Election post 1: Election Results

Hi everyone, I’ll be rolling out a few posts over the next few days with election results and reflections. After that, I’ll go back to spacing out my posts. Thank you for reading!

ELECTION RESULTS

With gratitude to Bolts Magazine and others who’ve tracked and reported on these results, here’s my summary of some of the most important outcomes in November.

Californians rejected a ballot measure to stop prisons from punishing incarcerated people for refusing a work assignment, which advocates called a measure to end prison slavery. Meanwhile, Nevada voters approved a measure abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude as a criminal punishment.

California voters overwhelmingly passed Prop 36, which increases punishment for some theft and drug crimes by reclassifying them as felonies, undoing the reforms of prop 47. The bill was marketed as a middle of the road, balanced bill in favor of treatment, but that’s not what Californians are going to get (echoing the national election results). Instead, one estimate finds that this will increase California’s prison population by 35% in the next 5 years, while also removing hundreds of millions of dollars that communities had been getting under the old law to pay for drug treatment. I highly doubt that the state government is prepared to spend the vast sums (billions of dollars?) necessary to imprison that many people under constitutional standards, so there may be a crisis brewing in 2025 as the government grapples with what the voters chose.

In L.A. County, George Gascón lost his reelection bid to Nathan Hochman, a 2020 Republican candidate for state attorney general who has vowed to roll back reforms, which will further exacerbate challenges in the jail and in CA prisons. This is a really painful loss, but expected. In 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protest movement, supporters put $10million into this race; this year, he raised 1/10th as much. Organizers on the ground were fractured this year (for reasons having nothing to do with Gascón), and there wasn’t a unified campaign to reelect him. The conditions that put Gascón into office in 2020 were really unusual, and organizers will have to do a lot of painstaking work to build a durable coalition to elect progressive leadership in the future.

In Orlando, Monique Worrell easily won her DA race against an appointed incumbent that governor DeSantis put in office after removing her from office over policy disagreements. So the question will again become whether the governor is going to overrule the voters again. Similarly, progressive Austin DA José Garza sailed through to a second term, fending off Elon Musk who spent $650,000 in the primary against him. Both Monique and José are really strong retail politicians, very engaged with community organizations and field partners, and felt as a real presence in their communities.

And Sean Teare won the seat in Harris County in a very close race, after resoundingly defeating a notoriously punitive and erratic DA in a primary earlier this year, who we hear Trump plans to make a U.S. Attorney. Musk also gave $2million to oust democratic judges, which seemed initially successful. When the votes were fully counted, though, dem judges won 9 out of 10 seats in Harris County. The incumbent dem sheriff also won, beating a challenger who vowed to cooperate with ICE.

Reform minded and progressive DAs also won in Arapahoe County (east Denver), CO, Oakland County (north Detroit), MI, Chatham County (Savannah), GA, Lake County (north Chicago), IL, Albany County, NY, Hamilton County (Cincinnati), OH, and Franklin County (Columbus), OH.

On a more somber note, in Arizona, voters passed ballot measures to ratchet up policing of immigrants and unhoused people. One measure will make unauthorized crossing of the state’s southern border a state crime punishable by up to six months in jail and empower local and state cops to arrest people suspected of being undocumented. The other measure aims to force cities to crack down on homeless encampments by allowing property owners to file reimbursement claims against cities for “maintaining a public nuisance.” I highlight these measures because they are outside the realm of what people normally consider to be “criminal justice,” yet they will absolutely implicate policing and incarceration.