The Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual, in City Journal, on why this was “The Anti-Crime Election”:

Start with California: one of the most closely followed ballot initiatives in the Golden State was Proposition 36, which looked to counter a 2014 initiative, Prop. 47, that had raised the threshold for felony theft to $950 and converted many felony drug offenses to misdemeanors. A decade later, the architects of Prop. 36 sought to put a modest but meaningful rollback of Prop. 47 on the ballot, allowing prosecutors to bring felony theft charges when the perpetrator is a repeat offender, increasing sentences for mass thefts, and requiring that certain sentences be served in state prisons rather than in county jails. Prop. 36 passed by a massive margin.

In Los Angeles, “progressive” prosecutor George Gascón, who succeeded Kamala Harris as San Francisco district attorney before becoming the lead prosecutor in L.A., lost his reelection bid to Nathan Hochman, who ran on a law-and-order platform. Anti-crime voter sentiment also made its way north to the Bay Area, where voters had already recalled former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022. As of this writing, Boudin’s replacement, Brooke Jenkins, seems poised to win election to a full term. In Alameda County (home to Oakland), District Attorney Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao appear likely to lose their respective recall elections. Like Boudin and Gascón, Price and Thao positioned themselves as criminal-justice reformers, keen to shrink the footprint of the justice system.

The progressive prosecutor movement took some hits outside of California, too. In Tampa, Florida Democrat Andrew Warren, suspended by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 for his non-prosecution policies, lost his reelection bid against Republican State’s Attorney Susan Lopez. In Athens, Georgia—where the murder of Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant earlier this year stoked outrage—Kalki Yalamanchili won a landslide victory over incumbent District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, who was elected on a reformist platform. In Phoenix, Tamika Wooten, who ran on pushing alternatives to incarceration and restorative justice, lost her bid to oust incumbent Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican. Law-and-order prosecutors also won in Macomb County, Michigan, and Kenosha County, Wisconsin.

It would be massively premature to write obituaries of the Democratic party, liberalism, or even progressivism. But some parts of the progressive movement took body blows that may take a generation to recover from. The Defund the Police and progressive prosecutor movements top that list. Law and order is back, and if Democrats don’t get with the program as they did in the 1990s, the electoral beatings will continue.