Democrats Would Rather Become Republicans Than Make the Case for Justice Reform

by Jerry Iannelli

When San Francisco’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, lost a recall election this month after a years-long, bad faith smear campaign, influential pundits and politicians rushed to claim that his defeat spelled the death of justice reform as a winning political issue. In perhaps the most high-profile example, New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher wrote — in an ostensibly non-opinion news piece — that voters in California “delivered a stark warning about the potency of law and order as a political message in 2022.”

But the takes seem to be a case of willful blindness more than anything. On the day of Boudin’s loss, a wave of progressive candidates also won elections in Los Angeles County and across California, propelled by campaigns centered around shifting resources away from policing and punishment and toward social services.

As of publication time, Hugo Soto-Martinez, a longtime union organizer running for Los Angeles City Council District 13, received more votes than incumbent Mitch O’Farrell. Erin Darling, a civil rights lawyer who has also advocated for greater investment in non-carceral services, also leads his race for District 11. In the city controller’s race, accountant Kenneth Mejia dominated his primary after plastering billboards across the city showing that police were sucking up far too much of the budget.

And while certainly on the less progressive end of the spectrum, mayoral candidate Karen Bass received more votes than her Democratic primary opponent, former Republican and billionaire tough-on-crime candidate Rick Caruso. Multiple races will head to runoffs in November thanks to California’s “jungle primary,” system, wherein the top two primary candidates, regardless of party, face head-to-head (unless a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round).

Most notably, City Council District 1 candidate Eunisses Hernandez, a longtime police critic who worked on decarceration initiatives for the Drug Policy Alliance and La Defensa (a group she co-founded), won her race outright with 54 percent of the vote. Hernandez beat centrist incumbent Gil Cedillo by running on a platform that prioritized shifting resources away from armed cops and closing down the scandal-plagued Men’s Central Jail.

These may not be races for state or national office, but they’re still shockingly powerful positions. There are just 15 council members representing Los Angeles’s 4 million residents, which means a single commissioner, on average, represents a population roughly half the size of Wyoming’s. The mayor and city controller are citywide positions, representing a population larger than 23 U.S. states.

One might think that the mainstream Democratic Party would be relieved to see such a large slate of justice reform candidates sweeping up consequential primary election victories—including in the comparatively more conservative Contra Costa County, California, where progressive district attorney and Boudin ally Diana Becton won reelection. With early indications suggesting the 2022 midterms could be a bloodbath for Democrats, these wins could be an indication that campaigns centered around police reform and more expansive visions of justice and public safety can drive voters to the polls.

But instead, Democrats once again seem to be running in the opposite direction. On June 8, mere hours after Boudin’s defeat, the influential centrist think-tank Third Way went on the offensive, effectively urging Democrats to cynically abandon justice reform and instead try to out-Republican the Republicans.

In a piece titled, “The Red City Defund the Police Problem,” Third Way authors Jim Kessler and Kylie Murdoch made the case for Democrats to argue that it is actually Republicans who are “soft on crime.” According to their report, large cities run by Democrats actually funnel more of their budgets to police than those run by Republicans. To some, this data is likely a not-so-surprising reflection of the fact that Democratic mayors have continued to prop up the historic over-policing of many urban areas in America—even amid growing skepticism about its effectiveness as a public safety strategy. But to Third Way, it was a cause for celebration.

“Our conclusion is that the ‘defund the police’ charge against Democrats may be politically damaging, but it is factually inaccurate,” the authors wrote. “If anything, Republican mayors have a defund problem.”

This tactic—the political equivalent of saying, “I know you are but what am I?”—seems tailor-made for the army of centrist pundits and political “strategists” who have used Boudin’s demise to call for a Democratic retreat on policing and justice reform. Said commentators include New York Magazine’s Jonathain Chait, talking head Bill Scher, and Clinton-era fossil James Carville, who cheered Boudin’s loss on CNN, claiming that he had been elected by “snobby, self-righteous elites.” That Carville—a former presidential adviser who trades in luxury real estate and is famously married to a prominent conservative strategist—could get away with calling anyone but himself “elite” exposes how divorced from reality the anti-police-reform crowd really is. Like many of Boudin’s critics, Carville is financially invested in a world where police enforce social and economic order. He and other members of the pro-recall crowd were so eager to define Boudin’s loss as an endorsement of their worldview that they seemingly forgot to check the results of the state’s other elections that night.

Never mind the fact that jettisoning justice reform from the Democratic platform only legitimizes the many, many lies told during the campaign against Boudin. Fetishizing police as society’s problem-solvers is an inherently conservative endeavor, and by now it should be clear that Democrats cannot win by simply turning the GOP’s toxic and disingenuous messaging against them. Pointing the finger at Republicans and arguing that they are the soft-on-crime party offers voters no competing vision for the world, no positive new ideas to support, and no hope that Democrats believe the country could be better or even marginally different than it is now.

To cede even an inch to the Republicans’ talking points on crime is to validate their entire project in the eyes of voters. If Democrats are willing to buy into the false idea that crime is rampant and that cops can fix it, then why would voters opt to choose the Democrats’ moderate half-measures over Republicans’ full-throated support for police?

Since the 1990s, Third Way-style Democrats have banked on the idea that voters will choose their brand of conservatism-lite over the Republicans’ Conservatism Classic. The ensuing years have provided little evidence that this approach has done much other than hand Republicans control of most major state and federal governmental branches. In the meantime, justice reformers at the local level are winning major races and building strong coalitions of local voters, largely due to their ability to make the case that there is a path to a safer society that doesn’t rely exclusively on the failed tough-on-crime strategies of the past. If the Democratic Party wants to run away from those candidates, it will only be running towards its own demise.

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