The Blue State Crime Myth

How Republicans Weaponized America’s Fear of Crime

For years, Americans have been fed a political narrative so simple it barely qualifies as an argument.

Crime is a blue state problem.

The claim is repeated with the confidence of settled fact by politicians, cable news personalities, social media influencers, and the broader ecosystem of culture war commentary that has made outrage into a profitable industry. Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Portland, and San Francisco are invoked like a liturgy, symbols of Democratic failure and urban collapse, evidence that liberalism produces lawlessness and conservatism produces order. The argument is delivered with such frequency and such certainty that millions of Americans have accepted it as background truth, the kind of thing you no longer bother to examine because it seems too obvious to question.

It does not survive examination.

Line graph comparing average murder rates in red states versus blue states from 2000 to 2022, showing consistently higher rates in red states.

A 2024 report from Third Way, the centrist policy organization, examined CDC mortality data across all fifty states from 2000 through 2022 and arrived at a finding that should have ended the blue state crime narrative permanently, though of course it did not. Murder rates in red states were 33 percent higher than in blue states in both 2021 and 2022, and 2022 marked the 23rd consecutive year that Trump-voting states experienced far higher murder rates than Biden-voting states. Eight of the ten states with the highest murder rates in 2022 voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama held the first, second, and third highest murder rates in the country, a distinction they have held for fifteen of the last twenty-three years. California ranked 30th. New York ranked 35th. Neither state cracks the top twenty-five in any year the report examined. That is not a footnote. That is the story.

The report also demolished the one escape hatch Republican commentators reach for when the data becomes inconvenient: the claim that red state murder rates are elevated because of blue cities embedded within them. Third Way removed the county containing the largest city from every red state in the analysis and kept those counties in for blue states, the most generous possible methodology for the argument, and red state murder rates were still 20 percent higher in 2021 and 16 percent higher in 2022. This is not a blue cities in red states problem. The report also noted that in 2023, Speaker Mike Johnson’s hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana recorded a murder rate eight times higher than Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ Brooklyn, six times higher than Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco, and more than seven times higher than the national average. House Republicans held their field hearings on violent crime in New York City, Chicago, and Washington. They should have held them in Shreveport.

The 2025 Numbers

According to FBI-based violent crime data, the most recent full rankings place the ten most violent states in America as follows:

Alaska at 724.1 (violent crimes per 100,000 residents)
New Mexico at 717.1
Tennessee at 592.3
Arkansas at 579.4
Louisiana at 519.8
California at 486.0
Colorado at 476.3
Missouri at 462.0
Kansas at 438.7
South Carolina at 436.7

Read that list again slowly.

Alaska. New Mexico. Tennessee. Arkansas. Louisiana. Missouri. Kansas. South Carolina. Of the ten states with the highest violent crime rates in America, the overwhelming majority have been under Republican political control for years, in some cases for decades. New Mexico, California and Colorado appear on the list and are legitimately Democratic-governed states. The other seven are not. That is the data. It does not come from a progressive think tank or a partisan advocacy group. It comes from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which uses standardized crime statistics measured per 100,000 residents to enable accurate state-by-state comparisons.

There is a companion truth that receives even less attention. Republican-governed states like Texas, Arizona, and Tennessee post violent crime rates in the 400s and 600s, two to three times higher than Connecticut, which records 181.59 violent crimes per 100,000 people. Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York, three states that appear in the standard recitation of Democratic failure, routinely rank among the safest in the country. The five least violent states in America are in the Northeast, with the exception of Hawaii. None of this appears in campaign advertising, because none of it is useful for campaign advertising.

The Historical Record

The partisan narrative is not merely wrong about the present. It is wrong about the past in ways that make the present numbers even harder to explain away.

National violent crime is currently at historic lows. Violent crime dropped 4.5 percent in 2024, with murder and nonnegligent manslaughter down 14.9 percent, the lowest violent crime rates since 1969. Property crime fell 8.1 percent, with motor vehicle theft seeing its largest single-year decline ever at 18.6 percent. And 2025 data shows the trend accelerating, with homicides down 17 percent, robbery down 20 percent, carjackings down 24 percent, motor vehicle theft down 25 percent, residential burglary down 19 percent, nonresidential burglary down 18 percent, and larceny down 12 percent, the lowest mid-year numbers in over a decade.

New York City recorded its deadliest modern year in 1990, when the city suffered 2,245 homicides during the convergence of the crack epidemic, gang warfare, and urban economic collapse. In 2024, New York City recorded approximately 377 homicides. That is a decline of more than 80 percent from its historic peak, one of the most dramatic sustained reductions in urban violence in American history. It receives a fraction of the attention devoted to a single weekend of shootings that can be packaged into a segment about Democratic failure.

Los Angeles reached its modern homicide peak in 1992 with approximately 1,092 murders. In 2024, Los Angeles recorded approximately 284 homicides. A dramatic and sustained decline from its most violent era, achieved over administrations of both parties, through policing strategies, demographic changes, and economic factors that resist the clean partisan attribution the narrative requires.

This is not an argument that Democratic governance solved crime. It is not that simple and anyone who tells you it is that simple is selling something. But it is an argument that the cities most frequently offered as proof of liberal failure are measurably, documentably safer than they were during the periods most retroactively celebrated as representing law, order, and competent governance.

The Cities the Narrative Ignores

New Orleans currently tops the list of American cities by homicide rate at 46 homicides per 100,000 people, followed by Memphis at 41. Both cities consistently rank near the top due to long-term structural challenges including poverty, strained social services, and persistent violent crime. New Orleans is in Louisiana. Memphis is in Tennessee. Both states appear in the top five most violent in the country. Neither city appears in the standard political recitation of crime-ridden American urban centers, because neither city fits the narrative’s geography.

Memphis ranked among the top large cities for both violent and property crimes, leading in aggravated assault, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. St. Louis, Cleveland, and Oakland dominated the lists for mid-sized cities. Smaller cities like Birmingham, East Point, Tukwila, and Emeryville had rates far above the national average, proving that crime is not just a big city problem.

Jackson, Mississippi. Birmingham, Alabama. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Little Rock, Arkansas. These cities rank among the most dangerous in America on a per-capita basis. They are located in states that have been electing Republican governors and legislatures for a generation. They are not in the liturgy. They never will be, because they destroy the argument the liturgy is designed to make.

What Actually Drives Crime

The honest explanation for violent crime has never fit into a bumper sticker or a cable news segment, and the people who profit from the bumper sticker version are not interested in the honest explanation.

Violent crime is shaped by poverty, gang activity, narcotics markets, educational inequality, housing instability, firearm access, economic decline, policing strategies, incarceration patterns, population density, historical segregation, social mobility, and the accumulated consequences of policy decisions made across generations and across administrations of both parties. It does not settle over a city because the mayor belongs to the wrong party. It is a social condition with social causes, and those causes are indifferent to the electoral map.

What has happened is that Americans increasingly consume crime through political branding rather than criminology or statistical reality. Media attention concentrates disproportionately on famous cities whose misery can be attached to a partisan story, while smaller cities and regions with equal or worse violence go largely unexamined because they complicate the story rather than confirming it. The result is a national conversation about crime shaped almost entirely by ideology and the requirements of the news cycle rather than by evidence or analysis.

What the Data Actually Says

Crime is not a uniquely Republican problem. Crime is not a uniquely Democratic problem. The national violent crime rate of 359.1 per 100,000 residents is the lowest since 1969. That fact belongs to no party. It was produced by decades of policy decisions, demographic shifts, economic changes, and social forces that no politician of either stripe can honestly claim sole credit for.

What can be claimed, and what the data supports, is that the states most insistently offered as evidence of liberal governance’s failure are frequently not the most violent states in America. The most violent states are often the ones whose governors are featured at Republican National Conventions explaining how Democratic cities have become ungovernable hellscapes.

The gap between the story and the evidence is not accidental. It is not the result of sloppy journalism or lazy politics, though there is plenty of both. It is the product of a deliberate choice to substitute a satisfying narrative for an inconvenient reality, because the narrative moves votes and the reality does not.

Slogans are emotionally satisfying. They require nothing of the audience and confirm what the audience already wanted to believe. Evidence is slower, more demanding, and almost always more complicated than the story that gets told about it.

That gap between the story and the evidence is not a bug in the American political conversation about crime.

It is the product.