A new report and analysis refutes Democratic talking points that red counties and cities are more dangerous and feature more murders than those run by Democrats.

In its newly released report, the Heritage Foundation that homicide rates have been higher in Democrat-run “blue counties” than they have been in “red counties” since 2002, a finding that contradicts a popular talking point made by prominent leftist Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and billionaire George Soros.

Newsom has frequently, of late, stated in public that “8 of the top 10 murder states are red.” Meanwhile, Soros wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that “violent crime in recent years has generally been increasing more quickly in jurisdictions without reform-minded prosecutors” and “murder rates have been rising fastest in some Republican states led by tough-on-crime politicians.”

But, as Fox News reported exclusively:

The problem, according to Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Dayaratna, who authored the report along with former research assistant Alexander Gage, is that studies cited by Democrats to make that argument – including a recent study from Third Way titled “The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem” – use a “flawed” methodology because crime is a local issue and, therefore, crime analysis must be undertaken at the local level.

“It is true that red states have higher homicide rates than blue states, but the problem with this is that crime is a hyper-localized phenomenon,” Dayaratna told Fox News Digital.

“It doesn’t make sense to talk about at the state level,” he continued. “It makes sense to talk about at the local level because that’s where the prosecutions occur. The local level crime is handled at the local level by local police, so when you look at this question on a local basis, namely the county level, you’ll see that the trend is reversed.”

“If you look at the analysis on a state-by-state level, it’s 34% higher in red states and blue states, according to the most recent data we analyzed, but then when you look at it as a county-by-county level, it is 60% higher in blue counties than red counties,” he added.

The study notes that “drawing conclusions from state-level homicide data in such a manner is flawed, as each state consists of a combination of federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies, as well as prosecutors with different approaches to law enforcement often based on highly divergent political beliefs.”

“Violations of state law are prosecuted largely at the county or city level and, thus, amalgamating data across such units neglects important variation in these different approaches,” the study goes on to say.

“Looking at homicide rates by county, states show skewed distributions with many counties having little or no homicides, and a handful of counties with excessively high homicide rates. Thus, state homicide rates can be heavily influenced by a few counties,” it adds. “When those counties have different politics from the rest of the state, it can flip the conclusion about the association between political identifications and homicides.”

“Third Way held ‘red’ states and ‘blue’ states constant in terms of how they voted in the 2020 presidential election. This approach is fundamentally flawed because electoral sentiment changed across the time period used for the study,” the report clarifies.

“For example, although President Biden won Arizona in 2020, the previous Democrat who won the state was Bill Clinton in 1996. Similarly, Donald Trump won Florida in both 2016 and 2020, despite the fact that Barack Obama had won the state in 2008 and 2012,” it added.