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During the pandemic, there was a rise in violent crime. But by 2023, violent crime was near its lowest level in over 50 years. But that year, Gallup found that 77 percent of Americans said they believed that crime was increasing. I hear that in my everyday life. People talk to me about their sense that where they live is less safe, and they’re mad about it. This was constant when I lived in San Francisco. It’s constant in New York, where I live now.
I have met people in New York who aren’t very political, but they vote. They’ve always voted for Democrats, and now they’re leaning toward Republicans on this issue alone. And you can see that nationally. Democrats feel they have a problem when it comes to crime. In 2020 the party was running on criminal justice reform. Now Kamala Harris talks about herself as California’s top law enforcement official.
At the same time, Democrats I know are frustrated. Violent crime is down, not up. Why won’t people look at the numbers? It’s begun to remind me of the economic debates over much of the past year. On the most important data, the economy looks good. But people are angry. You can say the people are wrong, or you can ask what the data is missing.
I think there is something missing in the violent crime data. That thing is disorder. Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies crime and drug policy, wrote a piece in his newsletter, The Causal Fallacy, about exactly this question. So I asked him on the show to talk about it.
This is an edited excerpt from our conversation for my podcast. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.”
If you look at the statistics, violent crime is going down. Donald Trump and others on the right say those statistics are flawed. You’re a right-of-center crime researcher. What do you think?
I think crime statistics are never going to be perfect. We have a decent measure of the rates of underreporting. We know that we miss something like half of crimes or that half of crimes don’t get reported to the police. That’s based on surveys of households. So that, itself, is an imperfect estimate.
But we can reasonably say that the trends that are showing up in the F.B.I.’s crime statistics numbers are real, or at least they are correlated with reality. And what those numbers show is that in 2020 there was a big spike in homicide and a big spike in aggravated assault. And that makes sense insofar as an aggravated assault is mostly a proxy for shootings, and shootings are just homicides where you miss.
Those rose sort of steadily in 2020. In 2021 they peak. They start coming down a little bit in 2022, 2023. And the early indicators show that we’re close to or at 2019 levels. There’s another component, which is auto theft, which has just exploded across the country and is still well elevated over 2019, and that’s maybe starting to come down.
But I find those numbers basically plausible. I find them plausible because, A, there are something like 18,000 police departments reporting in some capacity to the F.B.I. They can’t all be making it up. B, it jibes with what you see in individual municipal data. And, C, you can tell coherent stories about what has happened in the cultural and policy environment over the past couple of years that make it make sense that you would see a spike in murders and then they would recede.
So across those three things, it makes sense to me that we’re seeing a receding of crime.
Tell me the story that you believe.
I think it’s hard to avoid noticing that, by some measures, the spike in 2020 is the biggest, percentagewise, on record. There are, in my mind, two obvious causes. Cause 1 is the Covid-19 pandemic and, in particular, the restrictions imposed associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. So we shut down courts. We closed down schools. We reduced the number of people out in public spaces.
We reduced, in general, the level of what I talk about as social control of crime, informal and formal. And so as a result, you had less certainty of consequence. That’s one part of it, and you do see an uptick starting in March of 2020 in, for example, the C.D.C.’s numbers for homicides. But the really big spike is in June of 2020. And that is obviously consistent with the protests following the murder of George Floyd.
There’s a great deal of controversy around the role that the “defund the police” movement played in 2020 and in the increase in violence in 2020. But my view is that, unlike when we had this argument over the Ferguson protests — what my colleague Heather Mac Donald referred to as the Ferguson effect — in 2014, 2015, today we have some pretty decent research literature that says large-scale protests against the police seem to, A, lead to reductions in police officer activity and, B, increases in serious violent crime, in particular, homicide.
So in my mind, a big part of the story is the public sent the message to the cops: We want you to be doing less. The police responded, A, by being less proactive and, B, by at least in major cities, leaving the profession or departing for less crime-prone departments altogether. And as a result of that, the people who engage in the specific kinds of crime I was just talking about — which is to say, the cycle of violence that leads to shootings and homicides — were less fettered in their behavior. And so they took it as an opportunity to take shots at each other.
So that’s the story about why it went up. And the story of why it went down is, I think, multipart again. Some part of it is just what you might euphemistically call burnout. Every time somebody gets shot, there are fewer opportunities to shoot at them. Every time somebody gets killed, there are fewer opportunities to kill them. And people who get shot are often also themselves shooters. So there’s some degree of burnout there.
But it’s also the case that many cities — and again, cities, big cities in particular, where these problems are concentrated — have tried to reverse course on public messaging, to a limited extent policy changes, that they made in 2020 and really tried to emphasize the importance of public safety.
Here in D.C., where I’m recording, you can now get, I think, a $25,000 bonus for signing on with M.P.D. I was just in Philadelphia, where Cherelle Parker was just elected mayor, essentially, on a tough-on-crime, “We need to get crime under control” platform.
There’s been a real sea change. And I think that that sea change has begot a substantive change in the practice of policing. The police are more active than they were two years ago, and that has had benefits.
It’s something you see here, too, that Kathy Hochul has functionally flooded the subways in New York with armed police officers, with the National Guard. There’s an almost militarized presence there on behalf of a Democratic governor, after a former cop — now quite embattled — won the New York mayorship. The ideological valence of policing has really changed. I mean, Kamala Harris emphasizing in interviews that she was the former top law enforcement official of California — it’s a pretty big ideological shift.
Yeah, also, if you look across the country, Karen Bass in L.A., who fended off a tough-on-crime challenger but since then has had to turn toward a more tough-on-crime image. London Breed in San Francisco. I mentioned Cherelle Parker in Philadelphia. You mentioned Eric Adams. There are these big-city municipal figures who are adopting both policy but also rhetorical posture that says: We will not put up with crime.
You talk about Kamala Harris, who obviously is also sort of trying to counter an issue that is generally good for Republicans, is particularly good for Donald Trump, who, say what you will, has been consistent about his views on crime for decades.
But it really matters at the local level because voters are attuned to or highly sensitive to crime as an issue. They do not like it when they feel unsafe in their cities. And so if you want to do anything else as a big city exec, you have to deal with crime first.
When things are good, you think about, like, a Bill de Blasio in New York. You can get away with a reformist tendency, insofar as it doesn’t impinge on low crime. But the second things get bad, people are done with that, it turns out. At least that appears to be the status quo, I suspect, since the 1990s and certainly today.
Let me use the politics of two places I’ve lived in recently to get at some of the complexity here. So I lived in San Francisco until about a year ago. And there you would have this bifurcated discussion, where people on X and in the city would talk about San Francisco as a kind of hellscape. And then you would have earnest, liberal-leaning wonks come in and say, “Look, San Francisco has a lower murder rate than Jacksonville, Fla. It is less violent than many other big cities. This idea that San Francisco is uniquely violent, that you are unsafe here — it just isn’t true. We can look at the data and tell you that San Francisco does not look like an unsafe city compared with many other cities that do not get this kind of coverage on Fox News.”
I moved to New York City, and something I noticed when I was talking to people who just grew up here in other parts of the city — we’d be just chatting, and they would find out I worked in journalism and was a political reporter, and they’d say, “Oh, man, I’m done voting for Democrats.” And I’d say, “Why?” And they’re like, “The city is crazy. The subways are nuts. This whole place is out of control.”
So there’s been this strange conversation where, on the one hand, in these blue cities where Democrats govern and where there’s a lot of media attention, there is a genuine feeling that something is wrong. And then you look at the crime data, and it’s lower than it was in the ’80s and ’90s. In many cases, it isn’t that bad historically. It isn’t that bad even compared with other places.
You have a theory for what is happening here that explains the gap in perception and numbers. What is it?
I do want to emphasize, first, that I think that many times those perceptions are warranted. People are pretty sensitive to changes in the risk of even relatively rare events vis-à-vis crime. It shows up in lots of ways. And the way that I think about this is, like, people will pay a big premium in rent to avoid living in a crime-ridden area, even though if you go to those areas, your risk of victimization is quite low. And in many places in America, people are responding to the fact that violent crime is still elevated over a base line.
That said, the reality is that when people feel unsafe in a place, it is often not responsive to the kinds of major crime that became more prevalent in America over the past four years.
San Francisco is interesting. They had a homicide spike a little bit. It is nowhere near the magnitude of other cities. What San Francisco has, though, is this enormous problem with what I would talk about as disorder or disorderly behavior. And this is, in fact, what San Francisco is infamous for. San Francisco is the city where the city government has to issue a, I believe, quarterly report on the frequency of human feces found on the sidewalk. San Francisco has these very large open-air drug markets. San Francisco has an uncontrolled public homelessness problem, public serious mental illness problem. San Francisco, when I last looked at the data a couple of years ago, measurably had a shoplifting problem.
All of these are not what we would traditionally think about as major offenses. They’re not homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, etc. But they are much more prevalent than those offenses. You are much more likely to be witness to them, to be victimized in association with them. They are much more, therefore, likely to affect your perception of what it is like to live in the city.
And so I think, often — in the case of San Francisco but, as I have argued, increasingly in many other places, for example, here in D.C. — where the violent crime level is coming down, there are signs that the level of disorder is substantially elevated.
I was looking yesterday at shoplifting data reported by big cities. And there are many big cities where it’s up, places that you’d expect, like New York, but also places that you wouldn’t even think about, like Detroit, saw a large spike in shoplifting.
These sort of minor crimes that nonetheless are pretty disorienting to people around us. And I think that those are part of what is driving this perception that crime is a major issue, even as more serious but less prevalent and therefore less likely to be perceived crime comes down.
This tracks with my experience that when I would talk to people about what they were upset about, what I would hear about, and also what I would experience, were mentally ill people yelling at you and your children on the street, public drug use. In San Francisco, feces and public urination were a big problem — not an unknown problem in New York, either.
Homeless encampments are big, right? Everything in the drugstore, in some areas in these cities, is behind plexiglass now. You have to call at CVS to get deodorant or razors or anything out. There is a sense of things being out of control. I think it’s easy to think maybe this is just the superstar big blue cities. You’ve done a bunch of work on Chattanooga. Tell me a bit about the polling and studies you did there.
The Manhattan Institute did a couple of different pieces of work in Chattanooga. One, we did a poll of Chattanooga residents — I think this is back in March — about their perceptions of crime. And what you see in that polling is that, just like elsewhere, they believe that violent crime is a problem in their city. They’re worried about it. They don’t feel safe at night. They don’t feel safe walking around downtown. They are alarmed by what they see around them.
So I took that polling and said, OK, what’s really happening? And I spent a lot of time with the data that the city puts out. I talked to Chattanooga P.D., other leaders in the city. And what I concluded was that, like many other cities, Chattanooga saw an increase in violence in 2020, 2021.
And it is important to go back to my point earlier to acknowledge that Chattanooga did not have a major “defund the police” movement. This is not a big, progressive city that Fox News loves to hate on. When I did a ride-along there, I was told, “Yeah, we can pull people over. We have the capacity to enforce against minor crimes.” I was like, “Wow, you do not have the problems that I’m used to talking to cops about.”
But even there, they saw an increase in violent crime. And the way that they responded to this specific issue was to deploy a set of strategies that are effective for reducing violent crime. They used what we would talk about as focused deterrence, which is a set of strategies that focuses on identifying the small number of people in the community who drive violence in that community and either inducing them to reduce their violence or incapacitating them. That appears to have been successful. They really did drive homicide and violence levels back down to where they were in 2019 in the most recent data. They got it. It worked. They did what the evidence said they should have done, and they succeeded.
They also, though, experienced, like many other cities, a decline in their sworn staffing levels. A cop that I talked to when I was there said that they were doing less proactive patrol. And so my argument is that I suspect what happened in the city is that, faced with resource constraints and dealing with a spike in violence, the police department responded by prioritizing the most serious issues, and it worked. But it came at the expense of they were not doing traffic enforcement. They were less focused on cleaning up the parks. They also saw a big surge in homelessness, like many other cities.
And so you end up in this funny situation where they did deal with the big problem and people still don’t feel safe. And that’s because they sort of let the little problems fall to the wayside, and the little problems got bigger and bigger and bigger.
What was your evidence that the little problems were actually rising?
I look at a couple of different indicators. I look at minor crimes, which some of them have risen, some of them have not — things like drug equipment violations. I also look at 311 calls, which are, I think, an underutilized source of data on this topic, and they show that calls relating to homelessness, calls relating to litter, trash, etc. — both have risen pretty substantially.
I looked at traffic citations, which is also another underrated component of this, because when you think about it, how you’re behaving on the road is a component of disorder. How you’re treating that shared resource is related to disorder. And I saw that there had been a decline in traffic citations as well.
And those are diffuse signals. Part of the problem with thinking about disorder is it doesn’t get measured consistently in the same way. But I think the signals tended to point in that direction.
Where do you draw the line here between thinking about crime and thinking about disorder?
Many disorderly activities are crimes. Not all disorderly activities are crimes. Sometimes they’re sort of nebulously, they could be crime, depending on how the police officer feels at the time.
A city like New York has moved away from criminalizing disorderly behaviors. For example, I think in 2021, New York State removed its loitering for the purpose of prostitution law. You can no longer be arrested for appearing to be trying to engage in prostitution in New York State. But it’s still disorderly behavior to stand on the corner trying to flag down johns.
There’s a lot of conflict over what we mean when we talk about disorder. It gets tied up in this thick cultural baggage. Is this behavior disorderly? Is it just something that the rich and the poor vary on or that people’s opinions vary on based on ethnicity or race?
But I tend to think that we can at least offer a cogent definition of disorder. The definition I like to offer is that disorder is the domination of public space for private purposes. Think about the different kinds of disorders that we talk about. We might talk about somebody defecating in public. We might talk about somebody sleeping in public. Somebody playing his music too loud on the subway. Somebody shooting up. Somebody yelling at strangers. Somebody engaging in prostitution or attempting to solicit for prostitution in public. What joins these behaviors, in my mind, is that they are private acts. They are things that we would conventionally do at home.
This idea that what makes disorder alarming, unique, special, worthy of our attention is that, at least in big cities, there are common spaces, common resources that everyone is expected to share equally. And often disorderly behavior can be identified by an individual making a claim over that, whether it is your use of the sidewalk that is impeded by a tent or your freedom from seeing somebody else’s private consumption activity, whether it is drugs or sex.
You added a wrinkle to that definition that I’ve not heard you say before, which is that many of these — not all — are acts we would normally do at home. And what that made me think of immediately is that many of these acts are done by people who don’t have, in the traditional sense of the term, homes. The unsheltered homelessness is obviously a huge problem in San Francisco, in New York. But also everywhere, right? Most major cities — not literally everyone — are having a significant rise in unsheltered homelessness. Is the disorder problem simply the absence of people with homes, people who don’t have bathrooms, who are now doing things in public because they live in public?
It is not uncommon to make exactly this argument. This is part of the debates over disorder that happened in the 1990s. To what extent are regulations of disorder just trying to criminalize statuses — homelessness, poverty, etc.?
And my response is twofold. One is that we should be able to agree that there are lots of people who are disorderly in public who are not homeless. There are people who are, to use a podcast-appropriate term, jerks who think that it is perfectly kosher for them to light up on the subway or to play music in public or to berate people.
That said, it is certainly the case that homeless people are a subset, a substantial subset, of the disorderly population. But there, too, I think that we have seen not merely an increase in the population of people that are homeless but also in the degree to which people are willing to engage, feel comfortable engaging, in disorderly behavior.
The most extreme examples are the frequencies of public drug use. There’s a broad spectrum of the intensity of flagrant public drug use that you see in the United States. In certain jurisdictions in the United States over the past four years, the intensity of public drug use has gotten much more extreme. There was a very big difference between the homeless guy who hangs out in front of your local supermarket, who is polite, who is engaging — everyone knows somebody like this — who’s not a problem for the community, versus the guy who is yelling in public, versus the guy who is shooting up in public, who is sleeping rough and unapologetic about it. There is a big space for that behavior variation, even among the population that is homeless.
Something I’ve thought about a lot is the difference in the politics of crime and disorder from when I lived in Washington, D.C., where I lived from 2005 to 2018, and then the Bay Area and then New York.
When I lived in D.C., it was unambiguously more dangerous than anywhere else I have ever lived. The homicide rate was simply much higher. Someone very close to me was shot. A number of people I am also very close to were beaten up on the streets. Muggings in the early period in which I lived there — it was just, like, something that would happen to your friends when you went home from a party. It would happen every couple of weeks, it felt like.
And yet the politics of it were much less unstable, deranging, for at least the people in power than what was happening in San Francisco. And my explanation for that, over time was that there’s something around the politics here not just of disorder but of tolerance.
My sense of the politics in D.C. was that people felt like the government was trying to stop the crime and failing because crime is a hard problem. That the government is trying to stop the drug problem and failing because drugs are a hard problem. And what made the politics of this in San Francisco, particularly, very toxic and continue to be very toxic is the feeling the government wasn’t trying to stop it. That people at least thought it was in the government’s power to do something like clearing out the Tenderloin and not allowing it to be a giant open-air drug market. But they weren’t doing that. And in fact, they were watching city officials walk by this daily. This has, I think, become a big issue in New York, where you watch people jump the turnstile right in front of a bunch of employees of the subway.
How do you think about the role of the government’s attitude, even holding the problems constant?
What I would say is that I think that that response you are describing in San Francisco is touching on something real, which is that it is offensive to people’s sense of civic fairness when they see the government tolerating people’s behaviors in certain circumstances and particularly when they’re antisocial behaviors and not otherwise.
The great objection you may have heard from people in San Francisco is that the government of San Francisco simultaneously was aggressive about requiring people to wear masks in furtherance of the public health interest and also was actively trying to, in the name of harm reduction, educate people on how to use drugs, as opposed to explicitly condemning drug use or stopping people from using drugs on the street. I think that offends people’s basic sense that we all are equal citizens of a city, that part of how a city lives and functions and breathes is that assumption of equality.
And I do think that there is an ideological component there when you talk about “How do governments think about tolerance?” — particularly over the past five years but really waxing and waning in American civic life — which says: These problems — the problem of drug addiction, the problem of homelessness, the problem of dysfunctional behaviors, serious mental illness — are intractable and, in fact, it is wrong to try to change them, that it infringes upon the rights of the individual to try to do something about this, that the best we can possibly hope to do for people who are living profoundly dysfunctional lives is make them comfortable and hope that they will choose to change on their own.
I think about this in the serious mental illness context through the work of the sociologist Neil Gong, who has compared the treatment of, in Los Angeles, seriously mentally ill rich people and poor people. He finds that when you are on the public’s responsibility and seriously mentally ill in Los Angeles, you are treated with an attitude of toleration. They will do what they need to stabilize you. But they won’t ever try to compel you to do anything, even suggest that you do anything you don’t want to do.
Whereas what the rich do is that they sign themselves up to be coerced. If your kid is seriously mentally ill and you have the money for it, you will put him in a very restrictive environment, because that’s what’s conditioned to his health.
So I think that that kind of tolerance, which is, in my mind, a kind of pessimism about the capacity of government to address these problems, combined with a kind of civil libertarianism, had a moment over the past five years and is a constant in American life that is likely to come back.
Correct me if I’m wrong: Gong, he did the work on tolerated containment or something like that?
Yeah.
So I thought this was interesting. As I understand this theory — and I’ve not read that much of it directly, but I think I read a paper by him — it’s that you have an approach in many of these cities — and you really saw this in San Francisco. I mean, the Tenderloin is just a zone where huge amounts of what are, by any measure, crimes are allowed. But you can’t do that in Pacific Heights. You can’t do that in Noe Valley.
People live in the Tenderloin. It’s actually the part of San Francisco with the — I don’t remember if it’s the highest or just an unusually high number of children living in it per capita. And you see this in a lot of places, right? Skid Row in Los Angeles. But what you do in Skid Row you cannot do in Beverly Hills or at least in most parts of Beverly Hills.
And so there’s this way in which one of the things that emerged is that you would sort of concentrate all this disorder in places where the people have less political power to do anything about it. And in doing so, you would sort of move it out of the richer areas, where they would complain and vote you out of office.
Yeah. And you do see this in a lot of places. I think about a couple of years ago, New York City became the first city in the United States to open what is variously called a supervised consumption site or an overdose prevention site or an overdose prevention center, which is a place where people can go and consume drugs under the supervision of people with Narcan, some of whom have medical training.
And one of the interesting things that has happened is the community responses group called the Greater Harlem Coalition, with whom I’ve worked some, their response to the O.P.C., to the supervised consumption site, was not actually sort of shock and horror at the fact that this thing exists but rather to say, “If you come to our neighborhood, if you get off the train at Harlem, 125th Street, you have to walk a couple of blocks, and you’re there. If you come to our neighborhood, this is already the site of supersaturation of these services.”
And I think that that creates a great deal of community rancor. These are usually poor, predominantly Black or brown communities. If you go look at Kensington and Philadelphia, most people who are on the street in Kensington, I found from my recent trip, are white people from the surrounding area. But most of those who actually live in Kensington are recent immigrants who just need somewhere to live while they are working to build themselves up.
I think these kinds of concentrated areas of dysfunction are seen as solutions. Like, there’s this thing in “The Wire,” Hamsterdam, that is the pivotal example of this. The police’s strategy is: You’ll be allowed to sell drugs here, and we’ll concentrate the problems. They think that this will be a solution to the problems of the rest of the city.
But actually what you end up doing, in my experience, is you create concentrated dysfunction, and so you get economies of scale of dysfunction. Having a couple of guys doing drugs in a place is not great, but having a hundred guys doing drugs in a place is how you get a drug market. And a drug market is way more efficient. A drug market is providing a greater variety of services. A drug market is a magnet, and the magnet draws more people in.
The place that I’ve been that I’ve seen this most acutely is the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver in British Columbia, which is the Skid Row of Vancouver. And Downtown Eastside has, I suspect, the highest concentration of harm reduction drug treatment services, certainly in North America, possibly on Earth. It is actually the worst place I’ve ever been in my entire life. It is just blocks and blocks and blocks of people shooting up, selling drugs, buying drugs.
When you talk to people who are suffering the illness there, many of them are coming from the surrounding area. It is a place of profound dysfunction. And it is more dysfunctional because it is concentrated. So it’s not just bad for the people who live there. It is also bad for the people that it is allegedly meant to benefit, because of the way in which it concentrates and therefore reinforces their problems.
So this now gets us to maybe the borderline between disorder and crime. We’ve been talking about both things happening in blue cities and, to some degree, ideological trends among liberals. But there’s change here on the right, too, in an interesting way.
So you’ve talked about vice politics, the policies around things like cannabis, around gambling. I don’t think other people might put it here, but for reasons I think I would have some trouble explaining but I’m pretty sure is right, I think the embrace of quite unregulated crypto markets has a tendency in this. I think it’s quite adjacent to gambling.
And when you look at Trump and the Republicans right now, you see a lot of this. Trump said he’d back a weed legalization proposal, and in Florida you have Republican lawmakers floating proposals to legalize gambling. The sort of crypto deregulation is quite big on the right.
How do you see the changing relationship between the right and — not disorder, because they talk like they don’t like disorder — what you define as vice, which seems to be quite adjacent to disorder.
There is, in the very long run, waxing and waning in the degree to which we are tolerant of addictive, harmful substances or behaviors, where gambling is a behavior that is plausibly described as addictive. We go through periods of familiarity and then rejection and then hostility and then curiosity and then familiarity. And this is really the arc of the history of drug use in American society over the past 150 years.
Today there are a host of different vices that we are shifting toward embrace of, in part coming out of a period of hostility. I think we are experimenting a lot more — you’ve talked about psychedelics. I think psychedelics fit oddly into this. We can get into them if you’d like. Pornography, which is almost the one that we don’t talk about at all, even though everybody’s high schooler is exposed to it all the time. There’s been some great reporting on that. Something like 17 million Americans are now daily or near-daily marijuana smokers. A substantial fraction of young adults are gambling on a regular basis, and the ones who gamble most compulsively are young men.
You can almost tell a story about a type here, of people who are consuming a wide variety of legal or dubiously legal, vicious substances who are unattached, who are socially dysfunctional. Those people, it turns out, might actually be swing voters, to get back to your question.
Those are people who see something that they like in Donald Trump, who also see something that they like in the Democratic Party, which has, at least in recent years, been the more vice-tolerant party. And so I think that a move like Trump’s to publicly embrace marijuana legalization in certain form reflects a recognition that there is a large part of the electorate who are inured to these substances and who are in play.
You can talk about why Trump has gone for that. I think that reflects broader changes in the Republican ideology under him versus 30 years ago. But I do think, at its root, what it is is this change at the social level that vice is much more common, much more widely available.
I think you’re also looking at voters who are not just maybe swing voters but voters in transition. Something that has happened compositionally to the parties that I think is important here is suburban women are becoming very important to how Democrats win elections.
And in a way, I think Kamala Harris really represents that bloc. She is, on the one hand, quite concerned about crime and order and safety — a former prosecutor — and also very concerned about equity and that things aren’t being done unfairly. So there’s a tension there between “How do you make a community feel safe?” and “How do you make a community and the policing of it actually nonracist?”
And then, on the other hand, you have young men moving quite sharply into the Republican coalition, young men of all races, particularly non-college-educated young men. And those are the people who, in their lives, cannabis is significant, sports gambling and maybe crypto are significant, pornography is significant. Now, they don’t like crime, and they like a tougher presentation. But they want the things they do to be legal, and they do not want to be hassled by the police or anybody else about them.
Yeah, I think that that is right. I do want to emphasize that the social change that we’re talking about, the emergence of this population is itself downstream of if not Democratic per se priorities, then liberalizing priorities.
Joe Biden is a pretty old-school Democrat on this stuff. He’s conspicuously the only 2020 primary Democrat who refused to say he would legalize marijuana. But he is a dying breed in the party. It is not an accident that the Drug Policy Alliance went to deep blue Oregon to try to decriminalize drugs.
So I think it is right that there is this predictably emerging population who are personally, politically pretty apathetic and so happen to be up for grabs and whom the Republican coalition is less worried about getting the votes of. But their existence and their growth is downstream of, again, if not purely Democratic politics, then liberalizing policies that have been advanced by groups that are very much of a kind with those groups that have argued that the criminalization of public drug use is unfair, unjust and racist. So I think that that aspect is really very important as well.
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This is an excerpt from my conversation with Charles Fain Lehman for “The Ezra Klein Show.” In the rest of the conversation we discuss the effects of drug decriminalization and harm reduction policies, the problem with the drug policy approach that the Trump and Harris campaigns have taken, the problem of racially discriminatory policing, the history of community-based policing and more.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.
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