Blue Counties’ Bigger Homicide Surge

Updated: 2026.01.05 24D ago 4 sources
Analyzing CDC county data, the authors find that homicide rose for almost everyone in 2020 but increased more in Democratic‑leaning counties than in GOP‑leaning ones when comparing within counties over time. They also detect no significant relationship between homicide growth and either COVID‑19 deaths or per‑capita gun sales. — This challenges pandemic‑or‑guns explanations and suggests local political culture or governance differences may have influenced the scale of the 2020 violence spike.

Sources

Crime in the USA - by Inquisitive Bird
2026.01.05 72% relevant
Inquisitive Bird’s piece provides the raw time series and international benchmarks that are necessary to test and contextualize claims like the differential 2020 homicide rise in certain county types; the article’s descriptive focus is the empirical groundwork that underlies the matched idea’s causal and comparative claims.
Homicides Way Down
Steve Sailer 2026.01.03 75% relevant
Sailer reports a broad 2025 decline in homicides that contrasts with prior analyses (and an existing idea) showing differential homicide dynamics by political geography circa 2020; the new article supplies an update to the overall homicide time series (CDC WONDER weekly counts through mid‑2025) that should be compared with the earlier finding about where increases were concentrated.
The racial reckoning murder spree is over
Steve Sailer 2025.12.31 70% relevant
Sailer attributes the earlier homicide rise to the 'Ferguson Effect' and local unrest after high‑profile incidents — a claim related to analyses showing uneven, politically‑indexed homicide changes across jurisdictions; the article uses Baltimore as a case study of that pattern and its alleged reversion.
Breaking Down the 2020 Homicide Spike
2022.05.18 100% relevant
The brief’s finding that 'homicide increases in GOP‑leaning counties tended to be smaller than those in Democratic‑leaning counties' and 'no statistically significant relationship' to COVID deaths or gun sales.
← Back to All Ideas