Houston proves that crime continues to loom over local elections
Zachary Faria
Video Embed
Crime has been a major subject in local elections across the country over the past few years, and even Democratic voters are acknowledging that it isn’t just some conservative talking point.
The latest race in which crime was a major focus was the mayoral election in Houston. There, longtime Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) was running with the backing of Hillary Clinton, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and the outgoing mayor. With 96% of the vote counted, state Sen. John Whitmire held a lead of nearly 58,000 votes. The Associated Press called the race just 23 minutes after the polls closed.
SHADOW OF DOUBT: ARE TRUMP CANDIDATES CHANGING THEIR ELECTION DENIAL TUNE HEADING INTO 2024?
Whitmire has built a reputation for being tough on crime (even as a Democrat), and crime was the focus of his campaign. Whitmire said that crime had become a major problem in both perception and reality and that “we cannot have Houston perceived as not being a safe city.” Jackson Lee, for comparison, “talked about tackling public safety but also elevated concerns about women’s access to abortion and cast her opponent as a Trump-style Republican,” according to Politico.
Unsurprisingly, voters didn’t care too much about abortion or lazy attempts to paint a Democrat as a “Trump-style Republican” to choose Jackson Lee over Whitmire. And this decision was made by Democrats: Houston has been controlled by Democrats since 1982 and for 69 of the past 84 years going back to 1939. You can’t blame Republicans or conservative media for talking about crime. Democratic voters in Houston made this decision themselves.
This is not the first time that Democratic voters rejected a soft-on-crime local official in just the past few months. Last month’s elections saw voters in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania (home to Pittsburgh), and Loudoun County, Virginia, reject their district attorney candidates (one of them an incumbent) who were backed by Democratic megadonor George Soros. Even as voters soured on Republicans in yet another election cycle, crime won out as the most important local topic that voters wanted under control.
This is not a made-up concern or a concern that only Fox News viewers have. This is a concern that people living in Democrat-run cities and counties have because Democrat-run cities and counties have given criminals too much leniency over the past several years. Crime registers as an important subject regardless of how people want to spin it nationally. Houston is further proof of that.