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03 December 2015
Are the 'overwhelming majority of violent criminals' Democrats? Ted Cruz said so 1DEZ15
OH those foolish repiglicans, this is just so stupid it is hard to believe anyone could think "yeah, ted cruz, he'd be a good president". From +PolitiFact .....
"Here’s the simple and undeniable fact: The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats."
— Ted Cruz on Monday, November 30th, 2015 in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt
By Louis Jacobson on Tuesday, December 1st, 2015 at 3:55 p.m.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during a campaign stop at a Pizza Ranch in Newton, Iowa, on Nov. 29, 2015.
During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said most violent criminals are Democrats.
It came after Hewitt brought up the shooting at a Planned Parenthood
clinic that left three dead and nine injured in Colorado Springs, Colo.,
over Thanksgiving weekend. Hewitt told Cruz that he’d been doing
anti-abortion events for 25 years and had never met "a single pro-life
activist who is in favor of violence of any sort."
Cruz agreed. "And I would note that this whole episode has really
displayed the ugly underbelly of the media," Cruz said. "You know, every
time you have some sort of violent crime or mass killing, you can
almost see the media salivating, hoping, hoping desperately that the
murderer happens to be a Republican, so they can use it to try to paint
their political enemies. Now listen, here’s the simple and undeniable
fact. The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. The
media doesn’t report that."
We received dozens of emails from readers asking us to check the claim, so we took a closer look.
We queried the Cruz campaign, but didn’t hear back. CNN reported that
Cruz’s campaign, when asked, cited research by two academics, Marc
Meredith, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Morse, then of
Stanford University. They published a paper in the January 2014 edition of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science titled, "Do Voting Rights Notification Laws Increase Ex-Felon Turnout?" (After we published our item, Cruz defended the statement to ABC News on the basis of that study.)
The paper looked at the policy in some states of notifying newly
released inmates about their ability to re-register to vote. The authors
looked at data from New Mexico, New York and North Carolina and
concluded that notification laws do not significantly increase rates of
registration or voting among ex-felons.
Cruz’s claim relies not on the general thrust of the paper but on some of the data contained within it.
For instance, in New York, about one-third of felons released from
prison registered to vote after their release. Of those, about 62
percent registered as Democrats and 9 percent registered as Republicans,
with 26 percent registering as independents or with other parties.
In North Carolina, about a quarter of those who were released
registered after their release. Of those, 52 percent registered as
Democrats, 19 percent as Republicans and 22 percent as independents or
with other parties.
And in New Mexico, 41 percent of those who were released registered
to vote. Of those, 55 percent registered as Democrats, 10 percent as
Republicans and 18 percent as independents or with other parties.
So Cruz’s statement has some grounding in the research. But it
significantly oversimplifies the case -- and introduces some
inaccuracies.
"Cruz is misinterpreting our research," the authors told PolitiFact.
Here’s a rundown of factors that should give anyone pause:
• "Violent" vs. "nonviolent." Cruz said that "the
overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats." But the paper
didn’t break down their pool of ex-felons into those who had been
incarcerated for violent offenses and those who had been incarcerated
for nonviolent crimes. So the paper contains no support for this portion
of Cruz’s claim.
• A small sample of states. The paper focuses on three states out of 50, and the authors say it’s wrong to generalize from this small sample. In fact, in another academic paper,
the same authors found that in Iowa, Maine and Rhode Island, the most
common registration for discharged felons was not to affiliate with any
party.
"Ex-felons’ partisan affiliations vary across states, and we don’t
think there’s enough evidence to claim that the national ex-felon
population is ‘overwhelmingly Democratic,’ at least in terms of party
registration," the authors told us.
• The paper studied "ex-felons," not "criminals."
Cruz’s statement makes it sound as if Democrats are committing crimes.
That’s not what the paper measured. Rather, the paper found that once
felons are released from prison, they are likelier to register as
Democrats. The data in the paper doesn’t speak to whether they were
Democrats (registered or otherwise) when committing crimes.
• The study doesn’t address ex-felons who don’t register to vote. Half to two-thirds of the voters in these states didn’t register to vote.
• It’s hard to separate these figures from overall demographics.
It’s no secret that, statistically, African-Americans are
disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. It’s also
no secret that African-Americans are overwhelmingly Democratic. Put
these two together and it’s not surprising to find higher percentages of
Democratic registrations among ex-felons.
Indeed, in a 2010 paper -- "Did Disfranchisement Laws Help Elect
President Bush? New Evidence on the Turnout Rates and Candidate
Preferences of Florida’s Ex-Felons" -- Traci Burch of Northwestern
University found that African-American ex-felons did overwhelmingly
register as Democrats. But the paper also found that white ex-felons did
not follow the same pattern.
Meredith and Morse said they have looked at updates of the data Birch
studied and found that while African-American ex-felons still
overwhelmingly identify as Democratic, non-African-Americans were only
slightly more likely to identify as a Democrat than as a Republican.
• Correlation is not necessarily causation. As we
indicated above, it could be that high Democratic registration rates are
inevitable results of a criminal justice system stacked against
African-Americans. It's even possible that inmates’ experience in prison
could "turn" an ex-felon Democratic. Perhaps ex-felons simply don’t
like what they see as the Republican approach to criminal-justice
policy.
The bottom line is, despite Cruz’s belief that this is a "simple and
undeniable fact," there are enough asterisks with this statement to make
it anything but. Our ruling
Cruz said, "Here’s the simple and undeniable fact: The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats."
Research cited by the Cruz campaign supports the claim that, in at
least three states, felons released from prison go on to register as
Democrats at a disproportionately high rate following their release.
However, there are important caveats. The study in question looked at
both violent and nonviolent felons without separating out those two
groups. It’s not clear whether the patterns holds in the other 47
states. Also, the study didn’t look at active "criminals" but rather
those who had already served their time. Finally, it’s hard to draw a
line between cause and effect, particularly given the disproportionately
high population of African-Americans -- a traditionally Democratic
group -- in the criminal justice system.
We rate his statement Mostly False.
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