Democrats are putting ‘progressive prosecutors’ on trial

The Scene

Six summers ago, as he ramped up his campaigning for Democrats, Barack Obama praised a political experiment unfolding in city after city.

“If you are really concerned about how the criminal justice system treats African Americans, the best way to protest is to vote,” Obama said. “Do what they just did in Philadelphia and Boston and elect state attorneys and district attorneys who are looking at issues in a new light.”

This week, Portland voters ejected one of those district attorneys. Mike Schmidt, who’d run in 2020 to end “systemic racism” and “the school to prison pipeline,” won that race by such a landslide that his predecessor retired early, out of respect for people “shout[ing] from our streets that Black lives matter.” Schmidt lost this one to Nathan Vasquez, a prosecutor in the Multnomah County DA’s office endorsed by police unions.

“What you see and feel is real,” Vasquez said in a debate with Schmidt, blaming the incumbent for a surge in crime and drug overdoses. “My path offers hope, safety through collaboration, and actual, real experience handling prosecution — doing the work that is this office, to prosecute crimes.”

National Democrats, who were also once eager to align themselves with the 2020 protests, were thrilled to see the result on Tuesday. The years-long campaign to elect criminal justice reformers in powerful local offices isn’t over, but it is giving up ground.

State legislators in both parties have undermined them; progressive prosecutors in St. Louis, Chicago, and Northern Virginia have resigned, been replaced by critics, or lost reelection. In March, progressives did successfully oust Kim Ogg, the prosecutor of Houston’s Harris County, in one of the movement’s biggest wins. One week later, however, Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton proposed a rule that would allow him to remove urban prosecutors unless they complied with strict new reporting standards, because “District Attorneys who choose not to prosecute criminals appropriately have created unthinkable damage” to Texas.

“No attempt at change is linear, and it’s predictable that those who don’t want law enforcement accountability and who want to lock everyone up are fighting back,” said Jessica Brand, the founder of the Wren Collective, a criminal justice reform group. “Some progressives are going to lose. But more are winning reelection, even when met with massive spending for their opponents. It’s why some right-wing electeds are now utilizing undemocratic attempts to remove them — because they can’t win many elections. I think that shows that the movement has a strong future.”

David’s view

Remember how the campaign for progressive prosecutors started: As political arbitrage. Unless an incumbent was beset by scandals, the more than 2,000 local elections for district attorneys and county prosecutors were fairly low-profile and low-cost ways for donors to make an impact. In 2015, when George Soros began funding “Safety and Justice” PACs in these races, a six-figure buy that could go unnoticed in a Senate race could completely transform a sleepy DA election.

By 2018, when Obama praised the movement, it had notched win after win without the crime spike that conservatives and police unions predicted. Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn, Rachael Rollins in Boston’s Suffolk County, Kim Foxx in Cook County, Ill.: All of them aimed to end “mass incarceration” and declined to prosecute some petty offenses.

In 2020, when Donald Trump went after those prosecutors, he polarized the issue: No Democrat wanted advice from him about who could keep them safe. (“The radical left District Attorney in Portland, Mike Schmidt, his name is, has released hundreds of rioters,” Trump said at a 2020 rally in Pennsylvania, which was a boon for Schmidt back home.)

Only when Trump left office, and crime increased in some cities with progressive DAs, did Democrats start to panic. When I talked with Krasner in 2021, before he defeated a police-backed primary challenger, he attributed rising crime to the shutdown of civic infrastructure during COVID, and to police not closing enough cases.

That was compelling to Philadelphians. But Republicans didn’t let up. Democrats got more cautious about the premise of the progressive prosecutor movement — that you could decarcerate without increasing crime — while Republicans relentlessly tied their opponents to progressive prosecutors. After narrowly winning his 2021 race, Virginia Attorney Gen. Jason Miyares joined a PAC built to beat those prosecutors; like Trump, he saw power in identifying them and making Democrats own their records. (Earlier this month, House Republicans gathered in Philadelphia for a field hearing largely about blaming crime on Krasner.)

“Highlight every single far-left, special-interest prosecutor that has been elected in your state,” Miyares told members of the House Republican Study Committee in early 2022. “I don’t care if they are in your district — they are all over,” he explained, and Republicans could “make them famous.”

The RSC did that, sketching out a Concerned Citizens Bill of Rights, which recommended cutting off federal funds from states with “harmful no-cash bail policies,” or where some district attorneys “systematically decline to prosecute types of cases.” As he ran for president, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis built on that, suspending two elected prosecutors, accusing one of “dereliction of duty” for not pursuing tougher charges.

Voters in Portland and San Francisco don’t care much about what DeSantis thinks. But liberals who joined the 2020 protest wave have changed their priorities.

The View From Democrats

The Biden administration hasn’t gone after progressive prosecutors; the White House officials who were happy about Schmidt’s loss in a Politico story celebrated it anonymously. Its larger political project has been instituting reforms at Main Justice while increasing law enforcement funding and denouncing the “defund the police” slogan that’s vanished everywhere except Republican campaign ads.

“The tide is clearly turning,” said Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. Polling, said Kessler, usually found that “crime” was one of the top concerns for non-white voters; that refuted the worry some Democrats had in 2020, that by denouncing activists or progressive DAs that they’d alienate their base. “Biden has a history of being a strong-on-crime Democrat, and he needs to remind people,” he added.

Specifically, Kessler wants Biden to emphasize how much more money his administration has spent on law enforcement — and how cuts to police budgets, which Portland and some other Democratic cities enacted in 2020, have been completely reversed. In 2020, Trump accused Biden of wanting to “cut funding for police,” and Biden said that he wanted to increase it.

And he did. From 2021 to 2024, funding for the FBI has increased from $10.4 billion to $11.3 billion; funding for the COPS grants, which fund community policing, has nearly doubled, from $386 million to $663 million.

That’s separated Biden from activists and progressive campaigners, without mollifying Republicans at all. When the Biden administration has increased law enforcement funding, it’s been denounced by the Movement for Black Lives, who responded at one point: “When we say ‘defund and abolish the police,’ we mean exactly that.” This month, when House Republicans welcomed local law enforcement to D.C.’s “Police Week,” they repeatedly accused Democrats of “defunding” police; pressed on how Democrats actually increased funding, House Speaker Mike Johnson referred to the “viral vignettes” of him reading quotes of Democrats who, at some point, were “on board” with the idea.

Republicans have found firmer ground when attacking the Biden administration for appointing judges and U.S. attorneys sympathetic to the reform movement. Rollins, one of the DAs who Obama praised in 2018, won a hard-fought promotion under Biden: With Vice President Harris breaking the tie, Democrats made her a U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. Rollins resigned sixteen months later, after an ethics investigation found that she’d leaked DOJ secrets to influence the election of her successor.

Notable

• In Politico, Jonathan Martin profiled the final days of the Schmidt-Vasquez campaign, as “the culmination of simmering local frustration with crime, homelessness and drug abuse and a resounding correction to the shift left on criminal justice that took place here and in so many cities in 2020.”

• In the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson criticized House Republicans for banging the “defund” drum while proposing cuts in their budgets: “Democrats campaigning should make Republicans own all of this if they want to take back control of the House in the fall.”