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Red states unleash their bloodlust [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2025-08-31

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics.

Republican states enjoy killing their prisoners, and with Donald Trump in the White House, they’ve been even more eager to end human life, a Daily Kos analysis finds.

On Thursday, Florida killed Curtis Windom, a 59-year-old Black man who had been on death row for one-third of a century after being convicted of triple murder in 1992. Windom’s execution marks Florida’s 11th of the year—a new high for the state since the Supreme Court allowed states to reinstate the death penalty in 1976.

But the ironically named Sunshine State isn’t a lone wolf in state-sanctioned killings. This year, the U.S. is on track to gas, shoot, or lethally inject more prisoners than it has in over a decade, according to a Daily Kos review of execution data from the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks capital punishment in the United States.

Windom’s execution was the nation’s 30th of the year. That is already the most in one year since 2018, but there are 10 more killings on the books as of Friday. If those are carried out, the country will have killed 40 prisoners this year, the most since 2012. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the annual average was less than half that (19), though the COVID-19 pandemic slowed executions at the start of his term.

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This increase in executions comes as lethal-injection drugs are harder to find. Manufacturers don’t want the black mark of making drugs designed to kill, and sourcing materials is becoming more difficult. That has led some states, like South Carolina, to use firing squads instead. And that has led to predictably barbaric results, like in April when all the firing squad’s bullets missed the man’s heart and he reportedly suffered excruciating pain for up to a minute of consciousness that followed.

Executions are sometimes scheduled far in advance, so it is difficult to determine how much of an influence Trump’s presence in the White House has had on red states’ bloodlust. For instance, Ohio has nine executions scheduled for 2028, though that state is an outlier. More common is Windom’s case, where his death warrant was signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on July 29, a mere 30 days before the state ended his life.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, shown in May.

But if any president were going to stoke the nation’s bloodlust, it would be Trump, who holds the modern record for executing federal prisoners. During his first term, he oversaw the killings of 13 people. Prior to that, only three people had been federally executed since Congress reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988. (All three were killed under former President George W. Bush, also a Republican.) Worse, the first Trump administration carried out six of these killings after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Despite the moral abomination of killing a person in captivity, most Americans support an eye for an eye. A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that 60% of Americans favor the death penalty for a person convicted of murder, while 40% oppose it. That said, just 18% favor the death penalty for murder in every case, according to a 2024 YouGov poll.

And yet executions are now almost exclusively a red-state malefaction. In the past 10 years, nearly all of the 202 state-conducted killings have occurred in states regularly won by Republicans, according to Daily Kos’ review.

But what is more shocking is how some states kill far more people than you’d expect based on their populations. For instance, Oklahoma has killed 129 prisoners since 1976, despite having a population of just over 4 million. That makes for 31.5 executions per million residents, a blood-thirstiness that exceeds even the rate in kill-happy Texas (19.0), which leads in overall executions (595).

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The death penalty is the only legal punishment that cannot be overturned. But the possibility of exculpatory evidence does little to stop a red state from ending a life.

Last September, Missouri lethally injected Marcellus Williams, a 55-year-old Black man, despite the prosecuting office saying there is evidence of his innocence. His DNA was not on the knife used to murder Felicia Gayle in 1998, the crime of which he was convicted by a nearly entirely white jury. “Ms. Gayle’s murderer left behind considerable physical evidence,” the prosecuting attorney wrote in a January 2024 motion to vacate Williams’ conviction. “None of that physical evidence can be tied to Mr. Williams.”

Gayle’s family did not want Williams to die, either. So who did? Why was a potentially innocent man killed?

Then-Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, shrugged off all of these facts, refused to grant clemency, and pushed forward with the killing. The conservative-led state Supreme Court joined in, rejecting a request to stall Williams’ execution. The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court also rejected it. The three liberal justices dissented, for naught.

“Together, we must protect, cherish, and defend the dignity and sanctity of every human life,” Trump said in January.

Apparently, that comes with an asterisk.

Any updates?

Vibe check

This past Wednesday, a shooter killed two children, ages 8 and 10, and injured 17 others in an attack on a Catholic school in Minneapolis. And Republicans had their typical reaction, trying to pray away the nation’s gun-death crisis, as if no other nation on Earth has solved the issue.

However, Wednesday’s mass shooting was only one of at least 285 that have occurred this year, as of Friday afternoon, according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people were shot or killed, not including the suspected shooter.

Those shootings have claimed 244 lives and injured 1,296 people. Here’s what that looks like on a map:

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