This is a big reality shift away from a common assumption and a popular political narrative that was heavily used in the last election cycle. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Maybe this is why.
https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-murder-problem
https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-murder-problem
Quote:
Takeaways
- The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020.
- Over this 21-year span, this Red State murder gap has steadily widened from a low of 9% more per capita red state murders in 2003 and 2004 to 44% more per capita red state murders in 2019, before settling back to 43% in 2020.
- Altogether, the per capita Red State murder rate was 23% higher than the Blue State murder rate when all 21 years were combined.
- If Blue State murder rates were as high as Red State murder rates, Biden-voting states would have suffered over 45,000 more murders between 2000 and 2020.
- Even when murders in the largest cities in red states are removed, overall murder rates in Trump-voting states were 12% higher than Biden-voting states across this 21-year period and were higher in 18 of the 21 years observed.
Quote:
In this study, we collected homicide data from 2000 through 2020 for all 50 states from the Center of Disease Control Wonder's National Center for Health Statistics Mortality Data. Data is based on death certificates collected by state registries and provided to the National Vital Statistics System. We chose CDC data over FBI data because it's more up to date and does not rely on voluntary reporting from counties and states. All states are required to report mortality data to the CDC; they're only encouraged to report crime data to the FBI. The United States Department of Justice has acknowledged that CDC data is more accurate. (There were four states with several years of missing dataNew Hampshire, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. In these instances, we relied on FBI numbers from the Uniform Crime Statistics.)1 To allow for comparison, we calculated the state's per capita murder rate, the number of murders per 100,000 residents, and categorized states by their presidential vote in the 2020 election, resulting in an even 25-25 state split.