Cue the tough-talking Democrats in five … four … three … two … one …

Just in time for the November 8 midterms, the Defund Democrats nationally are racing out their tough-on-crime rhetoric. Why? Because they can read a poll. And the polls show a huge gap between Republicans and Democrats as to which party is trusted more to crack down on crime.

True to form, Democrats will say anything to get elected. Because for Democrats, it’s never about the principle. Rather, it’s always about the politics.

Take Mandela Barnes, for example. Barnes is running for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin against incumbent Republican Ron Johnson. It’s a must-win for the GOP, and Johnson only recently took a razor-thin 49-48 lead over Barnes in a recent poll. What’s interesting, though, is that Barnes led Johnson by seven points, 52-45, just a month ago in the same Marquette poll.

Why the sudden surge for Johnson? We suspect the Cheeseheads are waking up to Barnes’s radical leftism, especially on crime, which includes pushing to end cash bail, advocating for felons to retain the right to vote, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and calling to defund the police. “We need to invest more in neighborhood services and programming for our residents, for our communities on the front end,” he said in the wake of the George Floyd riots. “Where will that money come from? Well, it can come from over-bloated budgets in police departments.”

And all this, as Breitbart notes, “while spending large amounts of state money (he is the lieutenant governor) on security for himself during a crime wave in the state.”

Ah, protection for me but not for thee. Where have we heard that before?

What a difference two years and a crucial election make. Barnes is now airing a commercial spot in which he seems downright cop-friendly: “I’ll make sure our police have the resources and training they need to keep our communities safe, and that our communities have the resources to stop crime before it happens.”

Sure he will. Right up until he’s safely sworn into office.

Much as the 2022 version of Mandela Barnes would like to distance himself from the 2020 version, he won’t be able to. These facts will be stubborn things, and they’ve negatively affected the safety and security of Wisconsin’s citizenry — especially those in the inner cities, like Milwaukee, whom Democrats always profess to care about. As the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman observes, “These days even when budgets are available to hire more cops, it’s harder than ever to find people willing to do a dangerous job that too many Democrats love to demonize when it suits them.”

Much of this soft-on-crime baggage is also being lugged around by the Democrats’ hoodie-wearing, tattoo-sporting, debate-avoiding train wreck of a Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, whom our Thomas Gallatin recently profiled; and by incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia, who currently holds a Senate seat that he never really deserved and whose poll numbers now put him behind Republican candidate Herschel Walker; and by the Democrats’ candidate in North Carolina, Cheri Beasley, who, as Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel notes, “is the most radical candidate to run for Senate in the state’s history.” How so? McDaniel tells us: “In over 20 years as a judge, she has been soft on cop killers, thrown out the indictment of child sex predators, and helped overturn the sentence of a convicted murderer who shot a young boy in the face.”

To co-opt Joe Biden’s favorite line about Republicans, these aren’t your granddad’s Democrats, but they carry with them all the stench that the party has collected over the years concerning crime and punishment. From soft and weak in the ‘70s to clumsy and overreaching in the '90s, the Democrats have been all over the map. The current record surge of violence around the nation is courtesy of the Democrat Party.

McDaniel sums things up this way:

While the corporate media tries to downplay the crime crisis currently devastating Democrat-run cities, families across the country know they are less safe. The upcoming midterm elections will not just be a referendum on Democratic representatives who, time after time, put the interests of violent criminals ahead of public safety. Voters will also send a resounding message when they elect Republicans: Democrats are not up to the task of restoring order — and they never were. Republicans are.

Democrats up and down the ballot will have a lot to answer for between now and November 8. But the toughest question of all goes something like this: Why is it that your party always waits until just before an election to get tough on crime?

ONE MORE THING: Just how deeply embedded is the Democrats’ soft-on-crime reputation? Consider this: A March Gallup poll found that 80% of Americans worry personally about crime, and a recent NBC News poll found that Republicans have a 23-point advantage on the question of which party voters trust more to tackle crime.