The TV ad wasn’t subtle.
Over the course of 30 seconds, a Pennsylvania police chief dissects what are meant to be alarming aspects of Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s record on crime.
As security camera footage rolls showing young men assaulting people and stealing, the chief alleges that Fetterman wants to release offenders from prison and put an end to life sentences for felony murderers.
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“Protect your family,” he says. “Don’t vote Fetterman.”
Versions of this TV ad, which was produced and bankrolled by the Senate GOP’s biggest super PAC, have run in dozens of battleground Senate and House races this fall. As Republicans fight to win back majorities in Congress, they’ve increasingly made crime the foundation of their case to voters, and have ratcheted up attacks on Democrats’ records. (In the case of the Fetterman ad, multiple fact-checkers found the claims to be significantly distorted.)
The point of the ads isn’t just to argue that a vote for Democrats would make crime worse. The deeper implication is that, by voting for a Republican, voters could empower Washington to help fight crime.
It’s a potentially potent message. There’s just one issue: Very few Republican candidates are offering specific ideas for how they would actually address the problem that they are framing as a defining issue of this election.
Among a half-dozen GOP candidates in battleground Senate seats, the anti-crime plans on their campaign websites are limited to vague language about the importance of funding police. One candidate who has made crime a major issue, Ohio Republican J.D. Vance, does not have any crime platform on his website at all.
On his campaign website, Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia, laments Democrats’ alleged anti-police views and issues a boilerplate vow to ensure they have funding. But the Walker campaign did not return a request to specify his views and explain what he would do differently than Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who has voted for legislation to increase police funding.
Meanwhile, House Republicans rolled out a policy platform last month that promised, among other things, to pass legislation to incentivize police to hire 200,000 new officers and target progressive local prosecutors. The office of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the likely chair of the House Judiciary Committee under a GOP majority, didn’t respond to a request to further specify their policy plans.
A handful of GOP candidates responded to The Daily Beast’s requests to elaborate on their anti-crime plans. Mehmet Oz—the Republican running against Fetterman—says on his campaign website he “will support efforts to ensure [police] always have the resources they need to do their job and keep our communities safe.”
Asked to elaborate on his plans, Oz spokesperson Brittany Yanick said Oz “favors stronger penalties for those that push fentanyl,” including trying dealers for murder if a buyer is killed in an overdose.
In response, Fetterman spokesman Joe Cavello said Oz is “completely unserious about fighting crime in any sense—he hasn’t done it and has no real plans.”
“It’s all fear mongering and bullshit,” Cavello said. He added that Fetterman, if elected, would consider any legislation to toughen criminal penalties on those convicted of fentanyl-related offenses.
The drug focus was shared by Rep. Ted Budd, running in North Carolina, whose campaign sent a list of bills he would introduce in the Senate if elected. They include bipartisan bills to toughen penalties for fentanyl-related offenses, a bill outlining the proposal Oz made, and another to dramatically stiffen federal penalties for “rioting and looting.”
A spokesperson for Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the only incumbent senator in the group, listed two bills Johnson had co-sponsored when asked his plans on crime: one of them makes “killing or targeting” a law enforcement officer a basis for sentencing someone to the death penalty.
Collectively, Republicans’ answers reveal an awkward reality underlying their midterm crime push: Congress can’t do a whole lot to respond to crime.
Lawmakers can fund grant programs for police or make reforms to the federal criminal justice system, like what Republicans are proposing to do by stiffening sentencing for certain offenses. Beyond that, “much of what needs to be done comes at the state and local level,” said Jason Pye, director at the Due Process Institute, a nonprofit focusing on criminal justice issues.
Some experts do not even expect Congress’ approach to crime issues to vary drastically under Democratic majorities versus Republican majorities. Some of the biggest recent federal policy moves—like increased grant funding for local police departments—were supported by members and leaders in both parties.
When it comes to toughening sentences for drug-related crimes, experts have long been skeptical that those moves do anything to deter crime. But these Republicans have bipartisan company anyway; some Democrats have joined in sponsoring those bills as they position themselves as proactively fighting the opioid epidemic.
“I see progress being made regardless of who takes the House or Senate,” said Jillian Snider, the policy director for criminal justice at the R Street Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “If Republicans take both, I don’t see it as being dramatic, I see it as being incremental.”
The gap between the GOP’s rhetoric on crime and its lack of well-defined plans makes it unique among its top three midterm focus issues. On their other two key themes, the economy and immigration, there is a far clearer and more influential role for the legislative branch.
When it comes to crime, Republicans are betting that voters will reward their focus on the issue, even if they can’t specify what they would do about it. Given the effectiveness of “law and order” GOP messaging in the past, whether voters buy it again could help determine control of Congress.
That concerns experts, who see sensationalistic political messaging on crime contributing to undue public concern about the issue. Violent crime rates are higher in many places now than before the COVID pandemic, but many U.S. cities are far safer today than they were in the 1990s, when crime was at the center of much political communication.
“The way Republicans are talking about crime makes it sound like we’ve returned to peak violent crime in 1991,” he said. “The reality is that violent crime is much, much lower… Politicians who play up violent crime are contributing to perceptions among the public that crime is out of control.”
Recent opinion polls have consistently reflected that perception. An October Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 60 percent of voters will factor crime concerns into how they vote. And voters tend to give Republicans an edge on the issue: a Reuters poll from early October found that 39 percent of voters said Republicans were best positioned to “solve crime,” with 30 percent trusting Democrats.
For Republicans, that edge has largely been built by attacking Democrats’ positions and past remarks on crime. GOP candidates have argued that Democrats cannot be trusted on the issue, even under Congress’ limited purview.
It’s true that Democratic candidates have taken positions or made statements on crime and criminal justice that a number of voters may oppose. Several have expressed support for ending cash bail, for instance, arguing that the practice keeps people who haven’t been convicted of any crime in jail if they can’t pay bail. Republicans have argued that cashless bail reforms have led to increases in crime in states like New York, though experts caution the link is unproven.
There is a congressional tie-in: in the House, several Democrats have introduced legislation to end use of cash bail for federal criminal cases and to deny grant funds to states that use it. Oz, for instance, says on his campaign website that he opposes “anti-law” measures like bail reform.
But in the hyperbolic context of TV ads and press releases, many GOP attacks have taken complicated criminal justice positions and flattened them to shape simplistic narratives.
In the case of the Fetterman ad, Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP super PAC, claimed Fetterman wanted to end life sentences for felony murders as they paint the lieutenant governor as “soft” on crime. In fact, Fetterman said he wanted to end those sentences for second-degree felony murder; he used an example of someone sentence to life in prison after being part of a group committing a robbery while an accomplice fired the gun that killed someone.
In North Carolina, Budd has attacked his opponent Cheri Beasley—a former justice on the state Supreme Court—for her criminal justice positions. Budd has claimed that Beasley, while on the court, struck down a law requiring GPS monitoring of sex offenders and said she made it easier for them to “prowl” streets.
But the state court’s ruling didn’t strike down the law entirely; it found GPS monitoring to be unconstitutional for certain people. On Friday, Beasley—along with supporters in law enforcement—called on a recent Budd ad invoking this attack to be pulled from the airwaves.
Some of the Republican attack ads aren’t distortions but outright fabrications. In Georgia, a Walker campaign ad attacking Warnock, for instance, alleged without evidence that the Democratic incumbent voted to “cut police funding.”
That ad is characteristic of the Republican strategy of attacking Democratic candidates in key races by framing their past statements as anti-police or playing up links to other politicians who advocated to cut police funding.
Sensitive to the attacks, Democrats in Congress have pursued plans to fund the police so aggressively that they have sometimes alienated their own base. According to multiple news reports, party strategists have explicitly urged doing so in order to head off GOP attacks about “defunding” the police.
The strategy hasn’t stopped the GOP from lobbing those attacks, but it has made it much harder for Republican candidates—many of whom list funding the police as their only plan to tackle crime—to claim there’s much daylight between themselves and Democrats on the issue.
In September, an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the House voted for the so-called Invest to Protect Act, which allocates $300 million over the next five years in grants for local police departments. Nine Democrats and 55 Republicans voted against it.
When Democrats passed a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill in 2021, President Joe Biden announced that $10 billion of it would go toward local police departments. Perhaps unintentionally, the bill’s $350 billion in aid for local governments largely became a slush fund for law enforcement, according to the Marshall Project.
Ironically, criminal justice advocates expect that despite their rhetoric, GOP majorities in Congress could actually struggle more to fund police. Republicans, said the R Street Institute’s Snider, have historically been reluctant to appropriate piles of federal money toward law enforcement grants.
Many Republicans, at this point, also reflexively vote against the annual bills that appropriate funds for the federal government. Budd, for instance, voted against every appropriations bill from 2017 to 2020, each of which contained hundreds of millions of dollars in police funding.
Kelci Hobson, a spokesperson for Beasley, said these votes demonstrated Budd is “only focused on making voters scared—he doesn’t care about keeping us safe.”
Noting the rhetoric of candidates like Oz on crime, Pye argued that they need to be honest about how “Congress’s ability to ensure that law enforcement and first responders are properly trained is very limited.”
“He’s not running for governor; he’s running for Senate,” Pye said. “He can place pressure on state and local leaders, he can tie up dollars, but he can’t personally remove a failing police chief, sheriff, mayor, or city council members who are, in his eyes, failing.”
