Progressive District Attorney George Gascon survived two recall efforts but he did not survive last night's election. He lost by more than 20 points to Nate Hochman who presented himself as a moderate Democrat.

Hochman, who polls long predicted would oust Gascón, held a commanding 23-point lead based on early returns, outpacing the progressive incumbent by more than half a million votes. Gascón called Hochman to concede early Wednesday morning.

“The rightward shift across America last night is heartbreaking. Democrats have a long road ahead, but the work is more vital than ever and our commitment will not waver,” Gascón said in a statement, referencing President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris...

Returns as of Wednesday morning showed Hochman receiving more than 1.4 million votes and Gascón around 890,000 — or about 61% to 38% in favor of the challenger.

It was a blowout and Hochman didn't hold back when claiming his victory was a clear mandate for change to Gascon's "pro-criminal extreme policies."

The voters of Los Angeles County have spoken and have said enough is enough of D.A. Gascon’s pro-criminal extreme policies; they look forward to a safer future. As D.A., I look forward to representing all of the people, whether they voted for me or not, since their safety will be…

— Nathan Hochman (@NathanHochmanDA) November 6, 2024

Gascon was a truly terrible DA who always put the concerns of criminals ahead of victims. He also seems like an angry and fragile personality. He has been sued multiple times for retaliation by his own employees. He has already lost one case in which he testified on his own behalf and could still lose several more. His commitment to his extreme ideology might not waiver but he won't be in charge of dispensing justice in the largest county in the United States.

And it turns out that was just the start of the housecleaning that took place last night. In Alameda County, progressive DA Pamela Price was recalled. Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao was also recalled.

Voters in the East Bay appear to have delivered pretty decisive victories to the recall campaigns targeting Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price. Based on votes counted as of Wednesday morning, the recall of Thao is passing with 65% "yes" votes, and the recall of Price is passing with a strikingly similar margin...

The recall of Price, which has been framed as a backlash against progressive views of criminal justice and a push for more punitive prosecutions of those who commit crimes, was fairly widely predicted. The campaign to recall her followed much negative response to her handling of high-profile cases, including the 2021 freeway shooting of toddler Jasper Wu, and Delonzo Logwood, a man who received a relatively light sentence in a plea deal despite being implicated in three separate homicides.

As KRON4 reports, the recall of Price is passing by 64.8% of the vote as of Wednesday morning, with 35.2% voting "no."

And we're still not done because Californians also humiliated Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Democrats last night by passing prop. 36 despite their months of effort to keep it off the ballot.

California voters on Tuesday approved a November ballot measure that will impose stricter penalties for repeat theft and crimes involving fentanyl, steering away from recent progressive policies that critics blamed for increased lawlessness...

Proposition 36 will make it a felony for someone to steal merchandise of any value after two previous offenses and can lead to longer jail or prison sentences.

The ballot measure also allows judges to sentence convicted drug dealers who traffic in large quantities of hard drugs, including fentanyl, or who are armed with a gun while trafficking the drugs to state prison instead of county jails. It will also create a “treatment-mandated felony” as a new category of crime, by giving some eligible drug offenders an option for treatment instead of jail time.

The final tally isn't in yet but with a little more than half the vote in, Prop. 36 was winning 70% to 30%. It was another blowout in opposition to progressive criminal justice reform.

Vox noticed the trend in California and the fact that it also extended to equally blue Colorado.

Another ballot measure, which would require some people to serve more time in prison before they qualify for parole, passed by a comfortable margin in Colorado, a reliably blue state, on Tuesday as well.

Why is this happening? According to Vox, specific incidents of violent crime are being sensationalized by the media.

Media coverage of crime can often overstate trends and sometimes sensationalizes incidents that grab people’s attention. And law-and-order campaigns — the kind of campaigns that Trump ran, for example — are a mainstay of American politics and appear in virtually every election cycle in local, state, and national races.

That link goes to a story about the murder of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old student who was attacked and murdered while jogging on the University of Georgia campus by Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan who had crossed the border illegally in 2022.

Vox's suggestion that some crimes get sensationalized is pretty amazing in this context, since the reason all of these criminal justice reformers are in office in the first place is that Black Lives Matter spent years sensationalizing a handful of crimes and presenting the public with the idea that unarmed black men were routinely being murdered by the police. Surveys taken in 2021 showed that progressives believed the number of victims was vastly higher than the reality.

The question posed was “How many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?” As you can see, a majority of “very liberal” respondents believed the number was 1,000 or more, with nearly 22% saying 10,000 or more...

If people had a better handle on the facts surrounding this topic, such as the number of unarmed black men actually killed by police, it would probably change the public discussion quite a bit. The fact that many in the public have mistaken impressions seems to fall at the feet of the media.

This has been true for a long time. We learned after the shooting of Mike Brown that it makes a huge difference when disinformation (“Hands up, don’t shoot“) gets circulated in advance of facts. And yet the media keeps making the same mistake over and over. They made it again recently when reporting that Jacob Blake was “unarmed” when he was shot. In fact, he later admitted he had a knife in his hand.

I could make a list of a dozen other examples where the media got it wrong on this issue going all the way back to the death of Trayvon Martin. The falsehoods arrive in blaring headlines and the corrections are walked back quietly. And that’s one reason you had so many people rioting last summer and so many ready to defund the police since then.

It's fine that Vox is trying to correct mistaken impressions about crime statistics, but where were they when those mistaken impressions were running in the opposite direction? I can tell you. They were cheering them on. Now that the country, even the blue places like California, are trying to correct the policies and personnel put in place on the basis of those past errors about crime, Vox is suddenly concerned.