Pundits are turning Chesa Boudin’s recall into a bellwether, but news from a big Midwest city election suggests otherwise.
Yesterday, a progressive district attorney in a big west coast city was recalled by a 60% to 40% margin.
Yesterday, a progressive candidate for district attorney in a big midwestern city won the Democratic primary, beating two other rivals by more than 15% and making her a likely shoo-in this fall.
Today, political reporters and pundits are making much of the first story, arguing that it demonstrates a clear trend that started with Eric Adams’ victory in the New York City mayoral race last year, that core Democratic voters are rejecting progressive approaches to crime and incarceration. In New York Magazine, Ross Barkan described the first story as a rejection “of a certain strain of liberalism that buoyed reform-oriented prosecutors across the country and sought to defund the police.” In the Atlantic, Nellie Bowles said the incumbent in the first story lost because “he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality.” The New York Post called the recall a rejection of “soft-on-crime policies.” None of them are mentioning the second story. That’s because people writing trend stories don’t like inconvenient facts. And so this is how backlashes get artificially fueled.
By now, if you are someone who follows politics, you probably know something about Chesa Boudin, the now-recalled DA of San Francisco. The child of Sixties radicals who grew up to be a public defender, he rode the wave of attention built by the racial justice movement of the late 2010s to a narrow win in the 2019 election to replace a long-serving incumbent. He promised to end cash bail because it discriminates against poor defendants and promised to reduce incarceration rates by seeking alternatives to jail for non-violent offenders. He also took steps to increase police accountability, trying to prohibit the hiring of officers with past histories of misconduct and urging that elected prosecutors not take campaign contributions from police unions. His actions, in the teeth of San Francisco’s longstanding problems with homelessness and public perceptions of rising crime, were not popular with many San Franciscans, and especially galling to the police.
A well-organized and well-financed push by a mix of rich techies and Republicans to recall him a year ago failed to collect enough signatures; the second one, which was led by prominent Asian-American Democrats and backed by several local neighborhood Democratic clubs, succeeded. This time the pro-recall camp raised more than $7 million, much of it from a handful of wealthy donors, a mix of local realtors, plus again a claque of Republicans and techies. The anti-recall camp raised well less than half that amount, mostly from the ACLU, a few big unions, and a criminal justice reform PAC, plus some liberal tech money. About 25% of eligible voters showed up yesterday to cast ballots in San Francisco. On the Boudin recall proposition, 74,335 voted yes and 49,591 voted no.
Now, to our second story. In Polk County, Iowa, which encompasses the mostly Democratic city of Des Moines, a progressive reform candidate named Kimberly Graham beat two more traditional candidates in an election to replace the long-serving county attorney John Sarcone. She got 44% of the nearly 37,000 votes cast, roughly just 12% turnout. According to the Des Moines Register, Graham emphasized changing the priorities of the county attorney’s office, promising to focus on issues like wage theft and talking about partnering with academics to study disparities in charging and sentencing. “On drug prosecutions, Graham promised the most significant departure from Sarcone and her opponents,” the Register reported, “saying she would not prosecute low-level marijuana offenses and calling for leniency and treatment for users of harder drugs such as opioids. However, she promised continued prosecution of drug dealers.” On her website, Graham’s platform emphasizes ending cash bail for nonviolent offenders, criticizes mass incarceration, and emphasizes economic justice and the need to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Graham was outspent by 3–1 by her rivals, though she did have the support of the Justice and Public Safety PAC, an outside group.
Why did Graham win her primary while Boudin lost his recall fight? Beyond the most obvious reason, which is that she wasn’t targeted by millions in negative ads or the subject of a national media pile-on, here are some answers: she had strong community backing, particularly from a group called Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action, which has been doing community organizing in Des Moines for a long time. They worked hard to get out the vote for her, contacting more than 10,000 voters. Also, while Graham ran as a reformer, she was careful to address people’s fears about violent crime. On her website, her first promise as Polk County Attorney is to “Start prioritizing prosecution of violent, serious crimes, like gun violence, homicide, sexual assault and more, over low-level, non-violent offenses.”
It’s also possible that Boudin lost support in San Francisco because he never really had a mandate in the first place. In 2019, he won his election by a very narrow margin, and partially because under the city’s system of instant runoff voting, he was the number two choice for many voters who had backed a more traditional “law and order” candidate who did poorly. While Boudin led the field of four in the first round, he only won the final tally with 50.8% of the vote, hardly a resounding endorsement. Nevertheless, he tried to govern as if he had much deeper support, even as his ideological opponents filed for his recall within days of his election.
If there really was a big backlash against progressive district attorneys in Democratic cities, then why did Larry Krasner of Philadelphia cruise to re-election last fall? Why did a civil rights attorney running on a reform platform lead the race for Alameda County (Oakland) DA yesterday? Why did Contra Costa’s incumbent DA, another reformer, win re-election solidly? Part of the answer has to be the make-up of each electorate. In these places, Blacks make up a much larger proportion of the population than in San Francisco, where they are barely 6%.
One final reason why Boudin’s recall doesn’t prove anything about the prospects for criminal justice reformers: The main group that led the push to remove him, Safer SF Without Boudin, went out of its way to emphasize its support for “real criminal justice reform, public safety and police accountability now.” It personalized its attack on Boudin and made him the lightning rod for the frustrations of city residents, while offering them the out that by removing him they might still be on the side of reform. Unfortunately, whether it intended this or not, it has contributed to the larger ongoing backlash.
Micah Sifry is a Medium columnist and the author of several books on tech and politics, including The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet) and WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. He also writes a weekly newsletter called The Connector, where he focuses on movements, organizing and democracy. You can also follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.
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