Today, I want to call attention to an important piece the Prospect ran on our website today. The article, by Los Angeles journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan, documents how Black Lives Matters’ Los Angeles chapter not merely turned street heat on police and prosecutorial practices, but helped frame several key election contests around those issues in ways that led to some signal victories.

Two victories were particularly notable in Los Angeles County—which, with ten million residents, is so large it would rank 11th in population if it were a state. In one, county voters unseated county District Attorney Jackie Lacey, whose record included virtually no prosecutions of cops, no matter their brutality, in favor of police reform advocate and former San Francisco DA George Gascón. It was BLM-LA’s yearslong campaign that brought Lacey’s record to public attention. And the Gascón/BLM victory was also a resounding vote against identity politics, as Lacey is Black and Gascón is white and Cuban.

In the other victory, for Ballot Measure J, voters mandated the county to set aside 10 percent of its unrestricted funds for social services, and prohibited use of those funds for law enforcement or prisons. As Kaplan notes, BLM framed the measure

not as a way to decrease police but to increase services desperately needed by Black, brown, and poorer neighborhoods. It turned out that voters found that adding services, rather than subtracting law enforcement, was an anti-racist cause they could more easily get behind.

But Los Angeles was not a one-off in this November’s elections when it came to police and criminal justice reform. According to a Washington Post tally, at least 22 reform DAs in the Gascón mode were elected in cities and counties around the country, and measures creating or strengthening civilian oversight and review of police were enacted in a number of municipalities, too. And beyond question, the voter mobilization efforts of BLM groups across the land contributed to Joe Biden’s winning margin.

So while "defund the police" is clearly not a slogan with electoral potential, the politically adept BLM movement understands that. For their part, though, moderate Democrats need to understand how important the multiracial movement against systemic police racism and abuse is to the present and future of their party and, yes, to winning elections. Nationally, Democrats need to lead with the universal bread-and-butter issues of creating a more just and vibrant economy—but curtailing a host of common police practices must be part of the mix, too.