Crime in red states vs blue states looks different depending on where you draw the line. At the state level, Republican-voting states have had higher murder rates than Democratic-voting states for more than two decades running. At the county level, the pattern flips: Democratic-voting counties have higher homicide rates than Republican-voting ones. Both statements are accurate, and neither settles the argument, because once researchers control for poverty, income inequality, race, age, and how urban a place is, the correlation between partisanship and homicide effectively disappears at both levels.
What State-Level Numbers Show
The most-cited state-level analysis comes from the center-left think tank Third Way. Its February 2024 report found that the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 had an average murder rate 33% higher than the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden, in both 2021 and 2022. In 2022, red states averaged 8.5 homicides per 100,000 residents; blue states averaged 6.4. That was the 23rd year in a row that Trump-voting states outpaced Biden-voting states on this measure. Across the full 2000–2022 window, the cumulative red-state murder rate ran 24% higher.1Third Way. The 21st Century Red State Murder Crisis
The gap has also widened. In an earlier report covering 2000 through 2020, Third Way found the difference grew from about 9% in 2003–2004 to 43% by 2020, peaking at 44% in 2019. Murder rates over those two decades grew 39.4% in red states versus 13.4% in blue states.2Third Way. The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem
Federal data broadly tracks the pattern. A Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin for 2024 put the highest state homicide rates in Louisiana (10.6 per 100,000), Mississippi (9.8), Alabama (8.8), and Arkansas (7.3), all reliably Republican. Some of the lowest rates showed up in New York (2.7) and California (4.2).3Bureau of Justice Statistics. Crime Known to Law Enforcement, 2024
The County-Level Flip
Critics of the state-level framing argue crime is really a local phenomenon, and that Democratic cities inside red states drive up state totals. The Heritage Foundation made this case in a 2022 memo showing that removing Cook County (Chicago) cut Illinois’s homicide rate by 55%, and pulling out the two Tennessee counties containing Memphis and Nashville cut that state’s rate by 43%.4Heritage Foundation. The Blue City Murder Problem
In an October 2023 follow-up using County Health Rankings data and MIT Election Labs voting data, Heritage found that between 2014 and 2020, Democratic-voting counties had an aggregate homicide rate of 6.52 per 100,000 compared to 4.06 in Republican-voting counties, a gap it said held back to 2002.5Heritage Foundation. The Red State Murder Problem Becomes the Blue County Murder Problem
Third Way tested this rebuttal directly. When it removed the county containing the largest city from 22 of the 25 red states, while leaving blue-state cities untouched, red-state murder rates still came out 20% higher in 2021 and 16% higher in 2022.1Third Way. The 21st Century Red State Murder Crisis An Axios review of 2024 FBI data added that 13 of the 20 U.S. cities with the highest murder rates sat in Republican-run states, and eight of the top 10 were in states with Republican governors, including Jackson, Mississippi (nearly 78 per 100,000), Birmingham, Alabama (nearly 59), St. Louis, and Memphis.6Axios. Homicide Rates Highest, Blue Cities, Red States
Why the Partisan Signal Disappears Under Controls
A February 2024 analysis from the Manhattan Institute is probably the single most important piece of the debate. Researchers George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen showed that raw data gives contradictory answers depending on scale: blue counties look more dangerous than red counties, red states look more dangerous than blue states. Both are correct on their own terms, and both mislead on their own.7Manhattan Institute. Red vs. Blue Crime Debate and the Limits of Empirical Social Science
When they controlled for race, age, gender, urbanization, and per-capita income, the correlation between a region’s Trump vote share and its homicide rate vanished at both the state and county levels. A 10-percentage-point increase in 2020 Trump vote share produced a statistically insignificant effect of between 0% and negative 3% on homicide rates once those factors were in the model. Their conclusion was blunt: “confounding factors obviously drive a lot of these gaps in violence,” and the answer depends more on which variables a researcher chooses than on any real link between partisanship and crime.7Manhattan Institute. Red vs. Blue Crime Debate and the Limits of Empirical Social Science
A 2024 study in Evolutionary Human Sciences pointed at the same underlying story. Homicide rates are highest where both poverty and income inequality are most severe, and that interaction alone explained roughly 47% of the variation in state-level homicide rates. The authors argued resource scarcity creates conditions for violence regardless of who governs, and that the disproportionate impact on non-white communities reflects “a long history of systemic racism” concentrating poverty in specific places.8National Institutes of Health. US Homicide Rates Increase When Resources Are Scarce and Unequally Distributed
Do Democratic Mayors Cause More Crime?
The related claim that Democratic mayors drive up crime in their cities has been tested directly. A 2025 peer-reviewed study in Science Advances, cited in a Snopes fact-check, concluded that “the partisanship of mayors has no detectable effect on police spending, police employment, crime, or arrests.” Experts quoted in that review pointed to economic inequality, unemployment, and social safety nets as more meaningful drivers than mayoral party.9Snopes. Democrat Cities More Violent Crime
Robert VerBruggen of the Manhattan Institute noted that higher raw crime counts in Democratic cities largely reflect population geography: liberals cluster in urban areas, so Democratic-run cities tend to be bigger and thus record more crime in absolute numbers, whatever the local policy.9Snopes. Democrat Cities More Violent Crime
Gun Laws and Gun Deaths
One place the red-blue divide is stark is gun policy. States with the weakest gun laws consistently have the highest rates of gun deaths. Everytown Research’s scorecard, which rates states on 50 policies, put the five lowest scores in Idaho (3.5), Mississippi (4), South Dakota (4), Arkansas (4.5), and Wyoming (5), with gun death rates from 15.9 to 28.0 per 100,000. Top-ranked California (91), Massachusetts (86.5), and New York (85) posted gun death rates of 7.0, 3.8, and 4.4.10Everytown Research & Policy. Gun Law Rankings
The Giffords Law Center’s parallel scorecard found 13 of the 15 states with the highest gun death rates carried an “F” grade for gun law strength.11Giffords Law Center. Annual Gun Law Scorecard A Center for American Progress analysis using those grades found “F”-rated states had homicide rates 61% higher than states graded “A” or “B.”12Center for American Progress. Weak Gun Laws Are Driving Increases in Violent Crime
One caveat matters here. Gun suicides make up the majority of gun deaths: in 2024, 62% of gun deaths nationally were suicides and 35% were homicides.13Pew Research Center. What the Data Says About Gun Deaths in the US CDC figures for 2023 put the overall firearm death rate at 28.0 per 100,000 in Mississippi and 24.4 in Alaska, compared to 3.7 in Hawaii and 3.8 in Massachusetts.14Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Stats of the States – Firearm Mortality States like Wyoming and Montana rank high on gun deaths largely because of suicide rather than homicide, which complicates any straight red-versus-blue comparison of the totals.
Policing Spending and Incarceration Cut Against the Stereotype
Third Way’s 2024 numbers also complicate the “defund” narrative. Blue states spent an average of $453.67 per resident on policing in 2021, compared to $341.37 in red states, a 33% gap. Eight of the 10 states with the highest per-capita policing spend were blue.1Third Way. The 21st Century Red State Murder Crisis
Incarceration trends diverge too. Prison Policy Initiative data shows California cut its state prison population 22% between 2019 and 2023, New York 25%, and New Jersey 37%. Meanwhile Texas accounted for nearly 31% of all state prison population growth between 2022 and 2023, Florida 13%, and Georgia 7%.15Prison Policy Initiative. Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025
Crime Is Falling in Both
Set the argument aside for a moment. The bigger fact right now is that American crime is dropping fast. FBI preliminary 2025 data, released in May 2026, showed violent crime down an estimated 9.3% and murder down 18.1% versus 2024.16Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Releases Historic Early Look at Annual Crime Data The Council on Criminal Justice reported homicides in 40 large cities fell 21% in 2025 and projected a national rate of roughly 4.0 per 100,000, which would be the lowest ever recorded.17Council on Criminal Justice. Crime Trends in US Cities: Year-End 2025 Update
Crime analyst Jeff Asher, tracking real-time data from more than 400 agencies, estimates a 2025 murder rate around 4.2 per 100,000, the lowest under consistent FBI methodology since 1960. The decline shows up in cities with progressive prosecutors and in cities with tough-on-crime ones, in red states and blue states. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and New York City all reported murder totals at or near their lowest levels since the 1960s.18The Trace. US Murder Rate Historic Low Asher has cautioned against handing credit to any single policy or party, saying whatever is driving murders down now is “almost certainly not the same” as what drove them up during the 2020 spike.19U.S. House of Representatives. Testimony of Jeff Asher, House Judiciary Committee
The Bottom Line
The red-versus-blue crime question is a case study in how the same data supports opposing narratives depending on where you stand. State-level numbers favor the argument that Republican states are more dangerous. County-level numbers favor the argument that Democratic areas are. Both are technically true, and both fall apart once you control for the things that actually predict where violence happens: poverty, inequality, urbanization, and the demographics of who lives there. Homicide clusters where those conditions cluster, not where any particular party holds power.