Last week, the city of Baltimore, Maryland once again passed the grim milestone of seeing more than 300 murders in 2021 and there’s still more than a month to go. This is the seventh straight year that Charm City has broken that barrier. Crime rates of most types are also up around other parts of the state. In response, Governor Larry Hogan once again proposed legislation to combat the ongoing problem. His “refund the police” initiative would invest $150 million into state and local police departments to hire more officers and upgrade equipment. In typical fashion, the state’s Democratic leadership panned the proposal, but a new internal poll indicates that the public in Maryland is on Hogan’s side by a wide margin. And that included both the Black and Hispanic communities in Baltimore. (Free Beacon)

According to internal polling obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, 88 percent of black voters support Maryland governor Larry Hogan’s (R.) effort to “re-fund the police,” an initiative state Democrats denounced as “divisive” and “misguided.”

The poll, which was provided by an outside group aligned with Hogan, shows that 64 percent of likely black voters in the state “strongly support” the governor’s proposal to “provide greatly increased funding to state and local police agencies,” while 24 percent “somewhat support” the policy. Hogan’s initiative enjoys similar support across racial lines—89 and 74 percent of white and Hispanic voters support it, respectively.

Those numbers contradict state Democrats’ criticism of the plan.

In addition to the proposed funding increase, Hogan introduced two other bills. One would significantly increase penalties for those who use or possess illegal firearms. The other would compel the state’s criminal sentencing commission to “track and publish detailed information on the sentences that are handed down by judges for violent crimes.” The Governor also announced a plan to review all of the funding supplied to Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who has notoriously refused to prosecute many types of crime during her tenure in office.

Democratic state house speaker Adrienne Jones immediately accused the Governor of trying to “politicize public safety.” The Democratic state senate president called the refund the police program “divisive rhetoric that would not make communities safer.”

Looking at these most recent poll results, however, it appears that the Democrats in Maryland are yet again severely misreading the room. The margins on this aren’t even close. Support for the plan crosses all racial lines and those who “strongly support” vastly outnumber those who “somewhat support.”

And why wouldn’t people be willing to give this a try? The victims of the latest spate of murders included two young girls aged five and thirteen, as well as a 69-year-old woman who was stabbed to death inside of a church. The gangs of Baltimore are so far out of control that it’s difficult to describe.

Here’s the question we should be posing for the voters of Maryland. If you are that strongly in support of Hogan’s efforts to get the crime rates back under control while the Democrats continue to refuse to pass these bills (Hogan has been trying for three years now), why do you keep electing the same Democrats over and over again? I’m not trying to be too much of a naysayer here, but it’s hard to have too much sympathy for people who are in need of help but refuse to help themselves. Remember the classic definition of insanity, involving people who keep doing the same thing over and over again but expect different results.