Republicans have bet big on a reliable playbook in the final weeks of the midterms, smearing Democrats as soft on crime – but they're running into a major problem.
According to The New York Times, the GOP has spent $105 million on crime-themed ads in federal general election races. That's more than a quarter of its total ad spending, and about three times the $35.5 million Democrats have spent on the issue, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact.
But one analysis found that the national murder rate last year was the lowest since 1900, and violent crime has kept dropping this year, and even veteran Republicans concede the message isn't landing.
"This is the first election really in my lifetime where I have felt that it's not an issue," said Holly Harris, a longtime GOP strategist who now works at the criminal justice philanthropy Arnold Ventures. "I remember when I was at the Republican Party years ago, every ad that we wrote was focused on crime, and it's just not hitting the same mark."
Republicans have spent $18.5 million in North Carolina on ads about murder and lawlessness to attack former Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic Senate candidate, but several of the ads have backfired.
One blamed Cooper for a killing that happened in South Carolina, while another falsely claimed he gave an early release to the man charged with fatally stabbing a Ukrainian woman on a Charlotte light rail train.
A third featured a man whose son was murdered that implied Cooper's policies were responsible, but the father, a Democrat, later complained he had been “swindled, hoodwinked” about the ad's topic, which he had been told was about gun violence.
Cooper still leads Republican Michael Whatley consistently in the polls.
Violent crime in North Carolina is down 22 percent so far this year compared with 2024, according to the Crime Index. The national drop is 14 percent.
"It really does not seem to be having much traction at this point," said Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the conservative John Locke Foundation.
President Donald Trump has struggled with the same contradiction, including an appearance at a recent rally in Gastonia, where he blamed Cooper for North Carolina's "blood-soaked killing fields." Within half an hour, he was praising his own record: "Last year, we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded."
Democrats have gone on offense by pointing to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and to Trump's pardons of drug traffickers, fraudsters and Jan. 6 rioters.
In North Carolina, a Democratic PAC spent more than $2 million on ads about a convicted child sex offender who rose through the state GOP while Whatley was party chairman, although his campaign said he never hired the man for a paid position.
"Especially when voters feel that they're getting robbed at the gas station every day," soft-on-crime attacks seem out of step with voters' concerns, said Jim Kessler of the centrist Democratic group Third Way.