Red States, Blue Cities

Growing up and well into my adult years one of the basic assumptions I operated under was that most people are some combination of dumb and willfully ignorant. That was based on what my parents were saying and my limited, but growing, sample size of people I encountered. This process accelerated when I went off to college where allegedly I would be among the cream of the crop. I was disabused of that notion pretty quickly. In the early days of the internet there were message boards but people using those **typically** were at least amusing. Then came social media and the dumb people suddenly had a very accessible way of spewing their stupidity all over the intrawebz.

It isn’t a shocker to anyone that the loudest voices on social media (Faceberg, Twatter, Instaham, etc) are the dumbest. They are the people with the most time on their hands. An unfortunate fact is that many are women. They are people who wake up, race to their phones and start replying back to anything and everything. Some of my Indiana political “leaders”, notably now Senator Jim Banks, will get dozens of replies to any post, even posts that are innocuous, with people screeching at him about the Orange Man, Putin and January 6th. Many, perhaps most, aren’t even people living in Indiana.

On a regular basis while scrolling along I see NPCs repeating back one of the half dozen current responses they have been told to memorize. There are never more than half a dozen because they can’t hold more than that in their atrophied brains. One of the recent ones is that “crime is at a 30 year low in D.C.” despite the video evidence of people committing crimes and a police commander who is in trouble for fudging the crime states to make them seem lower than they really are

One that pops up in a various forms has to do with the idea that despite Republican talk of “law and order”, it is in fact “red states” that have the most crime. In many cases this is true as long as you don’t look too closely. Steve Sailer just posted about this topic and shared this chart

The bulk of the post is behind his paywall so that isn’t helpful but he sort of does this for a living. Most of the double digit homicide rate states are in fact “red states” that Trump carried, the District of Crapola being a noticeable outlier with a homicide rate of 27 with the next highest (Mississippi) lagging far behind at 17.9.

Anyway, pretty damning stuff right? Those “red states” are super dangerous, we need more liberals in office to fix violent crime by releasing violent felons without bail!

You can see why this appeals to lib’rals. It is simplistic and doesn’t actually look into the issue at all. It also is flat out silly because the premise is silly. A state that is “red” or “blue” is hardly heterogenous politically.

For example, while Cumala Whorris won her home state of California by a huge margin, 58.47% to only 38.33% for Trump, a difference of 20%, there were still were over 6 million votes cast for Trump in California. That means that other than Texas and Florida, more people voted for Trump in California than in any other state. Number 4 on the list of votes for Trump is New York, a state Whorris carried by a margin of 55.91% to 43.31%

On the other side, Cumala swallowed up over 6.3 million votes in Texas while still losing the state by 14% and she sucked in over 6.1 million votes in Florida, meaning 2 of the top 3 states where she received the most votes were states she lost to Trump.

As everyone knows, you will find die-hard liberals in the most conservative of states and rock-ribbed conservatives in the most liberal of states. Even in Wyoming which gave Trump his highest percentage of votes case at 71%, over one quarter of voters went for Cumala and in the District of Crapola where Cumala won over 90% of the votes, Trump still received a meager but real 6.47%. 21,000 people that call D.C. home voted for the Bad Orange Man.

Apparently overall political affiliation isn’t a decent predictor of violent crime. A far left state like Vermont has a very low homicide rate of only 2.4, the same rate as deep red Utah.

As my readers know, being the smartest and most astute of blog enthusiasts, every state is made up of a variety of settings. My home in the Hoosier state of Indiana has lots and LOTS of very rural areas, sparsely populated and full of corn fields. We also have smack dab in the middle of the state our largest city and capital of Indianapolis, a large city with a metropolitan area of over 2 million people which makes up 30% of the total population of the state. There are several other cities like nearby Fort Wayne, South Bend and the Gary area in the NW that borders Chicago and is nothing like the rest of the state.

My state voted for Trump by almost 20% over Whorris, 58.58% to 39.62%. All of our statewide offices are held by Republicans, and the GOP has a super majority in both chambers of the legislature. Looking at Sailer’s chart we see Indiana has a homicide rate of 7.9. Not great, not terrible. When you look a little closer at the data…

You find a huge disparity. The White homicide rate is a paltry 3.5, very low and less than half of the overall rate. Then look at blacks with a homicide rate of 44.5. The black homicide rate is 12 times higher than the White homicide rate. As a state Indiana is still overwhelmingly White….

…although dropping fast and blacks are still under 10% when you take out “Hispanic blacks”. Indianapolis is a different story entirely…

Over 1/4 black, over 13% mestizo and climbing fast and barely majority White in a city that was 2/3 White as recently as 2000.

Guess where most murders occur in Indiana? If you guessed Indianapolis, South Bend, Fort Wayne and Gary you win the prize! What do all of those cities have in common? They all have significant black populations: Gary, 79%; Fort Wayne 15% and South Bend 25%. I have done independent research in the past that shows blacks commit the vast majority of murders in Fort Wayne though they are “only” 15% of the population.

The places with the highest homicide rates also have some of the highest percentages of blacks, for example D.C. with a rate of 27 is 41% black and has a White-black homicide rate disparity of 0.6 to 58.9. Read that again, the White homicide rate in D.C. is 0.7 so if D.C. was 100% White it would have close to no murders at all and be the safest place in America by a wide margin.

Mississippi, which comes in 2nd on the list with a homicide rate of 17.9, has a White-black ratio of 6.1 vs 37.5 and the state is around 37% black. Again as we can see, Mississippi’s high homicide rate is the result of the 37% of the population that is black and is not the result of being a Republican leaning state. The same is true of other states on the list with high homicide rates like Alabama and Louisiana, all with the same drastically different homicide rates for blacks and White and with large black populations.

There isn’t a single state with a White homicide rate that reaches 7 while only 6 states have a black homicide rate in the single digits. Overall across the nation…

The White homicide rate is only 2.9 while the black rate is nearly 10 times as high at 28.3 and the mestizo rate is double that of Whites at 6.2.

This isn’t news to any of my regular readers. We all know this. My point in posting this is to provide you with a quick reference to refute people who claim that “red states have high homicide rates so it is the fault of Republicans”. Here is what everyone needs to remember:

The color of murder isn’t red or blue. It’s black.