Appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Monday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said that most violent criminals are Democrats.  

“Now listen, here’s the simple and undeniable fact. The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. The media doesn’t report that,” the Republican presidential candidate said.  

Hewitt had asked Cruz about the media’s response to the shooting last week at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic, suggesting CBS News and Colorado Democratic Gov. John W. Hickenlooper had been too quick to equate the shooter with Republican attacks on Planned Parenthood and a series of videos that made it look like the organization was selling fetal tissue.  

Cruz agreed that the media’s reaction portrayed a partisan bias.  

“You know, every time you have some sort of violent crime or mass killing, you can almost see the media salivating, hoping, hoping desperately that the murderer happens to be a Republican so they can use it to try to paint their political enemies,” Cruz said, before making his claim about Democrats representing the majority of violent criminals.  

When pressed for evidence backing up his assertion, the Cruz campaign pointed to research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Marc Meredith and Stanford University’s Michael Morse that found that ex-felons register to vote as Democrats.  

According to CNN , the same researchers cited previous research in their 2014 study suggesting that felons are more likely to be Democrats because they often share a similar demographic profile — based on ethnicity, income, age, education and employment status.  

In his radio appearance, Cruz went on to argue that Democrats “are soft on crime” because they “fight to give the right to vote to convicted felons.”  

“Why? Because the Democrats know convicted felons tend to vote Democrat. And so the media never reports on any of that, doesn’t want to admit any of that, but you can see in every one of these, every time there’s a terrible crime, they’re so excited, come on, please, one of these be a Republican so we can try to pain the other side.”  

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