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.