Today a TPM Reader who left New York City during the pandemic wrote in to ask if the crime situation in the city is really as out of control as he hears. He told me he’s going on what he hears from people who still live in the city, media reports, etc. I told him that the city definitely feels grittier, dirtier and in some ways less safe than it did before the pandemic. I frequently hear people tell me they’re more leery of going on the subways late at night. So I told this reader that even among people who know the city well and have no political motive to play up crime or perceptions of social disorder many people do feel this way. But what I told this reader is that I hadn’t actually looked at the statistics recently, something I’ve done fairly regularly through much of my career since it’s a major interest of mine. So I did. The actual data is quite interesting, certainly more complex than the back-to-the-’80s narrative but also one that shows that many forms of crime have gone up quite a bit.

(Admittedly, this is a New York-centric post. But I write about it here as a proxy for the broader national mood about crime and the backdrop it is playing for the midterm election.)

Continue reading “Is Crime in NYC Out of Control?” →

Close elections can come down to highly contingent factors. In Georgia Republicans are suffering the completely predictable results of their own cynical decision to back Herschel Walker’s absurd campaign. But something else may be afoot in Nevada.

This has been a pretty close race all year, with a very thin margin for the incumbent, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. But just over the last couple weeks Adam Laxalt has moved into the thinnest of leads. These are very, very small differences. It might be noise. It might be the general ebbing of the summer-long Democratic surge. Maybe Laxalt is just running a strong campaign. But there’s something else I want to point out. Where I live in New York, gas prices have been fairly stable recently. Still highish, but way down off the spring highs.

Continue reading “The Gas Bogey in Nevada” →

The Miami Herald has gotten the first state documents from Gov. DeSantis’s migrant shipment operation. You can see its report here. The actual documents are here and here.

I’m going through the documents now. Want to join me? Tell me what you find by email. Two things have jumped out at me so far. One is that the contract seemed to put the state on the line for pretty top dollar to spend on flights. $325,000 to fly 8 people. I don’t book a lot of private jets but isn’t that a lot? The State of Florida paid $615,000 just for the Vineyard flights. So just for 40-some people. That’s a huge amount of money.

And then there’s something else.

Continue reading “First Docs On Air DeSantis” →