Violent crime has risen dramatically over the past few years. While the FBI still has yet to produce systematic data on 2020, the bits and pieces put together through local police departments suggest a shocking increase in the murder rate in many American cities. And so far, it seems that murders are increasing over last year in many places.

The Fourth of July weekend in Chicago provided stark evidence of this trend: 19 people murdered and 104 shot, including 13 children among the wounded. To date, murders have increased 13% in the city over 2020 and a whopping 58% over 2019.

This is a policy problem of the first order. But if history is any guide, it threatens also to be a political problem for the Democratic Party.

Put bluntly, the challenge that Democrats have comes from their left wing. Progressives have historically been “soft” on the crime issue, in the sense that they prefer to treat crime as a manifestation of deeper economic inequalities rather than bad people doing bad things. That does not sit well with middleof-the-road voters, who see incidents of property damage, theft and violence requiring swift and vigorous legal action, regardless of embedded social injustices, making them much closer to the Republican view of the issue. If crime rates are high, and Democrats allow their progressive flank to brand them as weak on it, they are in greater danger of losing to Republicans.

They appear to realize this as well. On July 12, President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland played host at the White House to several police chiefs and Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain and winner of Democrats’

mayoral primary in New York City, in an attempt to mitigate the optics of a rise in violent crime in the wake of the left’s “defund the police” campaign.

The meeting also illustrated the uphill battle for Biden: Adams flatly rejected the president’s call for more police officers on the streets and instead said he’d first look at reorganizing the force’s priorities.

It would be ironic for the issue to hurt Biden politically: He came under attack from party rivals during the primaries for his past support for tough-on-crime policies, most notably the 1994 crime bill signed by President Bill Clinton. Adams’ success in the mayor’s race was taken as a sign that city Democrats were fed up with inaction on violent crime. Yet his hesitation after the White House meeting shows progressive laxity on crime is still a force in party politics.

It’s a familiar problem for the left.

Crime became a national political issue in the mid1960s, after successive waves

of violence swept through American cities. There were riots in Watts, the predominantly Black neighborhood of Los Angeles, in 1965, and for the next few years, violence hit many other urban centers, including Detroit, Newark and Omaha. The Lyndon Johnson administration responded by empaneling the Kerner Commission, whose report in 1968 emphasized that the government should address the root causes of the unrest, namely poverty and a lack of opportunity for urban residents.

Politically, this was a nonstarter — suburban and rural voters were not interested in a transfer of wealth as the solution to crime. They wanted punishments meted out for the offenders. In fact, the crime issue helped restore the Republican Party’s prospects after the disaster of the 1964 presidential election. That year, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater ran a libertarian-style campaign that rejected not only the New Deal (which Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had basically accepted in the 1950s) but also the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Goldwater had hoped to add Southern whites to the Republicans’ northern coalition of rural voters and suburbanites, but it backfired to calamitous effect for the GOP. Much of the South stayed loyal to Johnson, and traditionally Republican communities in the north bolted the GOP for Johnson. The Republicans suffered their biggest wipeout in 30 years.

But the party’s fortunes changed in 1968, thanks in part to the crime wave. Richard Nixon, who unlike Goldwater was a centrist on domestic issues, ran a campaign emphasizing law and order. Perhaps most famously, he held an enormous parade in Chicago shortly after the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which was marred by chaos and riots on the streets of the Windy City. A particular source of Nixon’s ire was the Supreme Court, which under the tenure of Chief Justice Earl Warren had expanded the rights of the accused, at the expense of what many took to be public safety. Nixon promised to nominate judges who would deal firmly with criminals.

Crime was such a durable issue for the GOP that it won back large swaths of its suburban base in 1968, held it in 1972 and suffered only a brief punishment for the Watergate scandal. Ronald Reagan likewise ran as a lawand-order candidate in 1980, promising national renewal in the face of what seemed to be urban decline.

Democrats who preferred dealing with crime through greater social welfare spending rather than increased policing and tougher criminal penalties were vulnerable, sometimes even within heavily Democratic communities. That is one reason why centrist Democrats such as Ed Koch of New York City had success running as law-andorder candidates in the ’70s and ’80s against the progressive forces in his own party. And the crime issue was a big part of why the Republicans won a historically rare third consecutive term to the presidency in 1988. Michael Dukakis gave a bloodless, technocratic answer when journalist Bernard Shaw asked him if he would favor the death penalty for somebody who raped and murdered his wife. And he paid a fearsome price for the “Willie Horton” ad, which blasted the Democrat for supporting a furlough program in the Bay State. It undercut his efforts to portray himself as a pragmatic, results-oriented alternative to Republican rule.

The Dukakis debacle summed up the Democratic problem of crime in a nutshell. He seemed out of touch with American anxiety and frustration about crime. Average voters were simply not going to support a candidate who saw such a personal issue in technical terms and at times seemed to sympathize with the criminals over the victims.

So, for nearly a quarter-century, Republicans were able to score political points on crime. Then, two things happened. First, Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 1992 and worked to get as far right as possible on the issue. He supported traditional Democratic ideas such as gun control and increased social welfare spending, but he was also in favor of the death penalty — even returning to Arkansas in January 1992 to make sure that convicted murderer Ricky Ray Rector would be executed. As president, Clinton increased social welfare spending to combat crime and secured passage of an assault weapons ban, but he also supported tougher sentencing rules, such as a “three strikes” provision that required life imprisonment for certain repeat offenders.

Second, crime rates plunged for a variety of reasons. Improved responses at the federal, state and local levels had an effect, but so did increased economic growth and a robust jobs market. Between 1960 and 1990, the violent crime rate more than quadrupled, from less than 200 violent crimes per 100,000 people to nearly 800. But between 1990 and 2000, the rate fell back to 500. Meanwhile, the homicide rate hit about 9 murders per 100,000 people in 1990, then fell to 6 by 2000. Trends over the past two decades have been similarly positive. In 2019, the overall violent crime rate was roughly 400 incidents per 100,000 people, and the homicide rate was just 5 victims per 100,000.

The drop in crime was a political boon for national Democrats. With the issue losing salience, the party could emphasize centrist cultural positions to win over suburban voters who had a generation before backed Republicans out of fear for their safety. Likewise, Democratic appeals on health care and education could have more of an impact with the crime issue out of the way. Bill Clinton was the first beneficiary of this change, cruising to an easy victory in 1996, thanks in part to a tremendous performance in the major suburbs of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia relative to Democratic candidates in the 1980s. Barack Obama likewise won comfortably twice, powered by strong suburban vote hauls. Ditto Joe Biden last year. With crime no longer on the front page, many suburban voters were up for grabs.

But with crime back in the headlines, is that coming to an end? It’s possible, but some perspective is needed. The murder rate in 2020 was up substantially in many American cities, but it is still coming off historical lows. Moreover, the 20th-century crime epidemic lasted for decades, reshaping popular culture itself. Movies such as “Dirty Harry,” “Death Wish” and “Escape from New York” had cultural relevance because they portrayed urban America as out of control, something that by the late 1980s was baked into the American psyche. Even futuristic sci-fi entries such as “Star Trek” and “Demolition Man” used the crime problem as a foil for the transformation into a new world. It would take a prolonged crime increase, not just a few consecutive annual increases from all-time lows, to transform contemporary public perceptions so thoroughly.

Still, crime as an issue puts pressure on Democrats because the left wing of the party is still inclined to see it in much the same terms as the Kerner Commission framed it — a consequence of a lack of social and economic opportunities. No doubt, there is a lot of truth to that, but the public still expects justice to be delivered to lawbreakers. Calls from progressive Democrats to defund the police were a political disaster in 2020 and quite possibly contributed to the

GOP’S much-better-than-expected showing in the House of Representatives. It is the Dukakis mistake, enlarged by an order of magnitude. At least Dukakis thought crime should be punished, which is more than can be said about some of today’s progressives. Their view is completely out of touch with the concerns of average voters, who recognize that, despite the problems of modern policing, vigorous law enforcement is necessary for the maintenance of public order. And voters are smart enough to see through the pie-in-the-sky alternative of a cadre of crisis interventionists, even if the far-left wing of the party is blind to it. The fact that many Democrats are now claiming that the Republicans are the ones who want to defund the police indicates clearly what the party’s internal polling must look like.

In the short term, perhaps the most likely political result will be mainly local in character. It is not quite right to say that crime has spiked nationwide, or at least certainly not to a uniform extent. Some places are seeing higher rates than others, which might factor in some suburban House districts in 2022 but not in others. Republicans could see their standing in suburban swing districts around Philadelphia or in Southern California improve by a handful of points, which in closely contested races could make the difference. Over the intermediate term, if the homicides and violent crime incidents continue to increase, that will put pressure on Biden’s electoral prospects in 2024 — seeing as how the incumbent stitched together an electoral coalition made up of suburbanites and urban residents. And if the rate continues at the same pace, upward of 50% in some communities, that could be a big problem for the incumbent.

However much voters may wish to address the root causes of crime, safety will always come first in their calculus. If they feel insecure in their homes or at work, they are going to respond accordingly at the ballot box.