NotsoSmartAnalysis, Part III

Yesterday, we responded to Eric Ostermeier’s collective slur against conservatives from Wednesday (“Red States have Higher Crime than Blue States“) by factoring in an overarching, non-partisan sociological issue – the propensity toward violence and crime in the states of the Old South, the former Confederacy; there is a social dynamic in the Old South that makes the whole place a lot more angry and violent, no matter who people vote for for President, governor or the state legislature.

It’s a real, current factor that predates and transcends modern politics – but it’s not strictly tied to America’s current partisan divide.

So what about statistics around an issue that is fully tied to modern politics, and the sociology and pathology that’s sprung from it?

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Eric Ostermeier’s statistics were calculated on a state by state basis. 

But are head-to-head comparisons of states especially meaningful?  Most states, especially most larger states, are diverse political microcosms in their own right.  New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan and California are dominated by huge, vastly powerful liberal machines – but their outstate, non-metro areas are quite conservative by contrast.  Other states – Minnesota, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Virginia – are deeply split, with small but intense clusters of urban liberals surrounded by a suburban/rural expanse that votes reliably Republican (and which usually carries the rest of the state financially). 

But if there’s one thing that’s true across the country, it’s this:  major metropolitan areas are almost universally governed by Democrats (or liberal Republicans, like Michael Bloomberg); even in cases like Giuliani’s New York, Brett Schundler’s Jersey City or Norm Coleman’s Saint Paul, the dominant political culture was sharply to the left, with the mayor fighting a David Vs. Goliath insurgency.  And while it’s by no means as uniform, the outlying areas in all these examples are much more likely to be center to right-leaning.

And statistically, it’s a blowout; nationwide, violent crime in Metropolitan areas is 58% higher than in non-metropolitan areas  (459 to 290/100,000).  In states that voted for Obama, it’s drastic; violent crime in metro areas is 86% higher than outside them (448 to 240); in McCain states, metro areas are 32% more violent (465 to 350/100,000)…

…and that’s if we forget about yesterday’s issue with traditional southern violence.  In the states of the former Confederacy, violent crime in metro areas is 20% higher than the national average (553 to 459/100,000), while in non-metro areas it’s a whopping 48% higher than in non-metro areas nationwide (429 to 290/100,000); indeed, non-metro crime in the former Old South (less Virginia) is only about 6% lower than crime in metropolitan areas nationwide (429 to 459/100,000).  Wanna see some danger?  Non-metro crime in South Carolina is 65% higher than the national average for metropolitan areas (760 to 459/100,000); Louisiana isn’t far behind. 

Indeed – Obama’s metro areas are eight percent more violent than Mac’s states overall (448 to 411/100,000); that ratio climbs to 38% when counting McCain’s non-Southern states (337/100,000), and 52% higher than McCain’s non-southern, non-metro areas (with 294 violent crimes per 100,000).

States – most states – seesaw slowly back and forth across the political divide; California used to vote GOP; the South was once reliably Democratic, and backed the New Deal.

But for generations, now, America’s major metropolitan areas have been the province of the left; the bigger the metro areas (New York, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Philly), the further to the left they are. 

And while Ostermeier noted that “Blue” state income is 11% higher than “Red” states (without citing cost of living variances, naturally), he missed another point; the poorest cities in America are the ones that have been the longest strangled by the left, of the ten poorest cities in the US, the record is clear:

  • #”1″ Detroit has been GOP-free for the past 48 years.
  • #2 Buffalo?  55 years.
  • #3 Cincinnati?  25 years.
  • #4 Cleveland – it’s been 20 years
  • #5 Miami and #7 El Paso have never had Republican mayors;
  • #6 St. Louis – sixty years.
  • #8 Milwaukee?  101 years!
  • #9 Philadelphia – 57 years!
  • #10 Newark – not only has it been 102 years since Newark, “America’s Vacationland”, had a Republican mayor, but it’s been almost a generation since they had a mayor that wasn’t indicted or jailed for some kind of corruption or another; Newark’s mayors and mayoral staff may actually impact New Jersey’s property crime figures. 

You have to drill waaaay down in the stats before you can find a metro area with even a centrist governing tradition outside the Old South (which, as we noted yesterday, is problematic for different reasons).   Phoenix used to be a decent example – but the influx of violent narcotraficantes has screwed up a good thing.  But again, that’s not a partisan issue.

So why are the crime numbers so bad in the cities?  Ostermeier invoked the “Chicken Vs. Egg” simile in his piece on Wednesday; to try to unpack urban crime, it’s more of a chicken/egg/farmer/omelet thing.  Which came first? 

Do Democrats control cities because they’re so relatively poor (and especially because they pack so much poverty in next to so much wealth)?  Or are cities poor because Democrats have spent the past couple of generations using them as warehouses for welfare clients and as social engineering laboratories?  And on the other hand do the cities serve as social labs and welfare warehouses because the Dems know that clients make good, multigenerational voters?

I’lll take “C”…

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Well, I would – if I thought that it was civil or responsible to try to use stats like this to try to impugn my opposition. 

Of course, just as the tradition and stats about southern crime added crucial context to Ostermeier’s original claims, there is reams of other context behind any specific claims that one tries to tie to politics.

Which leads to the other two questions I mentioned in my original post on the subject last Wednesday.

Question 2: Knowing this (and Ostermeier is a smart guy – he has to be, since he’s involved with the Humphrey Institute and all, right?), why would Ostermeier write this?  I’m accepting theories.

Question 3: Smart Politics is a product of the Humphey Institute.   How much taxpayer money was put into this piece of – let’s be honest – group slander?

8 thoughts on “NotsoSmartAnalysis, Part III

  1. This is a classic mistake with data, wrong level of aggregation. We aren’t Europeans or Canadians. Yes we have state troopers but they patrol roads. Crime and how it is handled is a local government issue. NOT a state issue. Except maybe in extremis. In MN we have the BCA but is supposed to handle support tasks. You could also drill down to the neighborhood level. Schiller of the Case-Schiller real estate index has done this, although I can’t find the free info right now (there are pay real estate sites that have it). Last time I checked the worst neighborhoods in the country were in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and maybe Cincinnati. Not really “red” areas.

  2. MoN – and another one was ‘Divorce highest in religious states’: of course, so is the marriage rate.

  3. MoN, one of the fun things is actually reading those “teen birth rate” studies when you realize that “teens” are defined as going up into their 20s in several of them, that most don’t distinguish between married and unmarried births, etc.

    As to the “divorce”, Mitch, there’s a strong bias to marry early in the South, and I knew Southerners who were disappointed to be not married by the time they finished high school or college. Early marriage tends to yield early birth, and since typically your personality isn’t fixated until 30 or so getting married before 30 tends to raise your chance of divorce.

  4. Nerd,

    As re marrying young – it’s not just a southern thing. It’s pretty common throughout rural America. And it ends as you noted quite a lot.

    But the stats are also skewed by the fact that so many fewer couples in blue states actually get married in the first place. Nobody keeps stats when POSSLQ’s break up.

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