The Crime Issue Is Kryptonite for Democrats. It Doesn’t Have to Be.

Mother Jones illustration; Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. In June 2025, before Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, he went on a popular internet show called Subway Takes. It’s what it sounds like: The show’s comedian host invites guests to join him on a subway car and then, as they rattle along, grills them about their hot takes on this and that subject. Mamdani was there to defend his take that he, a political newcomer, should run the city. Ever charismatic, Mamdani cracked a joke at the host’s suggestion that he could simply lower the cost of matcha lattes to win over voters. Then they turned to a more serious subject: policing. The host pulled out a crumpled election mailer: “This says NYC can’t risk a mayor who supports defunding police,” he said. “It’s almost like watching the Titanic over and over and over again,” says one congresswoman. “We can never just avoid the iceberg.” Insha Rahman, who was watching at home, perked up, eager to see how Mamdani would respond. A public defender turned criminal justice expert and political strategist, she now leads the Vera Institute of Justice and its sister organization, Vera Action, a prominent national advocacy organization that, among other things, advises politicians on how to talk with the public about crime and safety. Since 2022, her team has counseled hundreds of Democratic candidates. Months before the Subway Takes episode, in fact, they’d talked with Mamdani to help prep him for moments like this. Communicating about crime doesn’t come easy for Democrats, who in many ways are still haunted by the brutally effective “Willie Horton” advertisement that supporters of the elder George Bush deployed against his Democratic rival, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, during the 1988 presidential race. Horton, who is Black, had been convicted for participating in a 1974 robbery and murder in Dukakis’ home state. After more than a decade in lockup, he was allowed to participate in a weekend furlough program. During one such furlough, he fled the state, broke into a white couple’s home in Maryland, and then knifed the man and raped the woman. Horton was re-incarcerated, in Maryland this time. Dukakis hadn’t created the furlough program—a previous Republican governor had—but he’d supported it, and Bush harped on the case to take him down. Bush’s allies even trotted out the victims for a series of news conferences. Bush dismissed critics who said the ad was racist, but it clearly evoked age-old tropes about Black men posing a threat to white women. Bush won the election handily. Republicans have spent boatloads on these sorts of ads ever since, scapegoating immigrants and people of color in an effort to depict themselves as the Law & Order party and Democrats as Criminal Coddlers—or, more recently, as the Defund the Police party. Last month, Trump referenced Horton while stumping for a Senate candidate in North Carolina, and Repubicans have dropped more than $100 million on crime ads during this midterm cycle, far outpacing Democrats, who spent about $35 million, according to an AdImpact analysis of federal races in late September. “The tough-on-crime narrative is a really powerful tool that reactionaries trot out every two to four years so that they can win elections, and the consequence of that has been disastrous in communities like mine,” Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who leads the Congressional Community Safety Caucus, lamented during a recent roundtable discussion. “It’s almost like watching the Titanic over and over and over again…We can never just avoid the iceberg.” Insha Rahman is president of the Vera Institute of Justice.Paul Lewis Anderson Time and again, Lee told me in an interview, Democratic candidates have struggled with communicating about crime and justice issues. Some try to play the Republican game, insisting they’ll be equally tough on crime—or tougher!—and accuse rivals of supporting the January 6 rioters and child predator Jeffrey Epstein. Others duck and pivot to more favorable topics, hoping to avoid the issue of crime altogether. But Rahman’s team at Vera, which has done extensive polling, and has the ear of many Democratic lawmakers, including Lee, is convinced that neither strategy is effective. Democrats need to “put Willie Horton to bed once and for all,” Rahman says. Instead, she and her colleagues advise Democrats to lean into conversations about crime—to go on the offense and establish their own positions straight out the gate, without mimicking their opponents. “What we’ve seen from our multiple rounds of polling and message testing and studying this issue and working on races,” Rahman said during a talk at the Democratic National Convention’s summer convening last year, “is that voters are really clear what Republicans are about when it comes to this issue…And when we ask, ‘What do you think Democrats stand for,’ they say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. What’s their brand? Do they care about this issue?” “And the answer is, Democrats do,” she said enthusiastically. In advance of the midterms, Rahman has been pushing candidates to seize the moment as Trump’s version of toughness—masked ICE officers wreaking havoc in American cities—has grown increasingly unpopular. This is the time, she says, for Democrats to build their brand by explaining, in detail, how they’ll improve public safety by means of everything from better policing to violence intervention programs to investment in schooling and affordable housing. The winning strategy, she believes, is to flip the Republican frame and focus not on crime and fear, but safety and solutions. (“Serious About Safety” is her preferred slogan.) Dems need to “put Willie Horton to bed once and for all,” she says. And with crime at historically low rates, she believes they can—if only they are willing to get a little louder. Rahman, 45, immigrated to the United States in 1994, a year Democrats were deeply invested in out-toughing Republicans on crime. That September, President Bill Clinton signed his controversial crime bill, which allocated billions of dollars to policing and prisons, enacted stricter criminal penalties, and arguably fueled mass incarceration more than any other legislation in modern US history. Rahman was only 14 then, with other matters on her mind. She had just moved to an all-girls boarding school in upstate New York, a major change in pace after her childhood in Saudi Arabia, where her dad worked as as surgeon at a hospital run by an oil company. They’d lived on a diverse American compound with neighbors from all over the world. “My family is ethnically Indian,” she explained in a recent interview. “Suddenly I was in upstate New York, where my foreignness felt very pronounced. That’s what I was thinking about in 1994.” It wasn’t until she attended college at Vassar, also in New York, that she began thinking more about the justice system. Her freshman year, she joined a program that brought students into Green Haven maximum-security prison to take classes with incarcerated men; the experience opened her eyes to the harshness of the criminal justice system. After law school, she became a public defender in the Bronx for five years before joining the Vera Institute, where she hoped to change some of the harmful policies she’d witnessed on the ground. Her early work included lobbying for a bail reform law in New York and serving on a commission to close the notorious Rikers Island jail. She helped sue the Trump administration last year, after it cut $5 million in Vera’s funding. This year, she was named the institute’s president and director—the first woman, Muslim, and immigrant to hold the position since the organization was founded 65 years ago. Candidates need convincing: “It’s a shock to the system. There’s a fear that a Democrat really weighing in on the public safety debate is just gonna get trounced.” The project to get Democrats talking smarter on crime kicked off in 2022, when Rahman was working with Vera Action and feeling frustrated by the backlash to progressive criminal justice reforms. During the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis had sparked nationwide protests and a rallying cry to “defund the police.” These demands never materialized—police departments kept their massive budgets—but something else happened: Homicides spiked across the nation. By 2022, with midterms approaching, Democratic candidates were panicking and rolling back police accountability laws. “Fights about ‘defund’ dominated the conversation, as opposed to meaningful debate about safety and justice,” Rahman recalls. She wanted to better understand how voters were feeling, and whether the shift back toward tough rhetoric was necessary, so her team started commissioning polls. They knew that people were worried about crime—the New York Times interviewed one voter who was saving for a bulletproof vest to protect himself from lawlessness. But when asked to choose between a tough-on-crime approach (more resources for police, harsher bail laws, longer prison sentences) and a “serious about safety” one (getting illegal guns off the street and investing in preventative measures such as schooling, housing, jobs, and mental health and addiction treatment), 53 percent of respondents preferred the latter. That number grew to 56 percent in 2023, dipped as Trump ran for a second term, and then rebounded to 59 percent by early 2026. The results held across parties, and in swing states like North Carolina and Wisconsin. “It’s a broad consensus,” she says. The polling showed something else, too: Traditional ads of candidates flanked by police weren’t performing as well as they once did. In Virginia, a majority of respondents favored a mock “serious about safety” ad over tougher ones by both Republican and Democratic candidates—Black, Latino, and Gen Z voters across political parties were especially likely to prefer it. Many Democratic candidates have picked up on this, Rahman says. Take Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, a Democrat who, while running for reelection in 2024, ran ads crediting his city’s 20 percent decline in homicides in part to afterschool programs, not just better cooperation between the police and the community. During his successful 2022 US Senate campaign, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman ran an ad in which a burly, no-nonsense sheriff defended Fetterman’s record of pardoning nonviolent criminals when he was lieutenant governor. “He took that standard tough-on-crime ad and turned it on its head, using law enforcement to tell a different story about what makes communities safe,” Rahman told me. Since 2022, her team has coached more than 200 candidates—including about 60 this midterm cycle—on the “serious about safety” approach. Among them were Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her challenger, Nithya Raman; Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan; and Wisconsin gubernatorial contender David Crowley. The team also has briefed the Democratic Attorneys General Association, the Democratic Mayors Association, and even a Republican candidate in Kentucky, showing them polling results and ads that have worked well, helping candidates prep for debates, and offering advice on policy platforms. The Vera crew tailors its emphasis by region: Wisconsin voters, their polling shows, are particularly concerned about the overdose crisis, whereas Democratic politicians in California and New York need to spend more time confronting Republicans’ “disorder” narrative, which accuses Democratic leadership of allowing urban violence to go unchecked. While some candidates find Rahman’s advice intuitive, others require convincing. “It’s a shock to the system. There’s a fear that a Democrat really weighing in on the public safety debate is just gonna get trounced,” says Benjamin Heller, a program manager at Vera. As a former law enforcement staffer in the UK, Heller recommends that candidates highlight the police as an important part of the puzzle, acknowledging that officers are overworked and could use help addressing mental health or addiction crises so that they can focus on solving violent crimes. “Police feel really seen when they’re told, ‘You guys aren’t social workers. We see you guys are responding to everything and we expect you to somehow do everything,” he says. Mamdani, whom Heller briefed, used a similar message in his 2025 Subway Takes video. “No matter how many pieces of literature you get sent, I’m not defunding the police,” he said after the host brought up the accusatory mailer. “I’m actually working with the police to create public safety, by ensuring they can do their jobs, focused on serious crimes, and creating a Department of Community Safety that will focus on mental health, homelessness.” “So technically the police force will stay the same, but there will be more people doing other stuff,” the host replied, kicking off to a humorous exchange. “It just came together really beautifully,” Rahman says. Mamdani’s response had been, almost verbatim, what her team advises—and polling shows it’s popular with voters. Then mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani appears on Subway Takes. Not every campaign is so successful. In 2024, Vera staffers met with Vice President Kamala Harris’ then-campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodrguez, and were pleased to see how her first ad, set to Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” contrasted Trump’s approach with her own: Trump wants a country “of chaos, of fear, of hate,” she said in the ad. Harris then highlighted her vision for affordable health care, reproductive rights, and crucially, safety from gun violence. “The fact that a Democratic candidate actually put safety front and center in a 30-second ad about who she is—I could see our fingerprints all over it,” Rahman told me. But Harris’ campaign’s strategy soon pivoted to tougher ads touting Harris’ background as a prosecutor. At the DNC that year, Rahman warned that framing the race as “prosecutor vs. felon,” as the campaign was attempting, wouldn’t work—it hewed too close to Republican tough talk. “If Kamala Harris says, ‘I’m for the people, and here’s what I stand for, which is safety and justice,’ and contrasts that with, ‘Donald Trump is only out for himself,’ that is actually the most winning statement,” Rahman said at the time. Rahman took an important lesson from Harris’ defeat. “If voters are hearing Republicans talk about being tough on crime, they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s just who they are.’ When they hear that from Democrats, they think that’s not sincere,” she told me. “It just undermines their credibility and bolsters the GOP’s tough-on-crime argument.” In a national poll this year, Rahman’s team asked people which party was more trustworthy on crime, and found that Democrats’ score actually declined by 10 percentage points when they tried to invoke their own tough rhetoric. “You can’t battle them on their narrative turf. You’ve got to get off their playing field and onto your own.” Last summer, with Trump moving fast and breaking things in Washington, Rahman returned to the DNC to make her pitch on the main stage. Chair Ken Martin introduced her personally. “The research that they’re doing is really seminal,” he said, and gives “people the right way to frame the conversation.” “A lot of politicians need to see the proof in the pudding—to see they can survive these election cycles, that there is a pathway for them to be brave and honest .” Rahman urged the Democratic candidates in the crowd to “go on the offense” and call out Trump’s ICE and National Guard deployments as a political power grab. “This tough-on-crime rhetoric and actions, which historically I think Democrats have seen as a win for Republicans—it is actually a liability right now,” she said, and Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, and services for crime victims were not making communities safer. With the homicide rate at a 75-year low, soft-on-crime attacks weren’t landing like they used to. Trump, Rahman warned her crowd, would take credit for the low crime rates, even though, as The Atlantic recently pointed out, murders were already on the decline when he took over, and 6 of the 11 states where the rates are falling the fastest are “sanctuary” jurisdictions whose Democratic leaders won’t cooperate with ICE. “Crime is coming down, but don’t let Trump take credit,” Rahman told them. Say, “It’s going down in spite of him, and because of Democratic leadership—like mine.” The DNC speech didn’t go over as well as she’d hoped: Right-wing media took a comment she’d made about migrant crime out of context, and even some moderate Dems weren’t impressed. “‘Serious about Safety’ feels more like a college sex talk topic during freshman orientation than a serious message for Democratic candidates,” John Anzalone, a leading Democratic pollster, tweeted afterward. “This is not good advice. It is DC-think in a bubble.” The slogan “is catchy,” Sarah Pierce, director of social policy at Third Way, a think tank supporting center-left ideas, told me recently, “but it fails to state what voters are actually worried about, which is crime.” Gallup polling in March found that even if the low homicide rates make people feel more secure, 68 percent of respondents still said they worry “a great deal” or “a fair amount” about crime. But others at the DNC were persuaded, including some members of Congress. The Congressional Black Caucus has partnered with Rahman’s team on a “Serious About Safety Majority” campaign to help Democratic candidates talk about public safety on the campaign trail and, if they take back Congress, to introduce relevant legislation. “They’re really trying to figure out ways of steering the Democratic caucus in a different direction,” notes Rep. Lee, who is running for reelection in Pennsylvania. They’re teaching lawmakers “how we can push back against the Trumpian narrative and go on the offense,” says Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), another member of the caucus, who appreciates the valuable data the Vera team has provided. “A lot of politicians need to see the proof in the pudding—to see they can survive these election cycles, that there is a pathway for them to be brave and honest without losing their jobs,” Lee adds. Rahman’s efforts seem be shifting the Overton window on Democrats talking about crime. In 2022, she could count on one hand the number of candidates taking her advice. Today, almost “every single Democratic nominee for US Senate—in Michigan, in Florida, in Maine, in Texas—is running a Serious About Safety approach,” she told me. One outlier is former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, who has leaned on the old Bill Clinton-style rhetoric and maintained a solid lead in his bid for a US Senate seat. (Trump has suggested that Cooper’s prison release policies are akin to those of Michael Dukakis; old habits die hard.) Whether the Democrats can make themselves heard over Trump’s fearmongering is an open question, but Rahman says she’ll keep encouraging them to try. In a recent poll, when Vera Action asked voters which party is more responsible for declining crime, they gave Republicans a 10-point advantage. But that lead disappeared completely when respondents learned that the decline began before Trump took office and after Democrat-led cities implemented strategies to prevent violence. “The problem may be that many voters are simply not hearing from Democrats,” the Vera team concluded. The Dems, in other words, are leaving money on the table. Rahman wants them to grab it.