Crime rates provide a salient signal that drives state lawmakers’ policymaking and voters’ political behavior. Media coverage and elite debate often focus narrowly on recent crime trends, even if they run counter to much larger long-term shifts. Do voters only care about short-term changes in crime rates, or will their state policy views and evaluations of state officeholders respond to long-term trends when that information is available? To explore this, we fielded an original survey experiment in 2022 in California, where crime had declined dramatically over decades but rose the prior year. Survey respondents randomly selected to view the recent short-term rise in crime rates in the context of a long-term decline were less likely to favor a tough-on-crime policy and more likely to support the incumbent attorney general than those only presented with the short-term spike in crime, suggesting that voters are not purely myopic in this policy realm.
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