Democrats grapple with messaging on crime

Transcript

NIALA: Good morning! Welcome to Axios Today!

It’s Friday, March 3rd.

I’m Niala Boodhoo.

Here’s what we’re watching today: fewer Americans are getting married. Plus, our surging credit card debt. But first, our weekly politics State of Play: Democrats grapple with messaging on crime. That’s our One Big Thing.

Democrats grapple with messaging on crime

NIALA: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot this week became the first incumbent in the city to lose reelection in decades. As two other candidates are advancing to the April runoff. Lightfoot's failure to curb Chicago's high crime rate was central to her loss, and as Axios’ Alexi McCammond reports this elections and early tests of how Democrats are redefining their public safety platform ahead of 2024.

Hey, Alexi.

ALEXI MCCAMMOND: Hi, how are you?

NIALA: Alexi, let's start with Chicago. How did her approach to rising crime take down Mayor Lightfoot?

ALEXI: You know, after the pandemic, we saw spikes in violent crime across the country. Chicago has obviously been known and made headlines for its crime rates for years and years and years. So it's a tall order no matter who is the mayor. But these unique circumstances of post-pandemic plus George Floyd, where folks are looking for police accountability, racial justice, and curbing rising crime, it's really hard to actually deliver on the things that you promise when you're running.

And a lot of the people I talk to say that Mayor Lightfoot’s downfall or the reason that she was viewed as a failure on crime is because they said she was moving far too incrementally.

NIALA: Chicago is one of the bluest cities in America. Does that make a difference when it's an entirely democratic city what the conversation looks like?

ALEXI: That's one of the most revealing trends we've seen over the last couple of cycles alone. These deep blue liberal big cities in blue states are continuing to sort of lead a real time transformation of the Democratic party by electing these more moderate candidates who instead of saying things like defund the police or talking about social workers or mental health workers, they're really taking a pretty clear tough on crime stance. I think about places like San Francisco, Atlanta. I think of someone like Eric Adams, who obviously won the New York mayoral race, and he was very clear on his crime stance, very clear on how tough he would be. That doesn't mean he's been as effective as people want. But, he very quickly declared himself the face of the new Democratic party after he won, specifically because of this moderate approach to crime that got him to win.

NIALA: So how have Democrats in these cities reshaped the democratic narrative on crime as we look ahead to the 2024 presidential election?

ALEXI: They have a tough order because they really can't be so binary as either defund or fund the police. Now you hear Democrats talking about working with police officers, even hiring more police officers. President Biden himself in his executive order last year called to hire 100,000 more cops across the country. But at the same time, you hear Democrats talking about, okay, what do these actual community intervention programs look like? What do mental health and community and civilian boards look like?

I talked with Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City earlier this week, and he's been on the front lines of trying to figure out some of these police reform proposals for the party. And he said that when he's in rooms with other democratic mayors and they're talking about different ways forward, one major change he's noticed is that folks aren't really talking about police accountability anymore. Otherwise, he says voters wanna hear about reform.They're thinking more about how they interact with the community, what types of services are available to them as residents, and how the departments are operating overall. And I thought that was a really interesting change in how Democrats are trying to thread the needle between being pro-police but also pro-reform.

NIALA: Axios’ Politics Reporter Alexi McCammond joining us for our Friday state of play. Thanks, Alexi.

ALEXI: Thank you so much.

NIALA: One more related headline: President Biden said yesterday that he would sign a resolution led by House Republicans that blocks the District of Columbia’s ability to reduce maximum penalties for violent crimes. While Biden said in a tweet that he supports the idea of D.C. statehood and home-rule - his approval clears the way for Congress to overturn a D.C. law for the first time in nearly three decades.

A reminder: the reason we have “taxation without representation” on D.C. license plates is because Congress has the final authority over the District, regardless of what its elected officials say or do.

We’re back in a moment with why U.S. credit card debt is soaring.

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Our surging credit card debt

NIALA: Welcome back to Axios Today. I'm Niala Boodhoo.

DoorDash announced this week that it's launching its first credit card with Chase giving users a new structure of perks and rewards. These kinds of credit card incentives are contributing to a surge in credit card debt across the country, which reached a record high of about $930 billion in the last quarter of 2022. That's according to TransUnion. Axios’ Javier David has been covering this.

Javier, what can you tell us about this new DoorDash card and its structure?

JAVIER DAVID: It's what they call a 4, 3, 2, 1 structure. 4% cash back on DoorDash orders, specifically, 3% on dining purchased directly either from a restaurant or online somewhere. 2% on grocery store purchases and then 1% on just about everything else.

NIALA: How do you think incentives like these cash back rewards are playing into the surge in credit card debt that we're seeing?

JAVIER: Consumers in general are very eager for what analysts are calling experiences and that's travel, that's eating out. None of the data that we have shown reflects anything remotely, related to people pulling back. But these credit cards, they basically incentivize people to just continue to charge.

NIALA: We still have inflation concerns, high interest rates. How does all of this factor into that?

JAVIER: The inflation factor here is what's key. Over the last year or so, consumers have spent an awful lot of money on gas, on regular items that, you know, used to cost much less and they're using credit cards to kind of navigate this higher price environment. And at some point, all of these things add up. Now, some of the data that we've seen to date suggests that consumers are falling behind a little bit. Sort of a tick up in delinquencies starting to have a little bit of a harder time paying.

NIALA: Are there other things people need to know before choosing different credit cards?

JAVIER: The APR is arguably the most important thing. A credit card company will allow you to negotiate a lower balance. If you're like a, you have a solid payment history, sometimes they'll offer you a lower APR. So just be very, very mindful. Otherwise,you'll be paying a staggering amount.

NIALA: Javier David is Axios’ Managing Editor for Business and Markets. Thanks, Javier.

JAVIER: Thank you.

Fewer Americans are getting married

NIALA: A report from the National Center for Family & Marriage Research shows that Americans are getting married less — and if they do tie the knot, delaying it.

Axios’ Reporter Erica Pandey has the story – Erica these stats are pretty striking!

ERICA PANDEY: That's right, Niala. So the marriage rate has dropped by 60% in the U.S. since the 1970s, and there's a few things happening here. One is that getting married isn't so necessary anymore, especially for women who are now getting their own education, who are now working at much higher rates than they were in the 20th century. Also a lot of the things that we associate with marriage, whether that's buying property, whether that's having kids, people are now increasingly doing outside of wedlock and society's accepting that more and more.

The other thing is the way we think about marriage is changing, so it's no longer this first step into adulthood where you get married super young and you get a job and then buy a house and then you build your life. People wanna build their lives and then marry at the end, kind of like the capstone achievement of adulthood. The number of women who are getting married for the first time between the ages of 40 and 59 has jumped 75% since 1990. That big 60% drop in the marriage rate will might lead you to believe that Americans are kind of over marriage, but that doesn't seem to be the case, at least not yet.

University of Michigan does this really cool study called Monitoring the Future, where they ask high school seniors how they feel about different, different things, whether it's marriage, whether it's jobs, whatever it may be. In 1976, 74% of high school seniors said they expected to get married someday, and in 2020 it was 71%. So most of them still see that in their future. America isn't quite like Europe yet where marriage is becoming passé, but it is happening less often and it is happening later in life.

NIALA: Thanks, Erica! That’s Axios’s Erica Pandey.

And that does it for us this week. Axios Today is produced by Fonda Mwangi, Naomi Shavin and Lydia McMullen-Laird. Our senior sound engineer is Alex Sugiura. Alexandra Botti is our supervising producer. Sara Kehaulani Goo is Axios’ editor in chief. Aja Whitaker-Moore is our executive editor, and special thanks as always to Axios’ co-founder Mike Allen.

I’m Niala Boodhoo. Stay safe, enjoy your weekend and we’ll see you back here on Monday.