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.