The GOP’s ads were dark and ominous: grainy footage with a message that screams “you are not safe.” You know which ads I’m talking about because the Republican party spent more than $150 million on them this midterm election cycle.
Georgia saw one of the most relentless crime-focused campaigns from Republicans in their attempts to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. Their message sought to capitalize on voters’ fears about public safety. Instead of siphoning off the independent voters needed to flip that Senate seat, they failed. Their tried-and-true playbook of the last 40 years came up short.
With crime on the rise these past two years, it wasn’t hard to predict the GOP would return to this strategy to close the campaign. The Republican strategy backfired. They didn’t just lose the Senate race in Georgia, they failed to pick up a single Senate seat, flipped only one governor’s race and gained fewer than 20 House seats, most of which were due to gerrymandering. As it turns out, the scariest thing for voters this year was MAGA extremism and the threat it poses to our democracy and our lives.
Republican failures during this cycle shouldn’t mask the need for Democrats to engage on the crime issue. Working with three of the leading Democratic research firms, the Center for American Progress Action Fund undertook a message research project this year on crime and safety. The reality is that voters are genuinely concerned about crime and Democrats lack a clear brand on the issue. Our research found that Democrats can fix this problem without compromising on criminal justice reform. The approach is straightforward: empathize with voters’ concerns about crime and proactively discuss efforts to fight it — by holding people accountable and preventing crimes from happening. Then call out it is MAGA Republicans who are championing extreme gun laws like permitless carry that are increasing crime and putting communities in danger
This dynamic played out in the Georgia Senate election, where Herschel Walker’s campaign returned to the GOP playbook to scare voters, misrepresenting and outright lying about Warnock’s record. But disciplined messaging that highlighted Walker’s extreme policies on guns broke through — and voters chose Warnock to represent them for a six-year term.
Senator-elect John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was another poster-child for this approach. He faced a barrage of crime attack ads to the tune of $12 million (nearly 70% of the ads run against him focused on crime). But Fetterman pushed back and rooted his campaign in his own origin story in public service: running for mayor of the town of Braddock to stop crime and get gun deaths under control. He positioned himself as the candidate more concerned about public safety and refused to back down in his push to make our criminal justice system fair.
Despite Fetterman’s opponent using his work on sentencing reform against him, he did not walk back his position. He even put out an ad confirming he’s a champion for sentencing reform and second chances, stating out-right, “I believe our criminal justice system needs a significant overhaul.” At the end of the day, of the 11% of Pennsylvania voters who said that crime was the most important issue for their vote, a slight majority of them voted for Fetterman. Democrats should proactively engage on the issue of crime and safety and not let Republicans off the hook for pushing the extreme policies fueling violent crime in our communities.