Voters want to tap the brakes on runaway crime in California. Will their leaders respond?
Image generated using Dall-E
Across the Golden State, voters flagged their discomfort with pols and policies that accelerated social unrest. Prop 36 won because it reforms Prop 47, the starting gun for theft and disorder that collided with Californians’ sense of public safety. Soft-on-crime DAs have now been recalled in SF, Alameda, and LA—and some crime-friendly Bay Area mayors lost their campaigns. Rafael Mangual of City Journal wonders if local Dems will take the hint, and embrace more moderate policies.
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.
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.
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Go Deeper:
Opp Now enthusiastically welcomes smart, thoughtful, fair-minded, well-written comments from our readers. But be advised: we have zero interest in posting rants, ad hominems, poorly-argued screeds, transparently partisan yack, or the hateful name-calling often seen on other local websites. So if you've got a great idea that will add to the conversation, please send it in. If you're trolling or shilling for a candidate or initiative, forget it.