Is This the Poll That Proves That Issue Polling Is Dead?

In the summer of 2020, Democrats made a disastrous bet. They embraced "defund the police," and blue cities across the country followed their lead with slashed police budgets, soft-on-crime prosecutors, and a wave of violence that left residents afraid to walk their own streets.

Voters remembered.

There are a lot of reasons Americans put Donald Trump back in the White House, and crime was one of them. The Democrat Party had become the party of turning a blind eye to crime and defunding the police, and voters had seen enough.

Trump, of course, has delivered.

New preliminary estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey, which the Justice Department released on Monday, show that violent and property crime both dropped sharply in 2025.

"This report is proof that President Trump's 'Make America Safe Again' agenda is working," Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said, adding that under Trump and Attorney General Todd Blanche, "the safety of law-abiding Americans will always come first."

Serious nonfatal violent crime, a category covering sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault, plunged 25%, from 9.9 victimizations per 1,000 people age 12 and older in 2024 to 7.4 in 2025. Aggravated assault by itself fell 31%. Property victimization dropped 19%, from 138 per 1,000 households to 111.2. Burglary and trespassing fell 25%, motor vehicle theft fell 30%, and other household theft fell 19%.

The NCVS is our primary measure of criminal victimization, and it captures crimes whether or not anyone reported them to police.

All of this is proof that Trump's tough-on-crime agenda is working, and it comes as voters care about crime more than they have in a while.

A new Rasmussen Reports survey finds that 87% of voters call crime an important issue in deciding their congressional vote, up from 81% in August, with 51% calling it very important. Among those very-concerned voters, 54% trust Republicans more. With a record like Trump's and an electorate this focused on public safety, Republicans should be cruising on this issue heading into the midterms.

Instead, the same survey shows Democrats holding a narrow 44% to 43% edge over Republicans on which party likely voters trust more to handle crime and law enforcement, with 13% unsure. This makes zero sense.

So why is this happening?

My best guess is that partisan loyalty has made issue polling far less reliable than it used to be. Voters increasingly pick their team first, then answer every issue question accordingly, turning a question about crime into a proxy for which party they like.

Let’s look at the internals.

Among Democrats, 86% trust their own party on crime, even after that party spent years flirting with defunding the police. That number reflects team loyalty far more than any honest assessment of crime policy. Republicans show the same reflex, with 83% trusting the GOP. When roughly equal shares of both parties support their own party when one party is so blatantly soft on crime, it says more about tribalism than the issue of crime.

That's the only way to make sense of these results. We are watching Trump's tough-on-crime agenda produce measurable gains, yet Trump and the GOP are essentially tied with the party that opposes enforcement at nearly every turn.

We see the results of the Democrats' weak-on-crime agenda in blue cities every day. There's literally no reason for Democrats to be trusted on crime. A nine-point Republican lead evaporated over a year in which crime fell sharply, and nothing in the actual record explains that swing.

A shifting partisan climate ahead of the midterms explains it easily. That creates a dangerous trap for Republicans. If the GOP reads these numbers as a sign that crime has become a losing issue and stops talking about it, Democrats will happily fill the silence and rewrite the story. Those persuadable independents won't hear the good news unless Republicans tell them, over and over, between now and Election Day.