From the Washington Post:

Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t.

Over and over, Trump has shared that terse phrase with his tens of millions of Twitter followers, including on Wednesday and Thursday. And over and over, he has tried to imply that Democrats broadly and former vice president Joe Biden specifically are soft on crime. That his likely general election opponent and other leaders in the Democratic Party are happy to have social structures collapse into anarchy for some unclear reason.

To make that case, Trump has repeatedly lifted up a statistical factoid, as he did during an event at the White House on Wednesday.

“You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run,” he said. “Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of 20. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.”

This is factually incorrect and the Washington Post is going to hammer Trump because of it.

What is the information they are going to use?

Oh, 17 out of the 20 are and the top 10 absolute most violent are Democrat-run.

Let’s dig deeper.  The mayor of Las Vegas is Carolyn Goodman, the wife of the former mayor Oscar Goodman.  They are independents but were registered Democrats until 2009.  Oscar Goodman was the Democrat mayor of Las Vegas for the first 10 years of his three terms in office.

The mayor of San Antonio is Ron Nirenberg, and while he is registered as an independent, he is a Progressive.  He’s so Progressive that he is not a Democrat because he is Left of the Democrats (if that is even possible at this point).

The one I have no history for is Springfield Mayor, Ken McClure.

So while only 17 out of the 20 are Democrats, 19 out of the 20 are either Democrats, former Democrats, or Leftist/Progressives.

Jacksonville seems to be the odd one out.

When it comes to per-capita violence, the Republican drops off, and 19 of the 20 are Democrat.

For the Washington Post, Trump is completely wrong because only 95% of our most violent cities are Democrat-run instead of 100%.

From a statistical standpoint, it is possible to reject the null hypothesis with more than a 95% confidence interval, but it’s dodgy.

If there was ever a time for this GIF, it’s now.

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By J. Kb

8 thoughts on “This is not the dunk that they think it is”
  1. The Springfield Mayor is likely an Establishment Republican, but they may run nominally Non-Partisan races?

    “McClure for Mayor” website,
    “From my service as Chief of Staff to Governor Matt Blunt, to my appointment by Governor John Ashcroft as Chairman of the state Public Service Commission…”

    http://mcclureformayor.com

    Doesn’t change much, if 80% of the worst cities are run by Democrats, then It slunds reasonable that this is part of the problem. Remember Rudy Giuliani ran as a Republican in the crime ridden hell hole of 1991 NYFC, and they were desperate enough to give him a chance.

  2. I live in the Springfield Metro area, and from what I have found McClure is supposedly an independent. While he may have at one time been a Republican, what we do know is that he claims to be a career public servant having served in various state offices as an appointed–not elected–bureaucrat. His policies tend to be slanted to the progressive ilk

    As far as Springfield being violent–there aint any neighborhoods I am afraid to go into, what violence there is seems to be drug related. When local people see this statistic regarding violence, they scratch their heads and wonder how that happened

  3. Here we see a few classic Media propaganda tricks at play.

    1) The deceptive headline. You can pretty much say anything you want as a headline, then bury the real truth towards the back of the article, and most people just skim the first little bit anyway.

    2) Attacking the precision of a statement that wasn’t meant to be precise. Which leads to:

    3) Pretending that by disproving a minor point of an argument, one has won the whole argument.

  4. They are technically correct – the best kind of correct – but I think this will still count as an “own goal” for anyone who actually reads the article.

    And they wonder why journalists aren’t trusted…

  5. According to the conservative treehouse, the lone R on the list was recently elected, perhaps as a response to the disfunctions of a long string of Ds.

    1. He’s been there since 2015, and Jacksonville has had as many Republicans and Democrats as mayors in the last 40 years.

      The problem with Jacksonville is that it sits at the intersection of I-95 and I-10, two of the three interstates that pass through Florida. The other is I-75.

      Most of the drugs coming in and out of Florida that travel up the east coast travel along these highways.

      It’s not really a problem of politics, it’s location, location, location.

  6. It doesn’t matter what the percentage of ‘truth’ is. Now they get to claim it as ‘false according to the factcheckers’ and memory-hole/block it on all the social medias and search engines. .

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