3 Reasons the Tragic Killings By and Of Police Won't Have Big National Partisan Implications

By Jonathan Ladd

In response to the tragic killings by police of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others, many people have attended nonviolent protests across the country, often using the slogan "Black Lives Matter." This produced some rhetorical back and forth in the media between those criticising police policies toward non-whites and those defending police behavior. (See Saturday's rally by protesters on both sides outside NYC City Hall.)

But with the execution-style murder of two NYPD officers Saturday night by a deranged Baltimore man, the political rhetoric over race and police conduct has gone from hot to boiling. Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association said in a statement, "Mayor de Blasio, the blood of these two officers is clearly on your hands. It is your failed policies and actions that enabled this tragedy to occur." Republican politicians went beyond de Blasio and criticized national Democrats. Former New York Governor George Pataki tweeted: "Sickened by these barbaric acts, which sadly are a predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric of #ericholder & #mayordeblasio. #NYPD." And former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani blamed Liu and Ramos's deaths on "four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police" and said that black leaders contributed to "an atmosphere of severe, strong anti-police hatred in certain communities." Prominent Democrats, including the president, have been criticized by police for their stances in other cases this year. Back in August, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police Jim Pasco publicly criticized President Obama for his public statements about Ferguson. MO, in which Obama had attempted to be even handed between the police and the protesters.

These events are all very sad and tragic. Obviously, it is the substance of this debate that is most important, not the politics (e.g., how to prevent the killing of unarmed non-white men by police, as well as ensure that there is never violence against police officers). But as this is a political science blog, I'd like to briefly note why the national partisan implications of these controversies is likely to be minimal. Politicians and activists should feel free to debate this issue sincerely, with little fear of partisan consequences.

There was a time, specifically the 1980s, 1970s and late 1960s, when conflicts between police and non-whites were believed to be very harmful to the Democratic Party and helpful to Republicans. This perception existed for elections at the local, state, and national level, but is probably most associated with the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon in 1968 and George H.W. Bush in 1988, who ran successful campaigns emphasizing their tough-on-crime positions.

Mathew Yglesias worries that the renewed prominence of conflict between minority communities and the police will be similarly politically perilous for Democrats. He writes, "Among the public at large, the police are one of the most trusted institutions in America, so amplifying the wedge between high-profile Democrats and police organizations is a potentially useful political tactic for Republicans."

I'm going to set aside for a moment the question of exactly how much the intersection of race and crime affected the national partisan balance of power in the the 1980s, 1970s and late 1960s.[1] However, I will say that these issues are much less likely to help the Republican Party nationally now than in those previous decades. These high profile controversies are unlikely to affect the national partisan balance of power for 3 reasons:

First, most people are already sorted into a party that agrees with their ideology. This includes their overall policy preferences and specifically their racial attitudes. Over the past 40 years, as party elites have grown more ideologically distinct, at the mass level people have sorted themselves into the party that matches their overall ideology. Sorting by racial attitudes has accelerated since 2008 when Barack Obama became the most prominent figure in the Democratic Party. Some of this sorting came from party switching and some from opinion change. But for purposes of this argument, it doesn't matter how much each has caused the sorting, the important thing is that there aren't many people in the "wrong" party anymore on any major issue, including the interconnected topics of race and crime. White racial conservatives are already Republicans and white racial liberals are already Democrats, while all major racial minorities (including Latinos and Asians) are increasingly Democratic. Race still matters in forming political opinions, but as Michael Tesler has recently written, party identification and racial attitudes are increasingly entangled in people's heads. It is very difficult for race/crime to serve as a "wedge issue" in this era because almost everyone is already in the party that they would choose based on their race/crime preferences. Swing voters exist, but they tend to be those disengaged from politics, not likely to follow any of the events that could prime them, and thus most influenced by the overall state of the country in terms of the economy and war and peace.

The problem with old people is it's always the 1970s in their heads -- whether we're talking about inflation or crime.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) December 21, 2014

Second, the crime rate is much lower that in was in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, making people much less worried about it. When Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and other politicians used crime in their campaigns, they weren't making the issue up. Even if the topic was sometimes used to exploit racial prejudice, there was a real crime wave the the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Between 1960 and 1981, the U.S. murder rate doubled from 5.1 to 10.2 per 100,000 people. Almost all other national crime statistics show a similar pattern: a huge crime wave, increasing from the early 1960s through the late 1970s, then plateauing at a high rate through the early 1990s, followed by a large decline through to the present day. By most indicators, crime is less prevalent now than before the crime wave started in the early 1960s.[2] The end of the great crime wave of the late 20th century has corresponded with drops in support for the death penalty, gun control, anti-drug laws and a range of other anti-crime measures. Attitudes on criminal justice tend to move together over time and currently they are all moving in more lenient direction. Compared to 1968 or 1988, or even 1993 when Rudy Giuliani was first elected mayor, there is much less fear of crime and less support for a range of anti-crime policies.

Michael Brown Sr., Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), & Rev. Al Sharpton

Third and finally, the the racial breakdown of the electorate has changed. Specifically, the racial composition of the Democrats national electoral coalition has changed. Nonwhite voters are an increasingly large share of the electorate and Democrats rely on them. Several analysts have noted that if Barack Obama won the same proportion of each major ethnic group's votes as Michael Dukakis did in 1988, Obama would still have won, while if Dukakis received the same proportion of each racial group's votes as Obama, Dukakis would have still lost. Whites were 85% of the electorate in 1988 and only 72% of the electorate by 2012, a number that is projected to continue dropping.

The upshot of all of this is that Democrats have a national voting coalition made up of racial minorities and racially liberal whites. This is enough to get more votes than the Republicans nationally if politically disengaged voters have had good recent experiences with Democrats' performance in office (or negative experiences with Republicans in office). In contrast to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, conflicts between civil rights protesters and police are unlikely to affect the national partisan balance of power one way or the other.




[1]  There is a large literature on the role of race and crime in elections during that period, which I won't try to adequately summarize here. For what it's worth, my take on this is that race and crime considerations were often correlated with vote choice, could move electoral preferences temporarily through priming and may have swayed some local elections. But these considerations are unlikely to have swung any presidential elections (or congressional majorities) to the Republicans during the 1988-1992 period, because these outcomes were all largely in keeping with what we would expect based on structural factors like the economy, the party of the president, that party's length of time in office, and (in the case of Congress) the number of high quality candidates running for each party.

[2]  See here for a review of more data and an argument for one possible explanation.