A Tale of Two Studies

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

In mid-2005, a non-partisan organization called the Bay Area Center for Voting Research in Berkeley, CA, released a ranking of America’s most liberal and most conservative cities. That list was documented in our very own Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which was bemoaning the fact that Seattle ranked way down at 16th place on the most-liberal list.

Meanwhile, a few months ago, the FBI released its crime statistics for 2007, covering almost 8,700 cities across the country. You can download this in Excel format HERE. That format is pretty handy, because Excel makes it easy to sort and massage the numbers. One number that is useful for comparison purposes – and easy to calculate once I had the spreadsheet – is the “violent crime rate,” usually expressed as the number of violent crimes per 100,000 people. By “violent crimes,” the FBI means murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

Out of curiosity, I sorted the FBI’s list by the violent crime rate, and compared it to the 2005 list of America’s most liberal cities. Of the 40 cities with the worst violent crime rate, 19 were also among the 40 most liberal cities in the 2005 study. Only one was among the 40 most conservative cities.

"Liberal" and "Democrat" go together like "round" and "circle," and, sure enough, it turns out that most of the cities on the most-liberal list have been governed by Democrats for literally decades: Detroit hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1962; St. Louis since 1949; Oakland since 1966; Atlanta since 1962; Philadelphia since 1952; Washington, D.C., since 1965; New Orleans for nearly a century!

And before you tell me that poverty is a more significant indicator of violent crime, let me also point out that only 18 of the 40 worst cities were above the national average in percentage of people below the poverty level in 2007. Only four of the ten worst were above the national average.

But here’s an interesting point to consider: Jason Alderman, a director of the Center for Voting Research, was quoted in the PI article as saying, “The list [of most liberal cities] is dominated by cities that have strong and proud and long-standing African American populations,” which, the PI pointed out, “tend to vote overwhelmingly for liberal candidates.”

So…my question today is: Why? Why, when black Americans suffer disproportionately as victims of violent crime, poverty, and unemployment, do you continue to elect local politicians from a party whose track record – over decades – demonstrates clearly that they’re not making things any better for you? And how can clear-thinking Americans seriously believe that the Democrats stand the best chance of solving our current problems and getting the country going in the right direction after looking at their track record in the cities where their power has been entrenched the longest?

Thanks for listening.