California has shown no signs of going Republican anytime soon, but in Tuesday’s elections the reliably liberal state lurched to the right in ways that might surprise other Americans.
Fed up with open-air drug use, “smash-and-grab” robberies and shampoo locked away in stores, California voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure, Proposition 36, that will impose harsher penalties for shoplifting and drug possession.
Voters in Oakland and Los Angeles were on their way to ousting liberal district attorneys who had campaigned on social justice promises to reduce imprisonment and hold the police accountable. And statewide measures to raise the minimum wage, ban the forced labor of inmates and expand rent control, all backed by progressive groups and labor unions, were heading toward defeat.
Amid a conservative shift nationally that included Donald J. Trump’s reclamation of the White House, voters in heavily Democratic California displayed a similar frustration, challenging the state’s identity as a reflexively liberal bastion.
And Mr. Trump appears to have gained ground in California compared with four years ago, based on initial election returns, despite facing Vice President Kamala Harris in her home state. (She was still ahead by nearly 18 percentage points after a vote count update on Thursday, but Joseph R. Biden Jr. won in 2020 by 29 points.)
The mood this year was “very negative about the direction of the country especially, but also the state,” said Mark Baldassare, who is a political scientist and the statewide survey director for the Public Policy Institute of California. “Lots of concerns about the direction of the economy, and worries about the cost of living and public safety.”
In Los Angeles County, the district attorney, George Gascón was overwhelmingly defeated. Four years ago, his election was seen as a monumental moment for a national movement to elect progressive prosecutors.
This time, his opponent, Nathan Hochman, who is a Republican turned independent and a former federal prosecutor, won with roughly 60 percent of the vote in initial returns.
Mr. Hochman’s message: Los Angeles is a lawless dystopia that needs a heavier hand in the prosecutor’s office.
During Mr. Gascón’s tenure, police officers have complained about his policies, calling them lenient and saying that in some cases they have been reluctant to make arrests because they believed he would not prosecute.
Mr. Hochman had a very different message at his election night party on Tuesday in Beverly Hills.
“Here’s what I’m here to tell the police department: Your hands are not tied anymore,” Mr. Hochman said, to cheers. “The D.A.’s office will not have a political agenda ruling what goes on and what gets prosecuted. We will go back to two things: the facts and the law.”
From one perspective, Mr. Gascón’s election in the first place was an anomaly borne from a burst of social justice momentum during the pandemic, just months after the murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis. Voters were receptive to widespread calls for police accountability and to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
But California and Los Angeles in particular have a history of tougher criminal justice policies than many would think. Until a decade ago, the state had severely overcrowded prisons, the result of stiffer criminal justice laws and a strict three strikes policy.
“You know, often I talk, especially to people outside the county, people outside the city and California, people say that L.A. is so progressive,” Mr. Gascón said at a campaign event a week before the election, pointing to the policies of his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, including her support of the death penalty. “L.A. is not progressive.”
In a brief statement Wednesday morning, Mr. Gascon said, “the rightward shift across America last night is heartbreaking.”
Tristan Fontaine, a manager at a Walmart in Los Angeles, once voted for Barack Obama for president. But he said that as he has grown older he has become more conservative, mainly because of economic issues and the fact that his rent has skyrocketed. Even though Mr. Fontaine, 36, still describes himself as a moderate, he has now voted for Mr. Trump three times.
And this year he voted against Mr. Gascón and in favor of Proposition 36, partly because, as an employee of Walmart, he has seen the problem of retail theft up close.
“It’s just kind of silly that so many people were getting away with large amounts of theft and not being held accountable for it, so I think that it was time for a change,” he said.
Farther north, in Oakland, fears about crime and a sense that the county district attorney, Pamela Price, was too lenient fomented a backlash that saw Ms. Price recalled from her job, which she had only assumed in January 2023.
“Oakland was so fun back in the day,” said Denise Adair, 48, a native of the city who now lives in neighboring Berkeley and who voted to recall Ms. Price. “I would go into Oakland, West Oakland, East Oakland, and feel safe. I would walk all night down International Boulevard at midnight, and still feel safe. I wouldn’t dare go there after dark now.”
Ms. Adair, who also voted for Proposition 36, said, “I believe we need to be tougher on crime. If no one is tough on crime, why would people change?”
Crime in California, like nationally, is generally at historic lows, although during the pandemic there was a surge in homicides. Some property crimes, like theft, have increased in recent years. Shoplifting, for example, surged nearly 40 percent in California last year, according to the state’s Justice Department.
But the disorder in the streets is real, and even some activists who work on behalf of homeless Californians and people suffering from addiction said they welcomed tougher criminal penalties.
“People are tired of going to Walgreens and having someone unlock the door just to get a tube of toothpaste — including me,” said Del Seymour, known as the mayor of the Tenderloin for his activism in the neighborhood, a low-income area of San Francisco. “We’ve got to get some responsibility or it’s just the Wild Wild West.”
David Townsend, a Democratic consultant who advises moderate candidates and causes in California, sees the election more as a repudiation of progressive policies than a shift to the right.
The crime-related ballot measure that passed Tuesday reversed parts of a landmark 2014 measure that softened punishments for certain crimes. The decade-old law, Proposition 47, had passed overwhelmingly and had come in response to a Supreme Court directive that California take immediate steps to reduce its inmate population.
“What happened is the progressives went too far,” Mr. Townsend said.
“Voters believe that if you commit a crime you should go to jail,” Mr. Townsend said. “The issue is what kind of jail, what kind of rehab, what kind of diversion. But to just basically get a citation is ridiculous.”
Proposition 36 was so popular that Democratic candidates in some battleground House districts endorsed it. That was despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s opposition to the measure and the use in some areas of the slogan “Make Crime Illegal Again,” a conservative appeal that played on the MAGA mantra.
Tinisch Hollins, the executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, a criminal justice reform organization that opposed Proposition 36, said she believed that frustrated voters did not fully understand the measure’s implications.
“What I have learned from this is that there is a desperation for solutions and that people want to see better conditions and thought this initiative was going to provide it and didn’t read the fine print,” Ms. Hollins said.
She pointed out that the measure provides no extra money for drug treatment or housing, even though proponents said it would reduce homelessness by threatening drug users with prison time unless they complete treatment.
The state Legislative Analyst’s Office has estimated that Proposition 36 will result in potentially thousands more people being incarcerated in California and add hundreds of millions of dollars in extra costs for parole and imprisonment.
Now, Ms. Hollins worries that the new criminal justice landscape in California will exacerbate racial disparities and fill up the prisons again, and that the police will become more aggressive in the streets.
“I think they may be emboldened in doing their jobs now because of the leadership and rhetoric that will be coming from the White House,” she said.
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