Why Crime Likely Won’t Be An Issue In The 2022 Midterms

Daniel A. Cox November 29, 2021

A close up of a blinking lit red emergency vehicle light on top of a police car.

FiveThirtyEight

Violent crime is up. Data from the FBI found that the murder rate increased nearly 30 percent in 2020. And homicides continue to rise in 2021 as well, if not by quite as much.

Americans have noticed. A Gallup poll released in November 2020 found that 78 percent of Americans thought that the national crime rate was higher than the year before — the highest that number has been since 1993, when it was 87 percent. More recently, an October report from the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of Americans said violent crime was “a very big problem” in the U.S. today — a 20-percentage-point jump from roughly a year earlier.

But despite polls showing that Americans are increasingly worried about crime, there are a few reasons to believe that it may not be a large issue in the midterm elections next year. The biggest of which is that crime doesn’t offer a clear advantage to either political party.

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