Is there a 'Blue State' or 'Red State' Crime problem? Well, as with everything else, it depends who you ask. Sometimes it is hard to catch the 'misinformation' we are presented by politicians and the media. In this case, it is easy. "With Republicans hammering [Dems] over rising murder rates, Democrats have come up with a new line of defense: Republicans, they claim, are the ones really responsible for the surge in homicides. The United States, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently declared, has a “red state murder problem.” No, it doesn’t. The bogus claim comes from a March study by the Democratic think tank Third Way, which purports to show that, contrary to “the right-wing obsession over homicides in Democratic cities: murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states.” According to Third Way, of the top 10 states with the highest per-capita murder rates in 2020, eight (Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas) voted for Donald Trump, while just two (New Mexico and Georgia) voted for Joe Biden. “Republicans seem to do a much better job of talking about stopping crime than stopping crime,” Jim Kessler, an author of the report, told Axios. One problem with that: In most of these red states, the high murder rates are driven by the lethal violence in their blue cities." For the most part the 'misinformation' we are provided, like this, is not false on its face. It is misleading in that it highlights points which serves one side over the other and ignores the bigger reality of the issue. If you say that 1,000 deaths occur on I-95 and then try to blame those who live along the highway, you would not be wrong. But, you leave out that these deaths are traffic accidents involving cars and animals. Well, that adds much needed specificity to help you determine how to correct the problem. It is this kind of headline 'misinformation' that you see in the 'Blue State' vs 'Red State  murder issue and that we are inundated with on every issue on a daily basis. The same applies to 'electric cars'. No wonder everyone parrots the data points that fit their political preferences, ignoring a more complete data set from which decisions can be made, which is usually resident on both sides. The sad part is the media either knows this game or doesn't.  If the media participates knowingly, that is unethical or illegal.  If they don't investigate enough to uncover the game, that is journalistic incompetence. Even the reliably far-left Washington Post includes the following support for the truth in a recent article trying to defuse the 'Blue State' Crime problem. Urban areas in general don’t do so well, with homicide rates in core counties of large metropolitan areas higher than elsewhere over the years, and rising faster in 2020 and 2021. With the totality of data available, it is clear that large cities drive crime rates in the states. And, that the overwhelming majority of those cities are run by Democrats. So, what then is the impact of any unique policies the Democrats use in those cities that are not used by Republicans or Independents in large cities? Then we would know what is at fault and what to do to correct the rising 'crime problem'. Vary your news sources and dig below the headlines to find what's missing. More From AEI: More From Heritage Foundation: