There are a few clear lessons from the recent primary elections in California. The first is that California is still a one-party state. The second is that once partisanship is removed in the eyes of voters, conservative forces have a lot of room to operate. Despite their failure at a federal level, conservative forces are on the move in California using a playbook that will be repeated across the country.
In California’s top statewide races, Democrats easily finished with a large majority of votes across the board, with Republicans struggling to even approach 40% of the statewide vote. As recently as a decade ago, Republicans in California could threaten Democrats when they had an advantage in the national climate. Today, there’s effectively no threat of Republicans being involved in state-level governing. Republicans may pick up a few seats in California if there ends up being a giant Republican wave this fall, but they are still a defeated force at the federal and state level in all but a few pockets of California.
The election did see some huge results which will have implications across the country, in particular on the municipal level. California represents the vanguard of a phenomenon of urban reaction. Progressive movements centered on racial justice, criminal justice reform, tenants’ rights and more have spent the last decade building power locally in cities across the country; these movements are now running into a serious and well-financed backlash from the entrenched interests they vowed to fix.
This is most apparent in the successful recall of the progressive San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin, but can also be seen in the first-place primary finish of the real estate developer and recent Republican Rick Caruso in the Los Angeles mayoral race, and the first-place primary finish of Los Angeles’s rogue sheriff, Alex Villanueva. This comes on the heels of Republican Ann Davison winning the Seattle city attorney election and as a number of other Republican-aligned candidates make headway in Democratic primaries and non-partisan municipal elections in a number of historically progressive cities. This election cycle is the first test case of how entrenched powers in cities react to threats.
The recall of Boudin is instructive. The San Francisco power establishment had its sights on him from the day he won, and used a number of tactics to stymie and ultimately defeat him.
The first prong is one we will see more and more as progressives try to enact their democratic mandates in municipal governments: a police work slowdown. Police in the United States have operated with impunity for decades, effectively isolated from democratic accountability to the communities they serve. In California in particular, police and sheriff departments have allegedly engaged in large-scale criminality, operating in many locales as gangs that terrorize the population or as occupying forces. When police see the threat of being held accountable to the public, they impose costs that protect their positions.
This is an age-old tactic of conservative sections of the state when they feel threatened by elected progressive governments. After Boudin was elected, police in San Francisco stopped fully doing their jobs, a tactic used by the Baltimore police department after the death of Freddie Gray and the New York police department to punish Mayor Bill de Blasio. San Francisco now boasts a woeful clearance rate. Police efforts to sabotage Boudin went so far that the prosecutor had to rent a U-Haul to carry out a major arrest because the police refused to participate.
The message to residents was clear: remove Boudin and stop efforts to exercise accountability or people won’t be safe.
The second prong of the attack on Boudin came directly from capital. San Francisco is increasingly run by extremely wealthy tech oligarchs who can outspend any opposition by huge margins. Actually dealing with crime involves spending more on social programs and redistributing wealth downwards, anathema to the ultra-wealthy. Progressive prosecutors threaten a shift from prosecuting petty crime to enforcing regulations on businesses and the wealthy. The oligarchs can finance massive political campaigns, but they can also threaten capital flight and capital strikes, another age-old tactic to resist progressive government and democratic oversight.
In the US and California in particular, a new wealthy class has been moving from suburbs to cities and displacing the urban working-class population. In San Francisco, billionaires and the ascendant class of wealthy tech workers moved into a city with all that urban life entails – noise, homelessness, people of many economic and racial backgrounds in close proximity, etc – and have responded by trying to turn the city into the suburbs. As the housing crisis worsens and cities become more wealthy and more unequal, we will see a sort of reverse of the white flight of the 1950s and 60s and the suburban tax revolts of the late 1970s, as the new urban ruling classes seek to instate a homogeneous society in place of the bustling, messy, diverse, cultured places they inherited.
The final prong of the recall effort was a massive campaign by the media, which has ramped up around the country. Boudin’s tenure was marked by breathless coverage of crime and increasing media alarmism about the city becoming a war zone. Hundreds of articles have been written in San Francisco and elsewhere attributing rising crime to progressive prosecutors and criminal justice reform.
This hysteria is largely evidence-free: crime has been rising nationwide at about the same rate, with no correlation whatsoever to progressive prosecutors or city governments. In fact, cities with Republican mayors and prosecutors are far more dangerous. Republican-governed Jacksonville, for example, is about the same size as San Francisco and has three times the murder rate. The media, however, has focused almost exclusively on progressive-run jurisdictions. In San Francisco, people were whipped into a frenzy, despite the fact that the city is vastly safer than it was for most of the previous 50 years.
Boudin’s recall is the tip of the spear of reaction, rather than just one example of backlash against progressive governance. San Francisco is a unique city that, despite its left-leaning reputation, gave unique opportunities for conservative forces to move so aggressively. For one, Boudin only won in the first place with 36% of the vote, hardly a clear mandate. Indeed, the 40% who voted to retain him demonstrates that, if anything, he gained support over his tenure.
In contrast, the handy re-election victories of progressive prosecutors Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Kim Foxx in Chicago further demonstrate Boudin’s unique vulnerability. Krasner and Foxx both lost white voters, winning re-election on the back of large margins from the Latino and especially Black voters who together make up a majority of both their districts. In San Francisco, however, Black people and Latinos together make up just 20% of the population, with Black residents alone just 5% of residents.
San Francisco is also vastly wealthier than most other American cities, leaving a much smaller base of people affected by policies that primarily harm poor and marginalized people. The election map shows that support for the recall was strongest in the wealthiest areas. In Philadelphia, someone seeing a homeless encampment on their way to work is likely to be a working-class person; in San Francisco, there’s a decent chance this person is a millionaire or even billionaire who will make their distaste everyone’s problem.
There is much to learn in these results for progressives, but no clear path forward. How can institutions be made to actually respond to democratic leadership? How can the ultra-wealthy be counteracted? Can the left build an alternative media structure? There are no obvious answers, and, absent a plan, the forces of municipal conservative backlash will continue unabated.
Unless activists, workers and tenants regroup, reflect and commit to organization and politics on a mass level, the results in California will be the first in a series that serve to further militarize cities, stratify them by class, and brutalize the most vulnerable. These results are a canary in the coalmine for anyone who wants thriving, diverse, equitable cities that are good places to live and work.
Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America
