(PHILIP PACHECO/Agence France-Presse/AFP via Getty Images)

“Getting here was the easy part,” Chesa Boudin said in a victory speech after his 2019 election to the position of San Francisco district attorney. Three years later, despite presiding over a steep descent into lawlessness in the city on the bay, the progressive prosecutor might be about to prove himself right — though not in the way he had hoped.
Voters in what is perhaps America’s most liberal city will today vote on whether or not to recall Boudin. The polls suggest he will lose. Boudin’s 2019 victory was heralded as part of a national moment: a major milestone for a movement of progressive prosecutors promising a radical new approach to law and order. Now, his possible downfall is also part of a bigger story: the Left-wing poster boy who boasted about emptying jails, not prosecuting “quality-of-life” crimes, and “reimagining” criminal justice has become the face of the backlash against a lax approach in the midst of a crime wave.
It’s not hard to understand why the recall race has attracted outsized attention. Whether it’s the open air drug markets of the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood or the brazen shoplifting that has caused many retail chains to simply shut up shop in the city, anarchic scenes from San Francisco have captured the popular imagination of a public increasingly concerned about crime. From the mass resignations in his DA office to the tragic cases of former offenders committing violent, sometimes lethal, crimes after being released on his watch, there’s no shortage of evidence for the case against Boudin.
If the recall race has been an opportunity for the radical prosecutor to restate his progressive principles, he hasn’t exactly seized it. Instead, he has attempted a half-hearted and unconvincing pivot to a tougher (or at least slightly less lawless) approach and resorted to partisan name-calling, attempting to smear the recall campaign as a Republican plot. Not something that you want to be in a city where just 7% of voters are registered Republican. “It’s really problematic that we are having a very Trumpian conversation in San Francisco,” Boudin said recently.
But this is a blue-on-blue fight, with liberal San Franciscans exasperated with the incompetence and extremism of a prosecutor for whom their safety doesn’t always seem like the top priority. As recall campaigner Andrea Shorter told me last year: “The inconvenient truth for Boudin is that it’s not just a small group of conservatives that are out to recall Democratic politicians… We are interested in and support criminal justice reform. We understand its implications in terms of racial justice. I myself am African-American and also LGBTQ. I have supported criminal justice reform for nearly three decades, but not at the expense of public safety.”
Boudin would certainly be a major scalp for those worried about safety in American cities — and his ousting would send a powerful national message about the politics of crime in an election year. But if it is possible to underplay the significance of the recall race, it’s also possible to let the parable of San Francisco obscure the bigger picture.
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