“Tim Walz let Minnesota burn. Kamala Harris bailed out the ones who lit the matches,” posted former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald J. Trump on his Truth Social platform last week. Although Trump’s campaign reeled from the Democrats’ sudden change from incumbent President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris last month, a coherent message may now be in sight.

Trump acolytes certainly appear to see it that way, with a rising number of talking heads and likeminded journalists bringing up Walz’s questionable record as Minnesota’s governor during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, among other foibles.

In the “twin cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, crime rates spiked 75 percent that year; murder rates are still 50 percent higher than they were in 2019. According to Minneapolis’s progressive mayor Jacob Frey, Walz refused to deploy 600 of the state’s national guardsmen for 18 critical hours as the riots devastated his city’s downtown, destroying numerous businesses and a police station. Sitting in the safety of the governor’s residence in St. Paul, meanwhile, Minnesota’s first lady Gwen Walz left the windows open so that she might, as she told a local television station, “smell the burning tires,” which she hailed as a “very real thing.” Walz eventually deployed 100 guardsmen, who were reportedly too few in number to control the situation.

Then, just weeks away from being chosen as Biden’s vice presidential nominee, Kamala Harris urged her Twitter (now X) followers “to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota” by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF). That organization quickly collected $35 million, which it then used to bail out violent criminals, including some who had no connection to the riots but were merely minority criminal suspects and therefore “victims” of a “structurally racist” criminal justice system.

Those released with the help of MFF funds have included such model citizens as Christopher Boswell, who had twice been convicted of rape and charged with 10 other felonies, including attempted rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault. MFF handed over $350,000 to get him out of prison. Within months, Boswell was wanted on new felony counts relating to violations of his release. In December 2022, he was rearrested after kidnapping and torturing his girlfriend, crimes for which he was convicted and jailed the following year.

Donavan Boone got $3,000 from MFF to cover his bail for breaking into his girlfriend’s home and choking her. In 2022, he was rearrested on unrelated burglary charges, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Shawn Michael Tillman, who was bailed out by MFF after an arrest for indecent exposure, went on to murder a passenger on St. Paul’s public transit system in 2022. This March, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole for that crime.

In late July, as Harris was consolidating Democratic support but before Walz emerged as a contender for the bottom half of her ticket, some criticism of these cases emerged. Now that Walz is Harris’s vice-presidential candidate, however, that issue could emerge as the strongest arrow against them.

Notwithstanding progressive claptrap about “mostly peaceful” protests and false claims about falling crime rates, a Pew Research study conducted in April revealed that 61 percent of voters—including 40 percent of then-Biden supporters—believed the criminal justice system is “not tough enough on criminals,” while just 13 percent believed it is “too tough.” Last November, Gallup released a survey finding that 63 percent of voters identify crime as a “extremely or very serious issue,” ranking it nearly on par with border control, illegal immigration, and the economy.

Could this be a winning issue for a revitalized Trump campaign now that Walz is on Harris’s ticket? History offers a powerful lesson. In 1988, with Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis soaring far above GOP candidate and then-incumbent Vice President George H. W. Bush in the polls, the struggling Bush campaign seized on an ill-advised Massachusetts prison furlough program that allowed limited release for incarcerated criminals, including murderers serving life sentences without parole. Perhaps ironically, given later presidential history, the furlough program’s first campaign critic was Democratic primary candidate Al Gore, who referenced it to criticize Dukakis in a debate.

The Bush campaign’s message became clear and simple when it seized on the case of William Horton, a murderer serving a life sentence who was released under the furlough program in 1986 and failed to return to prison. After 10 months at large, Horton was rearrested in Maryland for raping a woman and stabbing her fiancé, and once again sentenced to life without parole.

Although the Bush campaign first started talking about Horton in June 1988, the highly effective “Willie Horton” ad, produced by a pro-Bush political action committee, was only released on Sept. 21, just weeks before the election. Despite the ad’s colloquial name, it did not identify Horton personally but rather showed a revolving door of convicts exiting a prison. The image was jarring and terrified the electorate. Dukakis’s lead evaporated, and Bush was elected decisively. The ad is credited not only with securing Bush’s victory, but stands out as one of the most effective television ads in political history.

The reaction at the time, however, might not surprise today’s Republicans, especially GOP leaders and more cautious pundits who have chosen to tread lightly around the issue of race, including the strictly factual point that Harris was added to Biden’s ticket due to her race and gender.

In 1988, Republicans showed no such fear despite the predictable blowback. The Dukakis campaign, vocal Democrats, outraged civil rights leaders, and their media allies all charged that the ad was “racist” and tried hard to shift the narrative from Democratic softness on crime to purported Republican prejudice. It failed. Unable to alter the national discussion in its favor, Dukakis’s campaign then filed an unsuccessful complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing the Bush campaign of colluding with the political action committee that produced the ad, in a possible campaign finance violation.

The only apology to Dukakis, however, came from Willie Horton, who remains incarcerated to this day. In a 2014 interview, he expressed regret for “the role I played in him losing the election.” Perhaps in the fullness of time Messrs. Boswell, Boone, and Tillman may reach out from their jail cells to an older and half-forgotten Kamala Harris with the same message, but that will only happen if Trump’s campaign can send a clear and simple message on something of great importance to American voters.