Black and Hispanic voters more likely to see violent crime as more important issue than whites

A new poll on voters’ perceptions of violent crime and how it affects their decision-making in the upcoming midterm elections found that non-white voters, especially Blacks, were more concerned about the issue than whites.

According to an October survey by the Pew Research Center, 61% of registered voters said violent crime is very important to them when deciding who to vote for this year.

When broken down by racial and ethnic groups, Black voters were the most likely to see violent crime as an important midterm issue – 81%. Hispanics were also above the average with 65% saying it was very important to their midterm vote, compared to 56% of whites.

Pew senior writer and editor John Gramlich noted that the racial gap widened among Democratic voters.

“Differences by race are especially pronounced among Democratic registered voters. While 82% of Black Democratic voters say violent crime is very important to their vote this year, only a third of White Democratic voters say the same,” Gramlich wrote.

When asked about how Hispanic Democratic voters compared to the two, Pew responded that they did not have enough of a sample size to report the share who say violent crime is important to their vote this year.

“We could only report the figures for Black and White Democratic voters, which is why those two groups are the only ones mentioned in the text of John’s post,” Caleb Keller, a communications associate at Pew, told ADN America via email.

“The same goes for [a racial/ethnic breakdown of] Republican voters - we didn’t have enough sample size to report all the racial/ethnic groups among GOP voters.”

Violent crime ranked sixth on the list of voters’ top midterm issues in the October poll. The economy ranked first, followed by the future of democracy in the country, education, healthcare and energy policy.

The survey also found that Republican and Republican-leaning voters were more likely than their Democratic counterparts to see violent crime as a key midterm issue, 73% to 49%. The gap widened when taking ideology into account – almost eight-in-ten conservative Republicans see violent crime as very important to their vote (77%) while only about a third of liberal Democrats felt the same (34%).

Older voters were also more likely than younger ones to be sensitive to violent crime.