October 13, 2021 10:25 AM UTC

When The Chart Doesn't Help, Eli Bremer Edition

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• by: Colorado Pols

A fundraising email this week from Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eli Bremer raised some eyebrows this week for employing a visual aid that didn’t exactly help convey the intended message:

Violent Crime cases have hit a 25-year high in Colorado – and, quite frankly, who’s surprised?

What else will it take, Colorado? When will we see a one-party rule has failed us?

The radical left proudly boasts plans to defund the police because they see police as the issue. People who were forced to stay home and had their freedoms taken away, like this past year, have become more desperate…

This is another example of the failed Biden Presidency and ineffective leadership in Colorado. Join me if you are ready for change.

To back up Bremer’s contention that a big scary wave of violent crime is just about to crash into your quiet suburban neighborhood, the campaign supplied this graph:

Which does show that the rate of violent crime in Colorado has increased to slightly above the national average in recent years, a fact which no one disputes. But even at today’s elevated levels of crime, we’re well below the historically much higher crime rates that prevailed in the years culminating in Denver’s infamous “summer of violence” in 1993. We have no interest in downplaying the recent uptick in violent crime, which is significant and has complex origins that defy political sloganeering. The problem is that Bremer contradicts his own attempt to hype the problem for personal political advantage by visually reminding his audience that as bad as it is now, it used to be even worse. With that, the utility of this issue as a partisan political weapon breaks down.

What Bremer might have done, of course, is cut the chart off at the year that best illustrates your point like local conservative group Compass Colorado did some years back regarding Colorado’s unemployment rate! It’s not exactly, you know, honest, but at least you don’t confound your own fundraising pitch.

It’s another reason why experience matters in a U.S. Senate race. Amateur fearmongers need not apply.