How bad does it have to get?
Pro-crime DAs are on shaky ground in California with the Chesa Boudin recall passing by a wide margin and the Gascon recall looking pretty good. But even while San Francisco was moving to kick out Boudin, Des Moines Democrats were voting for another pro-crime DA Kimberly Graham.
So there’s two takeaways here.
1. The pro-crime crime movement embodied by “criminal justice reform” and backed by lefty billionaires like George Soros and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings isn’t done yet.
2. A big problem is that Republicans have failed to properly message on this. And one reason for that is that Republicans were compromised by libertarian cash and activists who pushed to dismantle the criminal justice system. From some of Rubio and Romney’s proposals to the First Step Act, to state actions by supposedly conservative governors, there’s a lot of GOP buy-in.
And so there’s nothing focused like the “tough-on-crime” wave that helped advance conservatives and Republicans in the late 80s and 90s. At this point it almost seems more likely to come from urban Democratic politicians. It’s not as if the messaging is hard to grasp or deliver, yet within a decade it’s become a foreign language to much of the GOP. And beyond limiting Republican election prospects, a failure to properly lay out what’s going on is also bad for America.
Leave a Reply