As the dust settles on an historic election night, we’ll have no shortage of explanations for how President-elect Donald J. Trump prevailed over Vice President Kamala D. Harris. But few observers have yet focused on how several local election outcomes will make 2024 the “anti-crime election”—one for which many Americans have longed for about a decade.
Start with California: one of the most closely followed ballot initiatives in the Golden State was Proposition 36, which looked to counter a 2014 initiative, Prop. 47, that had raised the threshold for felony theft to $950 and converted many felony drug offenses to misdemeanors. A decade later, the architects of Prop. 36 sought to put a modest but meaningful rollback of Prop. 47 on the ballot, allowing prosecutors to bring felony theft charges when the perpetrator is a repeat offender, increasing sentences for mass thefts, and requiring that certain sentences be served in state prisons rather than in county jails. Prop. 36 passed by a massive margin.
In Los Angeles, “progressive” prosecutor George Gascón, who succeeded Kamala Harris as San Francisco district attorney before becoming the lead prosecutor in L.A., lost his reelection bid to Nathan Hochman, who ran on a law-and-order platform. Anti-crime voter sentiment also made its way north to the Bay Area, where voters had already recalled former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022. As of this writing, Boudin’s replacement, Brooke Jenkins, seems poised to win election to a full term. In Alameda County (home to Oakland), District Attorney Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao appear likely to lose their respective recall elections. Like Boudin and Gascón, Price and Thao positioned themselves as criminal-justice reformers, keen to shrink the footprint of the justice system.
The progressive prosecutor movement took some hits outside of California, too. In Tampa, Florida Democrat Andrew Warren, suspended by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 for his non-prosecution policies, lost his reelection bid against Republican State’s Attorney Susan Lopez. In Athens, Georgia—where the murder of Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant earlier this year stoked outrage—Kalki Yalamanchili won a landslide victory over incumbent District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, who was elected on a reformist platform. In Phoenix, Tamika Wooten, who ran on pushing alternatives to incarceration and restorative justice, lost her bid to oust incumbent Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican. Law-and-order prosecutors also won in Macomb County, Michigan, and Kenosha County, Wisconsin.
It wasn’t a clean sweep, to be sure. Progressive prosecutors held on and won some important races—particularly in Texas, where voters in Austin, El Paso, and Houston handed victories to candidates who positioned themselves as reformers. They also prevailed in Albany, New York, Orlando, Florida, and in both Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. But there is no doubt that decarcerationists have lost a great deal of momentum.
In 2014, the national crime picture began to darken, with sharp homicide increases in 2015 and 2016, followed by a horrible 2020, which saw the largest one-year homicide surge in at least the past century. Murders and shootings were only part of the picture. The country also saw spikes in other crime categories, as well as numerous troubling breakdowns in public order, especially the destructive and deadly riots that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. Countless videos showed brazen, organized retail thievery at pharmacies, bargain stores, and luxury retailers in many urban areas. In cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, residents faced all sorts of public nuisances, from traffic-blocking protesters to marijuana smoke clouds on every corner to open-air drug markets to dangerous street takeovers.
The decaying state of public safety didn’t immediately deliver the backlash against soft-on-crime policies many expected. During those years, mass outrage over various policing incidents that went viral on social media seemed to override whatever reservations Americans had about the hundreds of legislative and administrative criminal-justice reform initiatives of the 2010s and early 2020s. It's now clear, though, that many voters have reached their limits with respect to how much crime and disorder they were prepared to tolerate.
The progressive argument about crime and justice has always been based on lies and half-truths. Yes, America is an international outlier on incarceration, but the vast majority of prisoners in the U.S. are violent, chronic offenders who have squandered more than one “second chance.” Yes, police are imperfect and sometimes abuse their authority, but the sorts of fatal encounters that drove public outrage are statistically rare. Meantime, the public began to associate large-scale pullbacks in policing and concurrent declines in incarceration rates with deteriorations in public safety. And while certain minority groups have indeed been overrepresented in enforcement statistics, those same groups wound up bearing the brunt of the crime spikes that resulted from the “progressive” reforms.
One of the key takeaways of the 2024 election cycle may be that voters have learned a key lesson from recent history. When it came to progressive policies, they went along to get along—until the results hit them, hard and fast. If voters have wised up, however, it remains to be seen how much (if at all) this election cycle will affect the Left’s approach to these issues. The choices for Democrats are clear: moderate their positions to meet most Americans where they are, or stick to the playbook that brought them these election losses. Those hoping that they opt for the first course can enjoy, at least for now, some cautious optimism.
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