New York Times kinda, vaguely, sorta admits that maybe Willie Horton tactics don't always work.
Janet Protasiewicz, a progressive judicial nominee, smoked her opponent by 11 points to win a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Her conservative opponent responded like a cranky toddler, whining that he’d concede had he faced a worthy opponent (ht my good friend Meredith Clark). In Chicago, Brandon Johnson, a former school teacher who’d also previously called for defunding the police, won over a tough-on-crime conservative.
Both races, especially Chicago’s, hinged on crime. In that, like every race, the conservative tried to get elected by fearmongering about crime and trashing mild criminal justice reforms. In both cases, it resoundingly failed.
The New York Times thinks that it’s primarily because of abortion though, even though it’s not really an issue in Chicago.
‘Tough on crime’ has limits.
In Chicago, a deep-blue city in a blue state where abortion remains legal, the dominant issue in the mayor’s race was crime — and the “tough on crime” candidate, Paul Vallas, lost to Mr. Johnson, who walked back his support for cuts to police funding but stood by his position that a fundamentally different approach to public safety was needed.
Mr. Vallas’s campaign “is a very easy campaign to run,” said Christopher Mooney, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago. “You just scare everybody. It’s very effective, historically.”
Which makes it noteworthy that it didn’t work.
Political dynamics in a large city cannot necessarily be extrapolated nationally. But Republicans tried to make crime an issue in Wisconsin, too, including by putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot to tighten cash bail policies — and, while the amendment passed, it did not drive Republican turnout. Nor did Mr. Kelly gain ground by focusing his campaign on crime.
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