Do you trust Keith Ellison to keep you and your family safe? According to Jim Schultz, the Republican nominee for attorney general in Minnesota, this is the single defining question of the race to lead the state’s attorney general’s office for the next four years.

One ad claims that Ellison is “extreme” and has “let violence spread like cancer.” Schultz has focused so intensively on crime, his messaging has verged on the surreal. “It’s a sad day in Minnesota when I hear from countless parents who are too concerned for their children’s safety to let them go trick-or-treating in their own neighborhoods,” Schultz tweeted on the morning of Halloween. “We are losing the state we know and love.”

Schultz is not running an original campaign playbook. Republicans have attacked Democrats over crime in congressional races throughout the country, and local elections in overwhelmingly Democratic cities like Los Angeles and Portland have been similarly dominated by concerns about crime, homelessness, and public safety. The potency of those attacks was made clear in San Francisco earlier this year, where voters recalled progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin despite zero evidence to suggest that Boudin’s reformist policies were responsible for any sort of surge in the city’s crime rate.