Do black lives matter, or don’t they? The answer apparently depends on whom you ask: a Democrat or a Republican.

“In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections,” writes author and researcher Heather Mac Donald, “conservatives had relentlessly raised the alarm about the post-George Floyd crime surge: homicides had risen 29 percent in 2020 (the largest increase on record), and they have continued rising since then. Democrats and their media allies responded either that crime was a racist fiction or that, because post-Floyd crime levels nationally were still lower than they were in the early 1990s, there was nothing to see here, folks, move on!”

Blacks, though, seemed less inclined to obey this Democrat directive than in years past. In an election cycle whose results were disappointing for Republicans, the GOP nonetheless saw some a demographic bright spot among blacks: As columnist Star Parker notes, “Republican House candidates got 14% of the Black vote, almost twice the 8% of the Black vote that Republicans captured in 2020 and 2018.”

What accounts for this significant shift? A youth movement, as it turns out. Pew Research reports that 28% of black Republicans are ages 18-29, compared to 17% of black Democrats and 10% of white Republicans. And this shift may be driven by a realization among young blacks that their inner-city communities are hit hardest when law and order breaks down as it did during the long, hot, violent summer of 2020. As Mac Donald writes:

Black Americans have borne the brunt of the increased violence since the George Floyd race riots. Their share of homicide victims went from 53 percent in 2019 (blacks are 13 percent of the national population) to 56 percent in 2020. At least an additional 2,164 black lives were lost in 2020 over the 2019 count, compared with an increase of 950 white and Hispanic homicide victims combined in 2020. Such disparities only worsened in 2021 and 2022. In 2020, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at 20 times the rate of whites in the same age range. In 2021, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at nearly 25 times the rate of whites of the same age.

Could it be that blacks — and especially young blacks — are beginning to realize that decades of fealty to the Democrat Party have brought little more to their communities than death and destruction? As our Mark Alexander has made clear, the Democrat Party has inarguably racist roots, and it continues to be a powerful vehicle for black oppression. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our decrepit inner cities, which Democrats have controlled for decades and whose overwhelmingly black populations are nonetheless beholden to.

The Democrats are inclined to dismiss the Republicans’ focus on law-and-order as little more than a racist dog whistle, but facts are stubborn things. Nowhere was the issue of crime more powerfully driven home than in New York, where Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin made it the centerpiece of his campaign. Did it work? We might ask Zeldin’s opponent, Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul, who wound up getting just 53% of the vote in a state where her party outnumbers Republicans by two to one.

Of course, much of the black community’s allegiance to the Democrat Party is borne out of dependence, and a reluctance to bite the hand that feeds it. What Thomas Sowell wrote back in 2016 is no less true today: “A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression. In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.”

Whether by downplaying the seriousness of violent crime, or by failing to address the collapse of the black family, or by continually opposing such reforms as school choice, Democrats are doing black Americans no favors. To them, it seems that black lives matter only for their votes.