That’s not really Trump’s concern, of course, any more than his objection to Sen. John McCain in 2015 was about McCain’s failure to deliver for veterans, as Trump claimed. Trump was mad at McCain for disparaging a Trump rally in Arizona; Trump is mad at Cummings for authorizing subpoenas for material related to Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and others. So he turned on Fox News, as he does, saw footage of dilapidated buildings in Baltimore and whipped up a Cummings-is-failing message.

Trump’s fury at Cummings overlapped with a shift in his administration. On Sunday, Trump announced that he would nominate Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.) to replace outgoing National Intelligence Director Daniel Coats. Ratcliffe will “lead and inspire greatness for the Country he loves,” Trump said on Twitter, as apparently compared to Cummings, who is the sort of person who “stole and wasted” federal investment in Baltimore (as Trump said to reporters outside the White House on Tuesday).

AD

AD

If Cummings is responsible for poverty and crime in his district, as Trump has claimed, we have some bad news for the president about his DNI pick: On a number of metrics, Ratcliffe’s district is doing even worse.

Data from the Census Bureau shows that unemployment is higher in Cummings’s district than Ratcliffe’s — except among whites. White unemployment in Ratcliffe’s district is above the median for congressional districts. In Cummings’s, it’s one of the lowest in the country.

(On these graphs, the left-to-right axis shows the results of the 2016 presidential election in the congressional district.)

But Cummings’s district also has higher median household incomes than does Ratcliffe’s. Black households in Cummings’s district have higher incomes than black households in Ratcliffe’s.

As we noted on Monday, Cummings’s district has one of the highest white-to-black income ratios of any congressional district: White households make far more than black households.

While the overall poverty rate in Cummings’s district is slightly higher than in Ratcliffe’s, poverty levels for blacks and Hispanics are higher in Ratcliffe’s district. The black poverty level in Ratcliffe’s district, in fact, is in the 75th percentile of all congressional districts. In Cummings’s, it’s in the 44th percentile.

There are margins of error included in the Census Bureau data, but the gap between the two districts on black poverty levels falls outside that gray zone. We’ll note, too, that this data is for the most recently available year, 2017, Trump’s first in office and two years after Ratcliffe was elected to the House. It’s possible that there have been significant shifts since then, but the broad theme of Trump’s presidency has been a steady continuation of economic trends that began shortly after the recession.

AD

AD

The balance of those graphs is interesting. Cummings’s district was about as heavily Democratic in 2016 as Ratcliffe’s was Republican. The economic data is about equivalent, even when it differs. Relative to the other 433 congressional districts, incomes, poverty levels and unemployment are generally close in both districts.

One difference between the two is the level of gun violence. Data from the Gun Violence Archive shows that Ratcliffe’s district is in the lowest third of gun incidents since 2014, while Cummings’s is near the top. Of course, Ratcliffe’s district is much more rural, with 74 people per square mile, versus nearly 1,500 in Cummings’s district. (Population density correlates to crime rates.)

Population is also in part why it’s easier to find dilapidated buildings in Baltimore than in Ratcliffe’s district. In 1970, Baltimore’s population was 50 percent higher than it is now. As with other cities that had large exoduses of residents, there was a big inventory of housing left behind. In some places, like Detroit, those buildings have been torn down, leaving empty lots. Youngstown, Ohio, is closing abandoned streets and shrinking its city boundaries. Baltimore has been struggling to figure out what to do with its 17,000 vacant buildings for years. Sometimes, those buildings are filled with garbage and criminal activity.

Put another way, there are unique challenges that don’t exist in the northeast corner of Texas. But Trump hasn’t gone into detail on those problems, choosing instead to focus broadly on denunciations of Cummings for the poverty of his residents.