Westneat: Dems drop ball on crime

Then: nothing.

The bills went over to the U.S. Senate, and have not been heard of again.

It’s maybe no shock the Senate didn’t pass them. Republicans have been filibustering most Democratic bills and would have no interest in giving the liberal party a win on one of the GOP’s biggest fall campaign issues. Cynical, but that’s politics.

It’s political malpractice though that Democrats themselves have barely said a word about the effort.

“Some Democrats don’t want to talk about crime,” wrote Paul Begala, who I met back in the day when he was a political adviser for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. “They hope most voters’ righteous outrage about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade will overshadow crime as an issue. I think they’re wrong.”

One of these Democrats is our own U.S. senator, Patty Murray. She is being blamed by her GOP opponent Tiffany Smiley for everything from murders in King County to a Starbucks closing on Capitol Hill. These are not Murray’s direct purview — she’s a U.S. senator, not a mayor or police chief. But politics at its most primal level, as Bill Clinton would tell you, is about feeling your pain. It’s showing you’re engaged.

Violent crime in her state’s biggest city rose this summer to 25-year highs, but you’d barely know it from Murray. The “issues” page at her Senate website covers 14 topics, none related to public safety. Murray is a very active senator, taking to the Senate floor frequently to comment on a range of issues, from abortion rights to veterans benefits to the baby formula shortage earlier this year. Crime here at home didn’t rate a mention, according to C-SPAN’s speech tracker.

The point here isn’t to single out Murray. As Begala notes, Democrats nationwide are skittish about crime issues. Their own voter base is fractured about it. As Pew Research points out in a new national study released Monday, 82 percent of Black Democrats view violent crime as a “very important” voting issue this year. But only 33 percent of white Democrats do.

If Democrats underperform in the election, this will be a large part of why. It’s like the pandemic itself: Republicans struggled in 2020 largely because they didn’t take the pandemic seriously enough. Donald Trump would probably still be president if he’d simply stood out there wearing a hard hat, pretending to be in charge. Instead he treated a major disease outbreak like a political inconvenience. So voters canceled him.

Crime is not as shocking as a pandemic, but it is a sort of social contagion. This current crime wave was likely caused by the pandemic. Yet it’s the pandemic-denial party that’s flogging it, while strangely the party that took the pandemic seriously is now the one out of touch with reality.

Democrats are obviously conflicted — about the role of police, about GOP demagoguery of urban areas, about acknowledging that something’s gone wrong on their turf. As pollster Stuart Elway told me, it’s “gotten to the point that if Republicans are going to be saying crime is a huge problem, then the Democrats are going to say it’s not. Even if it is.”

That’s why it was a breakthrough when the party overcame all this and passed those four bills. But then to let it drop? Why not hold news conferences and demand a Senate vote. Why not force the bills onto the Senate floor, and make Republicans block them if that’s what they want to do. Why not push it like you mean it?

At least then voters might conclude the concern was more than just a hollow stunt.