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JUNE

**16, 2022**

Dayen on TAP

The Premature Narrative on Democrats and Crime

As they keep counting votes in Los Angeles and elsewhere, last week's
claim of a backlash to criminal justice reform is disappearing.

****

Last week, elections were held in California, and media desks were
ready. They had a district attorney subject to recall in San Francisco,
and a high-profile mayor's race in Los Angeles turning on the subjects
of homelessness and crime. If both races broke right, they could bundle
Chesa Boudin's downfall and Rick Caruso's triumph and pull off the
Holy Grail of political reporting: the election trend piece.

That piece was written, and replicated. "Progressive Backlash in
California Fuels Democratic Debate Over Crime," The New York Times

warned. The reckoning

was here. Progressive calls to defund and rethink policing were being
punished in some of the most left-leaning cities on the West Coast.

But then they kept counting the votes.

East Coast media once again neglected an enduring fact about California
elections: Votes are counted slowly and deliberately. All state voters
receive ballots via mail, and mail ballots can come into registrar
offices up to a week later and still be counted, as long as they are
postmarked by Election Day. Hundreds of thousands of votes have been and
will be counted after the

**Times**and others wrote their trend pieces. And in just the first
week, several outcomes have materially changed.

On the day after the election

in Los Angeles, Caruso had 42.12 percent of the vote, with Karen Bass in
second with 36.95 percent. As of Thursday morning, those numbers had
flipped : Bass now
has 41.05 percent, and Caruso has 38.29 percent. With plenty left to
count, on the current trajectory Caruso could scrape 35 percent.

This is a

**terrible**result for Caruso, given the $40 billion he plowed
into the
race. He outspent Bass by more than 12 to 1
,
in a race where the powerful local labor groups quietly endorsed
third-place finisher Kevin de León (a former labor organizer with the
state teachers union) and spent next to nothing. For Caruso, a
ubiquitous presence on TV and in mailboxes in the months leading up to
the election, to not break 40 percent in a fragmented field shows a
broad rejection of his crime and homelessness message.

In fact, most of the tough-on-crime narratives told on election night
are faltering as votes come in. Authoritarian L.A. sheriff Alex
Villanueva

is down to 31.86 percent in the first round, a shockingly bad result
against no-name challengers. The city attorney race is trending away
from the law-and-order candidates in the field, with one reformer likely
in the runoff and a second close to it. Progressives are now winning key
city council races. Nothing in the actual election results suggests that
Angelenos have driven a backlash on criminal justice reform.

In fact, none of the evidence has held up. Boudin will still be
recalled, but that race has tightened to 55-45
,
from 60-40 on election night. In larger counties like Alameda and Contra
Costa Counties, progressive district attorneys and sheriff candidates
were victorious
.
The tough-on-crime prosecutor in Sacramento who ran for state attorney
general is deep in fourth place
with only
7.5 percent of the vote. I won't make the same mistake as these
reporters and say there will be no backlash amid an uptick in violent
crime; it's just that it's not really to be found in California's
election results.

Inattentive media tried to bootstrap one district attorney recall to a
bunch of others in which the counting wasn't complete to paint a
completely false narrative of where Democratic voters are at on crime
policy. Alas, corrections won't be made and the narrative won't be
reset; "I got it wrong" isn't in the vocabulary of our punditocracy.

~ DAVID DAYEN

Follow David Dayen on Twitter

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Pete Buttigieg's Day Job

The ambitious transportation secretary has the power to go after
multiple abuses by the airlines and signal administration support for
suffering consumers. He's barely touched it. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

The Hidden Driver of High Gas Prices

Reduced refinery capacity, in large part triggered by industry
consolidation, has been a major factor. BY DAVID DAYEN

A Spineless Gun Agreement

Congress is ready to settle for less, or nothing at all. BY GABRIELLE
GURLEY

Time to Pass the Global Minimum Corporate Tax

Biden stepped up and helped negotiate a global deal last fall. Now,
Congress has to act. BY REUVEN AVI-YONAH

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