John McCoy/AP Photo
Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) speaks during her election night party, June 7, 2022, in Los Angeles. Bass and billionaire developer Rick Caruso advanced to a mayoral runoff election in November.
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 million 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.
