“He has been hyperventilating,” said New York Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul, “trying to scare people for months, and New Yorkers are onto it. All the legitimate media organizations have called him out for what he is doing: fear-mongering.”

Hochul, the former lieutenant governor who now holds the state’s top job only because former Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace last year over a sexual harassment scandal, was referring to the man who stands between her and legitimate election — Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin — and to his dogged focus on the issue that concerns many New Yorkers above all others, including inflation: violent crime.

Indeed, Hochul’s steadfast failure to acknowledge crime as the central issue that it is, coupled with Zeldin’s intelligent candidacy, have turned a race she once led by 24 points into an Election Day toss-up.

“Democratic states are safer than the Republican states,” Hochul claimed recently. It’s a statement that, even if true, misses the point entirely. And the point is this: The crime-ridden hellholes across the 50 states are the big cities and their surrounding counties, and these are almost entirely run by Democrats. As a new report from The Heritage Foundation makes clear:

Cities with rogue prosecutors have imposed policies that all — each and every one of them — inure to the benefit of criminals. Such policies have contributed to the lawlessness across so-called blue cities and the steep rise in crime rates across America. To suggest now that Republican elected officials who have followed different policies have contributed to crime increases is at best laughable.

None of this should surprise anyone. As our Mark Alexander pointed out back in June: “There was an unprecedented spike in murders nationwide in 2020, which spilled over into 2021 and 2022 … and there will be new records set in Demo-controlled urban centers again this year.”

Perhaps Hochul and other desperate Democrats have been emboldened by this smokescreen of a report from Third Way, which fancies itself a center-left think tank. The report, titled “The Red State Murder Problem,” states that “murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states.”

Hmm … why might that be? Heritage quickly debunks it:

The fundamental flaw with the study and the reason it does not deserve any serious consideration is that the “murder rate” in each state is largely a function of the large number of murders in a state’s biggest city or cities. A super majority of those cities, even in otherwise red states, are deep blue and run by left-wing ideologues.

So what the study’s authors try to spin as a red-state murder problem is really a blue-city murder problem.

As for those deep-blue cities run by leftists, here are the inconvenient truths: New Orleans currently owns the dubious distinction of Murder City USA, with 36.8 homicides per 100,000 residents. The Big Not-So-Easy is followed directly by Baltimore, Birmingham, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Rochester, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Kansas City, Washington DC, Richmond, Oakland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and on and on.

Any of those cities sound like Republican strongholds to you? Us neither. Many of them haven’t had a Republican mayor in decades.

Perhaps, when the smoke clears from Election 2022, and the Democrats have spent all the ammo in their circular firing squads, perhaps they’ll revisit their smug and disastrous decision to spend more than 10 times as much on abortion advertising as they did on the number one issue on voters’ minds, inflation, and more than twice as much as they did on that other major issue, violent crime.

It seems simple enough to us: A government that fails to ensure the safety of its citizens soon loses the confidence of those citizens. And Democrat leaders have clearly and unequivocally failed their citizens.

When we wake up on Wednesday, it’ll be interesting to see whether the voters in blue cities and blue states have opted for law and order, or are still somehow beholden to the soft-on-crime Democrats who got them into this mess.