‘Fund the Police’ Backfired—and Gave Trump More Power Than Ever

In the last four years, mainstream Democrats have: nominated a former prosecutor for president; elected an ex-NYPD officer to run New York City; campaigned on deporting more people; funneled money and weapons to regimes committing war crimes; overseen the beatings and arrests of people demanding police reform; sent more police officers to wallop students protesting for Palestinian rights; ratcheted up the War on Drugs; worked with major corporate retailers to arrest more shoplifters; filed racketeering and conspiracy charges against police-reform protesters in Atlanta; made it easier to arrest New Yorkers and Californians with mental illness; defended the use of solitary confinement; supported a landmark Supreme Court case to let cops arrest unhoused people; tried to imprison one of the world’s most famous rappers; promised to build Donald Trump’s border wall; ran endless ads about Trump’s criminal record; and applauded as the president chanted “Fund the Police!” during his most-watched yearly address. 

And yet, after an election last week in which voters all but screamed that the Democratic Party is moving in the wrong direction, centrist and conservative pundits have drawn the opposite conclusion: The Democrats are, somehow, still too soft on crime. 

The belief persists against all logic: Four years of proudly Backing The Blue, at a minimum, failed to help Democratic voter turnout—and likely depressed votes from progressives. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s mythical moderate Republican voters, whom the party molded its entire platform to pursue, did not arrive to carry the party to the finish line. Instead, the pro-cop platform seems to have done nothing but legitimize Republican grievances and hand Trump a bolstered police and surveillance state. Despite this, many of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders seem to think the only way forward is to become even more like Republicans—rather than offer voters anything different at all.

In a Saturday interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Democratic strategist James Carville blamed the Democrats’ loss on “defunding the police”—a slogan the party has done everything to reject short of murdering a protester live on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” At the end of a Dowd column that somehow made Kamala Harris’s conservative, Dick-Cheney-loving campaign sound like it had been run by a Maoist polycule, Carville claimed the “defund the police” slogan had killed Harris’s campaign. He also called the phrase “the three stupidest words in the English language” and said 2020’s civil rights protests had left a “stench” on the party. MSNBC host and informal Biden White House adviser Joe Scarborough then read Dowd’s column in its entirety on Monday’s episode of “Morning Joe.”

Carville is far from alone. Numerous commentators have, for example, floated the idea that the party’s new de-facto leader ought to be California Governor Gavin Newsom, a man so seemingly obsessed with clearing out homeless encampments that he traveled to Los Angeles County over the summer to throw out poor people’s belongings with his own hands.

Likewise, Mondaire Jones, an ex-Democratic congressman from New York City’s wealthy suburbs, tweeted Saturday that his party needs to continue jettisoning progressives from its coalition.

“So long as leaders in the Democratic Party capitulate to extremists who want them to use words like ‘defund the police’ and deny the existence of a border crisis, they will continue to lose tough elections,” he wrote.

Jones’s memory seems shockingly short—he ran on this exact, centrist platform in 2024 and lost his own election by a large margin last week. His race encapsulates the issue here: The party’s love-fest with police and prosecutors appears to have done less than nothing to gin up votes or change the party’s overall perception. But mainstream Democrats are now arrogantly digging in their heels instead of learning any lessons.

While Biden won in 2020 by rejecting protesters’ demands to abolish the police outright, his platform still included some significant reforms, including abolishing cash bail, mandatory minimum sentences, and the death penalty. But Biden and Harris didn’t just fail to deliver these changes—they wasted a post-George Floyd moment that was one of the best chances in U.S. history to dramatically alter the nation’s racist legal system. 

Four years later, Harris then moved far to the 2020 campaign’s right. Harris’s 2024 “Issues” webpage, for example, includes exactly zero criminal legal system reforms. Instead, the site touts her conviction rate as a prosecutor and the billions of dollars the Biden administration has funneled to the nation’s deportation forces, the international War on Drugs, and local law enforcement. (She later rolled out a hail-mary proposal to legalize marijuana as her poll numbers tanked.) In a now infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey, Harris even bragged about owning a gun.

“If someone breaks into my house,” she said, “they’re getting shot.”

The tactic, however, did not appear to convince anyone that the Democratic Party was the choice for those who want to get tough on crime. Most of the nation’s prominent law enforcement organizations and unions endorsed Trump, as they did in the previous two elections. While votes are still being counted, Harris almost certainly lost the popular vote and received fewer votes than Biden. According to national exit polls, most of those who voted said they believed Trump would be a better choice for public safety. And, unsurprisingly, conservative commentators simply lied throughout the election cycle and pretended the Democrats were namby-pamby pacifists. Right-wing talking head Bari Weiss, for example, implied last week on Fox News that the Democrats had run on “defunding” cops, a falsehood that went unchallenged on-air.

In some down-ballot races, Democrats were undone by the crime panics they themselves ginned up. Virtually no Democrat did more to stoke “organized retail theft” fears over the last election cycle than San Francisco Mayor London Breed—who, despite bending over backward to crack down on the poor and homeless, was ousted last week by a first-time politician who attacked her record on crime. A similar fate befell Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, among others. 

It shouldn’t have taken losing another presidential election in embarrassing fashion to teach Democrats that Republican voters simply want to vote for Republicans. Or that half-conservative measures don’t work when the other party is happy to outflank you from the right. But here we are. Rolling over whenever conservatives whipped up a new crime panic did not reward Democratic candidates. It instead taught voters that Republicans’ racist, dubious, and malicious narratives about crime were the only ones that mattered. While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason a presidential candidate lost an election, it is incontrovertible that “support for law enforcement” was a key principle of one of the least popular administrations in recent history. As such, there is nothing to lose in standing against a violent policing system that will never help Democrats anyway.

Of course, many Democratic Party dead-enders are financially invested in not seeing reality. Police reform opens up the door to other questions about class, inequality, corporate power, and capitalism that the modern Democratic Party quite literally cannot afford to discuss. But if there are any people left within the party’s governing coalition interested in clawing the country back from Republican rule, they ought to ask themselves what’s been gained by alienating the millions of people who have marched in the streets since the advent of the modern Black Lives Matter movement 12 years ago. “Funding the police” has done little other than tell those people to sit home—while funneling money and weapons to a police state happy to help Trump carry out a second term.

ICYMI—From The Appeal

Women languish in San Francisco’s jail for years without answers—or sunlight. After a moral panic about crime, the city’s billionaires and political leaders demanded more arrests. Pretrial detainees are now seeing the harmful effects.