Trump Seizes on Historic Crime Drop to Boost Republicans Ahead of Midterms

A Political Showcase Built on Real Numbers

With the 2026 midterms looming, President Donald Trump on Friday moved to make falling crime rates a centerpiece of his party's electoral pitch. Trump showcased falling violent crime rates as evidence that his law-and-order agenda is working, seeking to shift attention away from economic concerns heading into the midterm elections. The timing is deliberate — and the data he's leaning on is striking.

An Axios analysis of the Major Cities Chiefs Association's survey of 66 large U.S. communities found significant drops in violent crime in the first six months of 2026 compared to the same period last year: homicides fell 17.2%, robberies dropped 16.6%, rapes declined 6.2%, and aggravated assaults fell 5.7% — amounting to roughly 14,200 fewer reported violent crimes. Those are not marginal improvements. They represent a broad, measurable shift in public safety across dozens of American cities.

Some Cities Seeing Dramatic Turnarounds

The declines are especially striking in certain cities: in Washington, D.C., homicides are down 43.9%; in Memphis, homicides are down 43.7%; and in New Orleans, homicides are down nearly 25%. Trump has pointed directly to these cities as proof that his deployment of federal resources and National Guard troops is working.

The Council on Criminal Justice finds the national murder rate is on pace to hit the lowest level in at least 126 years, while crime data analyst Jeff Asher reports the 2026 murder rate is tracking to be "by far the lowest ever recorded." John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and former senior advisor for Research and Statistics in the U.S. Department of Justice, said that if the trend continues, the country will experience the lowest murder rate it has ever seen under Trump.

A Contested Narrative

Not everyone agrees on what's driving the numbers — or who deserves credit. Though Trump has taken credit for reducing overall crime, rates were already declining before he returned to office last January, and experts say it's at best too soon to tell if his administration has played a notable role in the drop. Rates began dropping under Biden and have continued to decline under Trump.

Democrats say Republicans are overstating the role of federal policy in a crime decline that began before Trump returned to office, and progressives have largely backed away from supporting the "defund the police" movement that emerged after George Floyd's murder in 2020. Meanwhile, criminologist Thaddeus Johnson of the Council on Criminal Justice noted that "in places that have both had federal interventions and not, we've seen declines," suggesting the trend may be driven by factors beyond any single administration's policies.

Crime as a Midterm Weapon

Trump's touting of the crime decline comes as he has also sought in recent months to make socialism and communism a defining theme in the midterms, and he has recently intensified attacks on self-described democratic socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other progressive candidates. The strategy is to frame Democrats as soft on crime even as the data shows improvement in cities they govern.

The new numbers complicate the political narrative around crime heading into the 2026 midterms. Trump has repeatedly described major Democratic-led cities as gripped by violent crime, yet data show many urban areas have become significantly safer over the last two years, with drops beginning in the second half of the Biden presidency and continuing under Trump. Whether voters credit the president or see a longer trend at work could be one of the defining questions of November's elections — and both parties know it.