California voters turn tough on crime
What happened
Voters in two of the country’s most liberal cities rallied behind law-and-order messaging this week, sending a stark warning to Democrats about police reform’s diminishing appeal. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled by a 60-40 margin, just three years after his election energized the “progressive prosecutor” movement as Boudin promised to send fewer people to prison. His reforms drew mounting backlash as homelessness, burglaries, car thefts, drug use, and overdoses soared. Liberals signaled a similar change of heart in Los Angeles, where Rick Caruso, a billionaire mall developer who ran as a crime fighter, forced a runoff in a mayoral race against Rep. Karen Bass, once on the short list to be President Biden’s vice president. Outspending Bass 10 to 1, Caruso, who recently switched parties from Republican to Democratic, vowed to add 1,500 police officers.
Several House GOP incumbents appeared to have resisted Trump-aligned primary challengers from the Right when The Week went to press. Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota overcame a challenge sparked when he voted to certify the 2020 presidential election results. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey bested a group of opponents despite criticism from Trump. And Rep. David Valadao of California, one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, was leading against a GOP challenger. In a House race in Montana, the former president endorsed his former interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, who resigned in 2018 amid an ethics investigation. Early returns showed Zinke with a slim lead.
What the columnists said
It’s not every day conservatives get good news from “Nancy Pelosi’s backyard,” said Jim Geraghty in National Review. But by a 20-point margin, voters deemed Boudin’s experiment of defanging police in favor of so-called restorative justice a disaster. Boudin took office and unveiled a “radical agenda of de-emphasizing the prosecution of drug cases and property offenses.” As a result,
San Francisco’s jail population is down, while the streets are a dangerous, drug-infested nightmare. Even the Bay Area’s far left concluded Boudin’s approach is “failing them.”
Even “deep-blue” San Francisco has competing interests, said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. Boudin was blamed for by-products of the homelessness crisis, which is largely the result of increased housing costs—not exactly a DA’s purview. Since his election, San Francisco’s crime rate hasn’t gone up “exceptionally compared with other big cities.” Yet “wealthier residents” want poor people and the homeless policed aggressively, and proponents of the recall outspent Boudin’s supporters 3 to 1.
Boudin himself might be a “scapegoat,” but the votes in San Francisco and Los Angeles “were clear rejections of a certain strain of liberalism that buoyed reform-oriented prosecutors across the country and sought to defund the police,” said Ross Barkan in New York magazine. Caruso built a coalition by championing more cops and “broken-windows policing” while promising to build 30,000 shelter beds to replace L.A.’s tent cities. Bass could still win the November runoff, but the message for Democrats is clear: “2022 could be a very precarious year.”