The conservative tide reaches the great Democratic bastion of California | Elections 2024

California still is counting votes. The country’s most populous state expects the official results of last week’s elections to be announced on December 13. Although 2.6 million ballots remain to be counted, the impact of the Republican tide is already being felt in America’s great Democratic stronghold. Voters turned to the right to punish the great progressive experiment taking place in California’s major cities. This conservative wave has hit the San Francisco Bay Area especially hard, but is also being felt in Los Angeles, where the district attorney lost the election. An overwhelming majority of Californians are demanding harsher penalties for crimes related to theft and drugs.

The clearest warning signal to Democrats comes from San Francisco. The electorate voted for a change in local politics. Mayor London Breed, a centrist, has lost her re-election bid after six years in office. Voters instead chose Daniel Lurie, heir to the Levi Strauss textile empire and a political novice. Lurie, 47, will be the first mayor since 1912 who has no government experience. People have accepted his message as a moderate outsider, although he also won as a Democratic politician who wanted to clean up the city. Lurie wants that expand the homeless shelter system and plans to declare a state of emergency the ravages of fentanyl in the city.

Lurie, who spent more than $7 million of his own fortune on his campaign, is not alone. The electorate also voted out Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Pamela Price, the district attorney of Alameda County, the region east of San Francisco. Thao and Price were elected two years ago and were standard bearers of the progressive movement. Their tenure has been derailed by the perception of rising crime, homelessness and a stagnant economic recovery of the Covid pandemic.

Price suffered the same fate as Chesa Boudin, the former San Francisco district attorney. Boudin succumbed to a recall campaign funded by tech moguls in 2022. Boudin was blamed for rising crime after trying to abolish bail for minor crimes, being more lenient on repeat offenders and taking a new approach to homelessness. Sixty percent voted to remove Boudin from office. Sixty-five percent voted last week to fire Price, who becomes the first Alameda district attorney to lose her job.

The best indicator of Californians’ fatigue with crime is the wide margin by which Proposition 36, which toughens penalties for drug possession and theft, was passed. Seventy percent of voters, about 8.6 million people, voted for this initiative, which received even more support than Kamala Harris. The proposal was approved in all 58 counties in the state. None voted to continue the alternatives introduced in 2014 to reduce penalties. The referendum ends the theft threshold of up to $950, which was considered a misdemeanor. Anyone arrested a third time will be charged with a serious crime, regardless of the amount stolen. The same goes for anyone with three drug possession charges. Critics of the measure believe it will increase the state’s prison population.

The city of Los Angeles was also affected by this wave of change. It has wiped out one of the best-known progressive profiles in the state, George Gascón. The district attorney was defeated by Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor, who defeated him by more than 600,000 votes. “The shift to the right across the country is devastating,” Gascón said in the statement acknowledging his defeat. The prosecutor took office four years ago with the promise of trying new methods of criminal justice. His experience was bolstered by a career as a lawyer in San Francisco, where he replaced Harris as progressive city attorney.

“We will make crime illegal again,” Hochman told reporters last week. The Beverly Hills-born attorney is a graduate of Brown and Stanford universities. He has experience litigating against corrupt elements of local law enforcement. In 2022, he tried to become attorney general of California but was defeated by Rob Bonta. His tough, centrist message has been better received this year. His campaign raised more than $7.2 million in donations, compared to Gascón’s $605,000. Hochman left his Republican past to succeed in the Democratic stronghold. In 2023, he changed his party membership to ‘independent’. Hochman has pledged to “remove the pro-crime measures” of his predecessor.

Despite the Democrats’ wake-up call, California remains blue. Harris won the state in a landslide, with 58% of the votes counted (7.7 million), compared to Donald Trump’s 38% (five million). Democrat Adam Schiff also defeated his Republican rival, former baseball player Steve Garvey, by 20 points. However, voters have determined a new direction for local politics.

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