Are Democrats distorting the statistics?

OPINION:

We all know that math scores have been trending downward for many years, but the people who work in the government should at least be able to count.

We’re finding more and more evidence that the statistics the government is releasing to the public are increasingly suspect and unreliable. It doesn’t seem like the errors are random, but perhaps manipulated for political advantage. Judge for yourself.

Let’s start with statistics on crime. Former President Donald Trump said in the debate that crime is out of control, and Vice President Kamala Harris countered by citing government statistics from the FBI indicating that crime rates are falling.

But Jeffrey Anderson, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, finds a surge in urban violent crime since 2019. He writes in The Wall Street Journal that from 2019 to 2023, the violent crime rate was up 19%. The urban violent crime rate was up 54%, and the urban property crime rate rose 26%.

How can Democrats keep saying crime is down? A big reason is that the FBI figures measure only crimes reported to the police. More than half of violent crimes are not reported, thanks to what Mr. Anderson calls a new era of “lax crime enforcement policies” in urban areas. Police in big cities also have an incentive to undercount crimes to make their performance look better.

Next, we have the job data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics admitted last month that it had overstated job growth by more than 800,000 positions. In the last year, the government has also overstated job growth by almost 500,000 from the original monthly headline numbers. In all, this is more than a 1 million overcount. In the original job announcements. In 10 of the last 13 months, the errors were in the direction of announcing too many jobs.

So President Biden gets the gangbuster headlines, and the whoopsie daisy comes later when no one is paying attention.

Those aren’t just random errors. Was the Labor Department under Mr. Biden finagling the data? Maybe.

Then, there was the decennial census population count. The Census Bureau admits that the numbers from the 2020 census were wildly wrong.

In an analysis issued in 2021 called the “Post-Enumeration Survey Estimation Report,” the Census Bureau reported which states recorded overcounts of their population and which saw undercounts. Florida, Texas, Tennessee and other red states were undercounted by some 1.5 million residents. The overcount was in mostly blue states including New York and Minnesota. Again, was this just an accident?

The miscount may have cost Republicans three electoral seats. This means the razor-tight presidential election and control of the House of Representatives may be decided because of an error in counting heads.

These government agencies are supposed to be politically independent, and historically, they have been filled with professionals who are devoid of bias. But when we see the errors all bending the data to benefit one party, one has to wonder if this is deliberate.

I hope I’m wrong and that these are innocent errors. But we live in an era where everything in Washington is hyper-politicized. Elections have become a blood sport. It used to be said that all is fair in love and war. And now add politics to that.

• Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation and co-author of the new book “The Trump Economic Miracle — and How to Do It Again.”