For one, FiveThirtyEight noted in late June that poll respondents are basically split as to which party does a better job at handling crime. If, as with many other issues, people increasingly say crime is best addressed by the party they prefer to vote for anyway, Democrats should have less incentive to downplay or triangulate the issue—to try to talk about other subjects instead, or to adopt Republican positions. What’s more, it also turns out that what you might describe as “root cause”–based liberal policies for responding to crime, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released last week, are currently popular as well. In fact, the Post found that spending to create economic “opportunities” in low-income areas, and to fund social workers who could be called on in place of police officers to deal with tense situations or troubled individuals, were the most popular potential methods of addressing crime among the options it gave to respondents... That’s only one poll, but it makes some sense that support for this kind of policy would be high right now. Concerns about deficits are low and, as mentioned, enthusiasm for social spending is high. So is consciousness of racial discrimination, both within the sphere of criminal justice and more broadly. This isn’t really news, per se; in fact, it’s the flip side of all the polling about defunding the police that’s been done over the last year—essentially, when you frame the idea as “doing other things in high-crime areas too” rather than simply starving police departments, support goes up significantly.