Midterm Elections (2022)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 50 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Crime and Political Punishment

      by

      Results from Tuesday’s primaries in California suggest that crime may be a big issue in the midterm elections. In San Francisco, a progressive prosecutor was ousted in a recall vote. In Los Angeles, a businessman and former Republican who has run for mayor on the promise to be a big crime fighter made a strong showing.It’s not hard to see why crime has moved up on the political agenda. Murders surged nationwide in 2020 and ticked up further in 2021, although we don’t really know why. Right-wingers blame Black Lives Matter, because of course they do. A more likely explanation is the stress caused by the pandemic — stress that, among other things, led to a large increase in domestic violence.Despite the recent surge, the overall homicide rate is still well below its peak in 1991, and the geography of the political backlash doesn’t seem closely correlated with actual crime rates: San Francisco and Los Angeles both have less violent crime than, say, Houston. But rising crime is real, and voter concern is understandable.But will the public backlash against crime lead to positive results? I wish I could be optimistic.At the very least, we’ll need to get past some widespread misconceptions. And even then, talking about cracking down on crime is easy; actually doing something about it isn’t.First, we need to get past the idea that crime is mainly a big-city problem — an idea that is still very much out there, even though it has long since stopped being true. Last year J.D. Vance, now the Republican nominee for senator from Ohio — and definitely in the running for one of America’s most cynical politicians — tweeted to his followers: “I have to go to New York soon, and I’m trying to figure out where to stay. I hear it’s disgusting and violent there.” I think that was sort of a joke, but one that he knew perfectly well that many of his followers wouldn’t get.The truth, as Bloomberg’s Justin Fox recently documented, is that New York is remarkably safe, not just compared with other large U.S. cities, but also compared with small towns and rural areas. In particular, New York City has a substantially lower homicide rate than that of Ohio as a whole.This doesn’t mean that everything is fine in the Big Apple; Eric Adams was elected mayor in part because crime has risen sharply, and he took a get-tough-on-crime stance. But in a rational world politicians from the heartland wouldn’t be sneering at New York; they’d be looking at our biggest city, which also happens to be one of the safest places in America, and trying to figure out what it’s doing right.Another misconception we need to get past is the idea that rising crime is all about immigration. Vance, in particular, has based his campaign largely on demagoguery about immigration, and especially about immigrant crime — demagoguery that seems to work best in places with very few immigrants: Less than 5 percent of Ohio’s population is foreign-born, compared with 38 percent in New York City.Even if we can avoid the misconceptions, however, what can politicians actually do about crime?It would help if we knew what caused crime to fall so much between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s — a decline, by the way, that was accompanied every step of the way by Gallup polls showing a plurality, and usually a large majority, of Americans asserting that crime was rising. But my reading is that there’s no consensus on why that decline — which took place all across the nation, in red states and blue — took place.It would also help if there were a clear pattern to the crime wave of 2020-21. But like the earlier decline, it was pretty much universal across America; it hit states and cities run by conservative Republicans, centrists and liberal Democrats with more or less equal force.So complaining about crime is easy, but actually bringing it down is hard; in fact, New Yorkers already seem deeply disillusioned with Adams’s efforts.One thing that might help is better policing; the available evidence suggests that severe sentences for convicted criminals don’t do much to deter crime, but that an increased probability of being caught does. So “defund the police” was a stupid (and politically destructive) slogan; we probably need to devote more, not less, resources to law enforcement. But of course we also need the police who do their job — the story from Uvalde just keeps getting worse — and don’t abuse their position. If fear of crime is a real issue, so is minority groups’ fear of being abused by the people who are supposed to protect them, and we can’t simply trust the police to always do the right thing.Oh, and it would help matters if criminals weren’t equipped with military-grade weapons and body armor — and no, having everyone else heavily armed isn’t the answer. New York doesn’t have low crime by American standards because it’s full of good guys with guns.Anyway, like it or not, crime will be an issue in November. As I said, I wish I could be optimistic. But my fear is that the beneficiaries of the new focus on crime will be politicians who have nothing to offer but tough talk.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      How South Dakota Voters Won a Power Struggle With G.O.P. Legislators

      by

      Coming on the same night that voters in San Francisco ousted their lightning rod of a district attorney, Chesa Boudin — in what was widely interpreted as a setback for progressive ideas on criminal justice — it would have been easy to overlook what happened on Tuesday in South Dakota.But the results there are no less consequential for national politics. Voters in South Dakota sent a resounding message of their own to the state’s conservative power structure: We’re in charge here, not you.The immediate issue was a constitutional amendment requiring that certain voter-initiated referendums must pass by 60 percent, rather than a simple majority. The measure was defeated decisively, with more than two-thirds of voters rejecting the proposed new threshold.But this wasn’t just a political process story. It was the latest round in a national fight between voters and state legislatures, who have been battling for primacy on issues like marijuana legalization, gerrymandering and health care. Last year, my colleagues Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti took a broad look at Republican-led efforts to limit ballot initiatives, which have grown only more intense in the last 12 months.In South Dakota, the ballot question was pushed by Republican state lawmakers who are hoping to defeat a November referendum on expanding access to Medicaid. To David Daley, the author of several recent books on grass-roots democracy, it was a classic example of the power struggle playing out in state capitols across the country.“Whenever citizens effectively use the ballot initiative to make policy changes the legislature opposes, lawmakers bite back, and they bite back hard,” Daley said.Raising the threshold for ballot drives is an increasingly common tool. A new report by RepresentUs, a nonpartisan group that promotes ballot initiatives, found that since 2017, at least four states have passed laws that impose supermajority requirements and put them in front of voters as a ballot question, out of at least 64 bills proposed.And it’s not always Republican lawmakers pitted against progressive voters.“We’ve seen legislators attempt to threaten and limit the ballot-measure process in red, blue and purple states,” said Anh-Linh Kearney, a research analyst for RepresentUs, pointing to Democratic-controlled Colorado, which raised the requirement for passing ballot measures to 55 percent in 2016.Not-so-subtle tactics to target referendumsChris Melody Fields Figueredo, the executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, described a “growing trend of tactical ways to make the process harder,” pointing to her group’s tally of 108 laws introduced this year in 26 states that would make technical tweaks to the rules surrounding ballot initiatives.Understand the June 7 Primary ElectionBy showing little enthusiasm for progressive and Trumpian candidates alike, voters in seven states showed the limits of the ideologies of both parties.Takeaways: For all the talk of sweeping away the old order, the primaries on June 7 largely saw the establishment striking back. Here’s what else we learned.Winners and Losers: Here is a rundown of some of the most notable wins and losses.California Races: The recall of a progressive prosecutor showed the shifting winds on criminal justice. In Los Angeles, Rick Caruso and Representative Karen Bass are heading to a runoff mayoral election.New Mexico’s Governor Race: Mark Ronchetti, a former television meteorologist, has won New Mexico’s Republican nomination for governor.Since 2017, Fields Figueredo said, the center had counted a fivefold increase in bills introduced and enacted that would make it more difficult to pass ballot measures.Sometimes those tweaks take Kafkaesque forms.In Arkansas, for instance, a drive to establish a nonpartisan redistricting commission ran into a deviously written 2015 law requiring that canvassers for the ballot initiative pass a federal background check conducted by the State Police.But there was a catch. The State Police could not do federal background checks. So the group behind the ballot drive, Arkansas Voters First, pulled what information it could from publicly available records and submitted thousands more signatures than required. The secretary of state rejected those background checks on the grounds that the canvassers had not “passed,” and threw out more than 10,000 signatures.Litigation followed. In a 2020 decision, the Arkansas Supreme Court sided with the secretary of state, ruling that the statute had mandated the background checks, whether or not the task was impossible. In a dissent, Justice Josephine Linker Hart pointed out the absurdity of the statute, noting that “the State Police do not ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ the subject of a background check” — they merely share the information from the relevant databases.“It was wild,” said Bonnie Miller, who led the Arkansas Voters First petition drive. “I’m still not over it.”A court later threw out the background-check requirement, but the cat-and-mouse game goes on: The Arkansas General Assembly passed a new law that lengthened the list of offenses that disqualify paid canvassers. And a measure similar to the one South Dakota voters just rejected, raising the threshold for successful ballot initiatives to 60 percent, is now on the ballot.Miller feels as if she’s battling for the very principle behind voter-led referendums. “This threshold, it’s just death to direct democracy in our state,” she said.‘People want the ability to make decisions for themselves’Opponents of the South Dakota amendment had a couple of factors working in their favor.There’s the state’s long history with ballot initiatives: Father Robert Haire, a radical Catholic priest, helped pioneer the concept as an activist with the Populist Party in the 1880s.Then there’s the fact that Medicaid is popular. Voter-led petitions have already powered Medicaid expansion in Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks information and trends about the country’s health care system, has found that three-quarters of Americans hold a favorable opinion of the program — including 76 percent of independents and 65 percent of Republicans.At this point, only 12 states have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, despite its popularity. As you can see from this interactive map, also put together by Kaiser, these states are concentrated in the Deep South, along with Kansas, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming. But when Kaiser asked people in those states whether they wanted to expand Medicaid’s coverage, 61 percent said yes.And finally, Fields Figueredo said, voters have a deep-seated aversion to having their choices limited by politicians — setting up inevitable clashes with lawmakers who “don’t like being told what to do.”“People want the ability to make decisions for themselves,” she said.What to read“We’re bleeding out, and you’re not there”: Families of the Uvalde, Texas, massacre pleaded with Congress today to enact new gun control laws.Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas said this week that the state would investigate fake accounts on Twitter — an issue that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has pointed to as he appears to waver on a blockbuster deal to buy the platform. What’s in it for Paxton and Texas? David McCabe and J. David Goodman explain.The Supreme Court is expected to release some enormously important rulings in the coming weeks. David Leonhardt previews the five biggest ones.Rick Caruso will face Representative Karen Bass in the general election for Los Angeles mayor.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesAbout last night’s election results …Last night, we wrote about four candidates we were watching in Tuesday’s primaries, and 24 hours later, we have some results — but as expected, we’re still waiting for more.In one of the three Republican primary challenges we were monitoring, the incumbent is safe. In the other two, it’s too soon to say.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More