LOS ANGELES — George Gascón has spent four years as Los Angeles’ preeminent lightning rod, drawing endless heat over his progressive overhaul of the county’s district attorney office. But his reelection bid has felt less like an ideological brawl than a rout.
Public polling puts Gascón 30 points behind his challenger Nathan Hochman, a Republican-turned-independent former federal prosecutor. The slew of high-wattage Democratic politicians and funders who clambered to back his 2020 bid for district attorney — from Vice President Kamala Harris to George Soros — are nowhere to be found. Neither campaign has shown an appetite to cast the contest as a high-stakes broader referendum on criminal justice reform that would surely launch a thousand think pieces pondering the fate of the movement nationwide.
But Gascón’s widely anticipated loss could still leave a lasting imprint on the public safety debate, particularly as he appears on the same ballot as a state initiative that would increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes. Together, those races — along with the second Bay Area progressive prosecutor in two years to face a recall — would mark a notable rollback of the reforms California voters embraced over the last decade at a time when crime consistently ranks as a top issue in the presidential election.
The ballot initiative and Gascón’s race “will be combined, and rightfully so, as a signal that people want change,” said Rick Caruso, a centrist Democrat and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate who is backing Hochman. “And I think the elected officials in office are going to take notice of it. I hope they do. If they're smart, they will.”
The progressive prosecutor movement boomed — and in some high-profile cases, retreated — throughout the country, but few faces have been as prominent as Gascón’s. A former beat cop who then became San Francisco’s district attorney, Gascón’s challenge to Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey in 2020 surged just as George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis prompted a national reckoning on police violence and the criminal justice system.
Prominent California Democrats (Gov. Gavin Newsom, then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti) and national party figures (Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders , Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren ) endorsed his campaign. With the aid of a super PAC seeded by the country’s most prominent criminal justice reform advocates, Gascón won handily over Lacey, a fellow Democrat.
He instituted sweeping changes in the nation’s most populous county — largely ending cash bail, banning his prosecutors from seeking the death penalty and rejecting the use of many sentencing enhancements. Those shifts — coupled with the nationwide crime spike of the pandemic era — led to immediate backlash.
Gascón’s popularity never recovered during his term. He got just 25 percent of the vote in this year’s March primary against a crowded field of challengers, a dire number for an incumbent.
Progressives say Gascón was especially hampered in Los Angeles, where he faced two recall attempts that failed to make the ballot but fostered a steady stream of negative headlines and vocal resistance from fellow prosecutors inside the district attorney’s office.
“Is it a huge bummer to see him down in the polls? If that's correct, yes, of course,” said Jessica Brand, founder of the Wren Collective, a group that advocates for criminal justice reform nationwide. But, she said, it is not especially surprising “after four years of a lot of law enforcement money, a lot of inside attacks, a lot of tech money to try to get rid of him.”
And, she added, “in a city that is really struggling with housing and substance use, where people often look to the criminal legal system to solve those issues, even though it's not very effective at solving those issues.”
Gascón has pushed back vigorously on Hochman’s critiques of his job performance, but he admits he has struggled to sell his work to the public.
“One of the things that I haven't done well enough is communicating — just really conveying what we're doing, why we're doing it and what is occurring as a result of what we're doing,” Gascón told POLITICO. “And that is 100 percent on me.”
Despite his dreary poll numbers, Gascón professes to be bullish about the race. He said that when voters hear about the accomplishments of his office — the resentencing initiatives, the exoneration of people who were wrongly convicted in the past — they like what they hear. He has secured the endorsement of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, the powerful county Labor Federation and a long list of local Democratic clubs and elected officials.
“We sort of lost some of that national attention, if you will, but we have gained so much more locally,” said Gascón, adding that Democrats like Harris and Newsom have “bigger fish to fry” this election.
Another central part of his message has been going after Hochman as a covert Republican ill-fitted for deep-blue Los Angeles, emphasizing how his challenger only recently left the GOP after running as the party’s nominee for attorney general two years ago.
Hochman anticipated Gascón’s partisan jabs and worked hard to neutralize them. He endorsed Harris, secured endorsements from local Democrats and aligned himself with the “hard middle” instead of MAGA.
“I am pro-choice my whole life. I'm pro-LGBTQ rights my whole life. I voted for the person over the party my whole life,” Hochman said in an interview.
The result is a race for a technically nonpartisan office that has failed to rouse voters along the typical red-versus-blue lines, much to Gascón’s detriment.
Brian Goldsmith, a Democratic strategist who is consulting for an anti-Gascón super PAC, credited Hochman with working “really hard to avoid falling into the trap of running as a Republican.”
“Gascón's only hope from the beginning of this, given his job approval, personal unfavorability, the perceptions of crime, was to tribalize the race — turn it into a Democrat vs. Republican thing. That would've required a whole bunch of resources in a county that is bigger than 40 states,” Goldsmith said.
Money — or in Gascón’s case, the lack of it — has been a dominant feature of this contest.
Hochman has the cash edge. By the end of September, his campaign reached the county’s $2.5 million contributions cap and began directing donors to a foundation supporting crime victims and anti-recidivism programs. And he’s been buoyed by at least $4.5 million in digital advertising and direct mail from a constellation of independent groups, including ones financed by Caruso, the local police and firefighters’ unions and Los Angeles tech entrepreneur Diego Berdakin.
For Gascón, the cash disparity has been most directly felt by the absence of the key outside players who backed his 2020 campaign. In that first run, six- and seven-figure donations from wealthy progressives gave him a major boost over Lacey , the incumbent. That support has been largely missing this time around. One group, which has gotten money from prominent criminal justice advocate Quinn Delaney, has come to his aid, producing door-hangers that feature side-by-side photos of Hochman and Trump. But help from other one-time supporters, namely Soros, has not materialized.
“Mr. Soros’s focus this cycle is on national elections, particularly the presidential contest. This reflects the unprecedented stakes facing the nation and should not be misconstrued as an abandonment of Gascón or other local leaders who are implementing effective and humane approaches to public safety,” a spokesperson for Soros said. “Los Angeles County District Attorney Gascón has George Soros’s endorsement.”
Gascón said there has more broadly been a “retraction” in the resources available for social justice in recent years.
“You don't undo 40 or 50 years of wrongdoing in a four-year term,” he said. “I think some people expected naively that they would just give a lot of money [in] one shot … and it will be like turning a light switch on, and the light will continue to stay on magically.”
The statewide crime initiative, Proposition 36, is another looming factor. The ballot measure rolls back some of the reforms championed by Gascón that voters approved 10 years ago and, based on public polling, is widely expected to pass. A number of reform-oriented donors have written hefty checks to the “No on 36” campaign, leading some observers to speculate that the initiative may be sucking up dollars that otherwise would have aided Gascón.
But even the statewide effort to fend off stricter penalties has lagged in fundraising, at least in comparison to the money that poured in for reform efforts in the past. In a crowded election season, with high-stakes races all over the map competing for liberals’ dollars, the progressive public safety efforts have fallen out of vogue.
"What really happened for Gascón, and to a lesser extent Prop 36, is when people crunched the numbers they — and also the people they respect — didn’t see these races as winnable,” said one Democratic strategist who advises reform-oriented donors and was granted anonymity to bluntly discuss the dynamics around political giving. “They are getting hit up all over the place — and they have to calculate whether they can get a better ROI by giving to operations on the ground in Pennsylvania, or the Montana Senate race or House races."
Hochman has another theory on why progressive money hasn’t flowed to his opponent’s aid — that his pitch as someone who can more competently execute elements of the reform agenda than Gascón could has made him less of a bogeyman to the left.
“When you hear myself with my background, talking about how we can actually bring real and effective criminal justice reform while prioritizing public safety, you don't view me as a threat to that agenda,” Hochman said. “You view me as someone who can actually get it carried out.”
Progressives would likely scoff at that, noting that Hochman is running indisputably to Gascón’s right. Elements of Hochman’s and his allies’ messaging have the vintage tough-on-crime aesthetics: ominous music, grainy security footage of crime and chaos. The ads prominently feature law enforcement in uniform, a visual reminder that the outrage over police violence that dominated 2020 has receded somewhat from the political zeitgeist.
But reform advocates take some solace in the fact that Hochman is not running a solely lock ‘em up campaign. He has also incorporated reformers’ language — promising to address “root causes of crime” — and says his work as both a defense attorney and prosecutor made him a believer in the need for accountability in the justice system.
Brand, who tracks prosecutor races nationwide, said she’s seen other challengers to progressive incumbents make similar gestures to the reform movement.
“They do it because it polls well. I don’t think everybody’s had a hearts and minds change. I’m not sure Nathan Hochman believes that to his bones, but he knows he’s got to do things differently,” Brand said.
She added: “The public has been educated enough to know that the same ‘lock everybody up and send everybody away to life without parole’ just is not tenable anymore. It was never tenable, but they know that it didn't work. And people who run for office have to mold their messaging and their policies to that.”
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