime rates—most notably, a 25 percent jump in homicides, the largest increase in a single year since the government began keeping tabs in 1960. This is the first real reversal in the long, steady drop in crime since the 1990s, and many pundits see it as a political opportunity.

“Republicans plotting to retake the majority in the House and Senate next November may well have found the issue that could make that happen: crime,” wrote CNN’s Chris Cillizza. “Democrats should beware,” wrote Rich Lowry here. It’s a theme that is circulating across the political spectrum, from right (Fox News) to left (Brookings Institution).

There is strong historical precedent for this belief. In the 1970s and 1980s, Republican candidates successfully used violent crime as an issue to attract white voters. Fused with concerns over the economy, busing and neighborhood integration, “law-and-order” politics dislodged millions of working- and middle-class white voters from their former home in the Democratic Party. No politician did it better than Richard Nixon, whose White House staff aimed, in their own words, “to orient the Silent Majority toward issues other than foreign policy (e.g.: inflation, crime, law and order, etc.) and then to increase support for the President’s foreign and domestic proposals.”

But 2021 is not 1971. Even allowing for the public’s very real perception of violent crime as a top national priority, the nation’s political demography has changed dramatically over the last half century. Then, many working-class and middle-class voters lived in cities or inner-ring suburbs where crime was not a hypothetical concern; it was an everyday reality. By contrast, today most voters the GOP hopes to claw back inhabit increasingly diverse suburban areas where crime is not an everyday reality. Polls show that while most voters believe crime is on the rise, they don’t believe it threatens their neighborhoods.

It’s true that crime might function as a mechanism to motivate the conservative base. But to move voters from the Democratic to the Republican column, it will need to capture the independent voters who swung from Trump to Biden in the last election. And here the historical analogy breaks down.

To understand why it’s not the silver bullet that Republicans think it is, it’s critical to revisit the reasons why it once worked.

The fundamental reason that crime resonated as a political issue 50 years ago was that it was a part of many swing voters’ daily reality. Between 1960 and 1970 the national crime rate rose by 176 percent. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the murder rate doubled, with the most dramatic spikes occurring in the decade after the Vietnam War.

Particularly in cities and inner-ring suburbs, where millions of working-class whites still worked and lived, crime was a visible indicator of urban decay and social chaos. In New York City, the crime rate skyrocketed in the 1950s and 1960s, a phenomenon many attributed to the growth of “ghettos” where chronic poverty and substandard housing had created a breeding ground for urban crime. In 1966 alone, the number of reported burglaries citywide increased by more than 96 percent; the number of robberies, by nearly 90 percent and the rate of felonies as a whole by 60 percent. It became axiomatic that entire parts of the city were off-limits to law-abiding citizens. Even public transportation seemed increasingly dangerous. In 1965 the rate of “serious” crimes reported on the subways – robberies, muggings, armed assaults – increased by 52 percent.

New York reeled from one gruesome crime after another, like the murder of Charles Gallagher, a physics professor at Columbia University who was found dead of a gunshot wound in Central Park. Time Magazine remarked that Gallagher’s murder was a reminder that the park, “a sunny sanctuary for birds and bird watchers like Charles Gallagher during the day, [has] long been a junglelike hideout for muggers, holdup men and perverts after dark.” Even more chilling was the murder of Bertha Haas, a 68-year-old Bronx widow who was beaten, raped and strangled to death inside her own apartment building.

Such tragedies had a cumulative effect. A survey conducted in 1966 revealed that almost half of all white Brooklynites felt unsafe when walking outside after dark; 40 percent reported sometimes staying home or foregoing social engagements because “it was too unsafe” to go outdoors; 74 percent were “somewhat concerned” or “very concerned” that their homes might be burglarized.

There was a clear racial overlay to public perception. Roughly one out of five white New Yorkers admitted he would feel “personal concern” if a Black person crossed the street and began walking toward him.

This story repeated itself across the country. As early as 1964, Alabama Gov. George Wallace —an avowed segregationist and white supremacist who launched a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination — stunned political observers when he racked up large numbers in the Wisconsin primary. Though incumbent President Lyndon Johnson handily won the state, Wallace’s appeal in white ethnic urban and suburban neighborhoods was unmistakable. “If you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today,” he warned rallygoers, “the man who knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital.” “Anyone here from Philadelphia?” Wallace asked on another occasion. “You know, they can’t even have night football games anymore because of the trouble between the races. And that’s the city of brotherly love!”

At a rally in Milwaukee, before a crowd of 700 working-class voters—most of them of Serbian, Polish, Czechoslovakian and Hungarian descent — the master of ceremonies, Brono Gruber, a military veteran and neighborhood bar owner, blamed local crime specifically on Blacks: “I live on Walnut Street and three weeks ago tonight a friend of mine was assaulted by three of your countrymen, or whatever you want to call them… They beat up old ladies 83 years old, rape our womenfolk. They mug people. They won’t work. They are on relief. How long can we tolerate this? Did I go to Guadalcanal to come back to something like this!?”"

Wallace was able to fuse concerns over neighborhood integration and crime because, in the minds of many white voters, they were one and the same. LBJ’s proxy on the Wisconsin ballot, Gov. John Reynolds, had earned scorn in blue-collar neighborhoods for his successful advocacy of a state open housing law that would have cracked down on segregated rentals and restrictive home sales.

White backlash over crime and race was not wholly divorced from reality. Racially restrictive housing laws— enforced by a complex web of regulations handed down by federal mortgage agencies—consigned Black Americans to the worst, most cramped (yet paradoxically most overpriced) housing stock. An absence of basic public services like reliable garbage removal, building inspection and quality schools in those neighborhoods made residents second-class citizens.

Discrimination created a vicious cycle. Because discriminatory rental and mortgage practices sharply limited their residential options, Black residents enjoyed little recourse when landlords consolidated and subdivided their properties, creating more cramped and rundown housing stock. Boarded-up, abandoned buildings seemed to dot every block, as landlords often found it more advantageous to pack more tenants in one property than to pay property taxes and maintenance on two. Such decay did, in fact, tend to attract a disproportionate share of drug dealers, vagrants, prostitutes, and vandals. In short, when residents of white ethnic enclaves in Gary, Indiana or Milwaukee, Wisconsin pointed to surrounding Black neighborhoods with fear, they were reacting from genuine experience.

In Canarsie, a working-class enclave in Brooklyn inhabited predominately by second-generation Italian and Jewish families, residents were transfixed by the crime and violence that seemed to be burning a hole in adjacent neighborhoods. “The neighborhood was totally destroyed as soon as the Blacks moved in,” one man told a sociologist. “Buildings started burning down, and we had more crime.”

The problem, of course, was that many working-class white voters could not disentangle race and crime. As neighborhood integration and political wars over school busing further enflamed white backlash, crime became a convenient shorthand for racialized anxiety that Republican politicians used to divide and conquer the electorate.

If you fast forward to the 2020s, you see a very different landscape. Race remains a salient part of our politics, but in a country that is markedly more diverse than it was 50 years ago, in which we are reexamining every facet of our national history and civic framework, culture wars over “critical race theory” may be more resonant placeholders for race than crime.

More to the point, vast demographic changes over the past 50 years have re-sorted the American population. Today’s swing voters are affluent suburbanites, not working-class residents of transitional urban neighborhoods. The places where violent crime is on the rise—namely, cities—are deep blue and unlikely to change. The places where violent crime is not on the rise—namely, suburbs—are the new political battleground.

Polling consistently shows that while a majority of Americans believe crime is a very, or even the most, serious problem facing the country (59 percent in a recent Washington Post/ABC poll), very few believe it is a problem in the places they actually live (only 17 percent). In a sharply siloed media environment, it’s easy to see how conservative viewers of Fox News might be led to believe that Joe Biden’s administration has led to “American carnage.”

But voters aren’t distributed the way they were in 1970. It’s the educated suburbs that are up for grabs now, and voters there simply don’t confront violent crime on a daily basis in the same way that the working-class Democrats of Brooklyn or Milwaukee did a half century ago. If they don’t perceive crime as a threat to them personally, will it motivate their decisions in November 2022? The historical record would suggest that it won’t.

Of course, none of this is to say that some of the urban voters affected by today’s rise in crime might not be up for grabs. Studies show that low-income non-white families are far more exposed to violent crime and more likely to perceive it as an immediate threat. Republicans have made inroads with Latino voters, and in recent months, it has become clear that last year’s racial justice awakening obscured a more complicated reality about the Black electorate, which is diverse—not a monolith—but generally concerned about crime and welcoming of a greater police presence on the streets if and when that presence is protective of their safety.

In theory, then, working-class Black and Latino Americans, particularly more conservative-leaning men, could prove today’s crime-backlash voters. But the GOP seems ill-equipped to seize that opportunity. The party’s open embrace of white nationalism will likely place a ceiling on that support, and its association with the January 6 insurgency makes it a poor, or at least compromised, messenger; Democrats could easily paint Republicans as the true purveyors of violence in American society.

In fact, polling shows that voters are split about evenly on which party they believe is best equipped to address the issue of crime—hardly the same clear advantage that Republicans enjoyed 50 years ago. Whereas it was easy and intuitive in the 1970s to blame Democratic mayors and governors—to say nothing of Lyndon Johnson—for the nation’s unraveling, it’s not at all clear that today’s voters will punish Democrats for a rise in violent crime. People may also decide that the spike in crime was an unfortunate aftershock of the pandemic, especially if the rate subsides over the coming months.

The 2022 election cycle is still in the distant future, and in politics, things change quickly. Judging by history and by polling, however, crime may not provide the winning message that the GOP is looking for. Yesterday’s swing voters are not today’s swing voters, and in 2021, “law and order” doesn’t mean the same thing it did in 1971.