Dems confront criticism on crime after key San Francisco defeat
Democrats on Wednesday braced for renewed Republican attacks on their management of crime across the U.S. after residents in San Francisco voted overwhelmingly to recall the city’s progressive district attorney, suggesting that even the party’s most loyal supporters are frustrated with the way in which violence and social problems are being addressed.
Chesa Boudin was swept into the district attorney’s office pledging to seek alternatives to incarceration, end the racist war on drugs and hold police officers to account. But the city’s longstanding problems with vandalism, open drug use and robberies proved too much for voters, who blamed him for making the situation worse.
While a single city race is hardly a barometer of the national mood, the rejection of Boudin by residents in the nation’s progressive epicenter carried symbolic significance for members of both parties. Republicans were emboldened by the vote, planning to highlight crime in several critical Senate races. At the White House, meanwhile, President Joe Biden acknowledged that the vote sent a “clear message” about public safety.
“Both parties have to step up and do something about crime as well as gun violence,” Biden said ahead of a trip to California, noting he sent “billions of dollars and encouraged them to use it to hire police officers and reforming police departments.”
“It’s time to move,” Biden continued. “It’s time that states and the localities spend the money they have to deal with crime as well as retrain police officers.”
The Democratic president’s tough-on-crime comments come as his party continues to face pointed attacks from Republicans about its commitment to public safety two years after progressive activists responded to the police murder of George Floyd by championing calls to “defund the police.”
Biden has rejected such calls, as have the overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress, yet polling suggests that voters have become increasingly likely to trust Republicans more than Democrats on public safety.
Republicans, pointing to the San Francisco election, signaled that they would continue to hammer vulnerable Democratic candidates in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin for their record on crime or associations with the Black Lives Matter movement. While the economy is widely considered the central issue of this midterm season, Republicans believe a focus on crime will help them this fall, especially among suburban voters.
“The very first thing that I talk about everywhere we go is ending the war on our police, ending the war on cops,” said Andrew Giuliani, a Republican candidate for New York governor.
Public safety remains a potent political issue, even as the numbers suggest a more complicated reality.
Crime statistics for the first quarter of 2022, released by the FBI on Monday, suggest that a rise in violent crime is not the fault of either party’s criminal justice policies. Democratic-led cities such as Detroit, Fort Wayne and South Bend, Indiana, as well as Wichita, Kansas and Portland, Ore., listed fewer murders for the first quarter of 2022 than 2021. The same could be said for several cities with Republican mayors at the helm.
ELSEWHERE
Republican U.S. Rep. Steven Palazzo of Mississippi was forced into a runoff Tuesday after a congressional ethics watchdog raised questions about his campaign spending and he faced his largest-ever field of primary challengers.
In Montana, ballot printing errors have delayed election results for Montana’s new congressional seat, forcing a small northwestern county to count votes by hand in the unexpectedly close Republican primary race between former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and former state Sen. Al “Doc” Olszewski.ormer Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is competing against several other Republicans for a chance to capture a new U.S. House district in western Montana.
In Iowa, Republican state Sen. Zach Nunn won the GOP spot to take on the state’s lone Democratic House member, Rep. Cindy Axne, in a newly drawn district with a stronger GOP tilt.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity heart surgeon endorsed by former President Donald Trump, won Pennsylvania’s Republican U.S. Senate primary on Wednesday, narrowly defeating former hedge fund CEO David McCormick after a days-long statewide recount buffeted by litigation that reached the nation’s highest court. The recount determined that Oz had eked out victory over McCormick by 951 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast in the May 17 primary election.
In Los Angeles, billionaire Republican-turnedDemocrat Rick Caruso placed first in preliminary returns for mayor and will face Democratic Rep. Karen Bass, a stalwart in the party’s progressive wing, in a November runoff.