MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough flunked basic math on Tuesday’s Morning Joe as he claimed you are 400 times more likely to be murdered in the red state of Louisiana than the blue state of California. Even charitable interpretations of this blunder fail to help Scarborough make the point he thinks he was making.
Scarborough began by seeming to think that red states cannot have crime-ridden blue cities, “There are a lot of cities, and we talked about this yesterday, that need help. A lot of red state cities. If you look at most crime charts, seven, eight of the top ten deadliest cities in America, big cities are usually in red states. If you look at, you know, Gavin Newsom and the Speaker, sort of, had a back and forth this weekend, Speaker Johnson's home state of Louisiana, 400 times more likely. You're 400 times more likely to be killed in Louisiana than you are in California. Certainly nothing you ever hear in the right-wing, sort of, blogosphere.”
On Monday, Scarborough made a similar point on X, but instead of saying 400 times, he quote-tweeted a post from Newsom’s office claiming Louisiana’s murder rate is “nearly 400%” higher. According to the CDC, Louisiana does have a 378 percent higher murder rate. However, if you look at overall crime, it is only 11 percent higher and makes it more of an outlier in the red state-blue state comparison. Violent crime is only 8 percent higher.
[See NewsBusters for more]