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Foreigners are often surprised that Americans elect most of their local prosecutors — and that these prosecutors can become major forces in public force. But we do, and they can.
Thomas Dewey, as the 38-year-old elected Manhattan district attorney, was a major presidential candidate in 1940 and the Republican nominee in the next two elections. Pat Brown got his political start as San Francisco's district attorney. He and his son Jerry were governors of California for 24 of the 60 years from 1958 to 2018. Vice President Kamala Harris's first electoral office was also San Francisco district attorney.
In Philadelphia, Arlen Specter switched to the Republican Party to be elected district attorney in 1965 and reelected in 1969. Specter lost reelection in 1977, but Ed Rendell, a young assistant district attorney he had hired, went on to defeat the man who had beaten Specter. Their careers as senator, mayor, and governor lasted until 2010.
A conversation with Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum Politically upwardly mobile district attorneys have typically been tough on crime. That's not the case, just the opposite, for Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney who was renominated Tuesday, and for the other "reform" prosecutors backed by billionaire George Soros, who have been elected in Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston.
Krasner, a longtime criminal defense lawyer, replaced almost the entire staff, promised never to seek the death penalty, decriminalized prostitution and theft under $500, and reduced charges in controversial homicide and domestic abuse cases.
As for Philadelphia's huge increase in homicides — 499 were killed in 2020, the most since 1990 — Krasner blames COVID-19 and the shutdowns. He doesn't seem to connect any of it with his own tenure, nor with the "mostly peaceful" protests and Black Lives Matter demands for defunding the police that began after George Floyd died last May.
Sympathetic media and academics take the same view. A January New York Times article, looking back on the 2020 crime spike, never once in 1,983 words mentions either Black Lives Matter or the protests. A Princeton sociologist interviewed in the Atlantic avoids mentioning Black Lives Matter and, while admitting police withdrawal from "dominating public spaces" was followed by an upsurge in crime, nevertheless denies that "protests cause violence."
Evidently, most Philadelphia Democratic voters, or, at least, those who showed up on Tuesday, agreed. In figures available at this writing, Krasner defeated challenger Carlos Vega by a 30-point margin. But reported turnout was only 129,000. That's far below the 743,000 of November 2020, when Philadelphia voted 81% to 18% for President Joe Biden. The result might have been closer, or different, with a larger turnout.
Another Soros-backed "reform" prosecutor, Cook County, Illinois, State's Attorney Kim Foxx, had more difficulty running for reelection in 2020 after she abruptly dropped charges against hate-hoaxing actor Jussie Smollett in 2019.
Foxx won renomination with just 50.2% over three opponents in March and was reelected with just 54% over a Republican in November. That's far below Biden's 74% tally on the same day and the 72% that Foxx had won in 2016. Also, note that that's with presidential-year turnouts of 892,000 and 2.2 million.
Other Soros-backed "reform" prosecutors may face political backlash. Kim Gardner in St. Louis faces misconduct charges in her case against former Gov. Eric Greitens, and there has been talk of a recall election for Chesa Boudin in San Francisco and George Gascon in Los Angeles.
But the real political peril may come to national Democrats. Their kente-cloth-clad congressional leaders took a knee for Black Lives Matter in June 2020 and then suffered unexpected House seat losses in November. "Republican attacks on the ‘defund the police' movement," the party's recent post-mortem concluded, "proved more potent than Democrats ever anticipated."
Soros-backed "reform" prosecutors have won in jurisdictions dominated by central cities with large black or Hispanic populations and whose college-graduate white liberal voters, as the New York Times's Thomas Edsall has noted, are more "anti-racist" than blacks.
Almost entirely absent in these cities and counties are the white, ethnic, noncollege homeowners who cast crucial votes against soft-on-crime mayors and prosecutors in the 1975-95 high crime years. Staten Island and Queens made Rudy Giuliani Mayor of New York in 1993, and blue-collar Delaware suburbs with Philly TV prompted Biden to sponsor the crime bill in 1994.
But most such voters in "reform" prosecutor constituencies have died or moved to Florida or Texas or far-out exurbs. Where they still linger, in downscale Cook County suburbs, they've voted anti-"reform."
The problem for Democrats is that there are many more like-minded voters beyond these heavily Democratic cities and counties, and that poll after poll shows support dwindling for Black Lives Matter and defunding the police — even, as their increased support for then-President Donald Trump in 2020 suggests, among some Hispanics and blacks.
Just as liberal voters tend to overestimate police violence against blacks, so Soros's "reform" prosecutors seem to underestimate the number of offenders capable of repeated criminal violence. Unfortunately, there are some people who are genuinely vicious and unpredictably violent, from whom the larger public deserves and demands protection. If the body count keeps adding up, Soros's "reform" prosecutors may hang on, but a lot of Democrats across the country may not.