When George Gascón won the Los Angeles County District Attorney race this month, it was another in a string of victories for the criminal justice reform movement. Gascón, a former cop who had previously served as San Francisco DA, had been endorsed by Black Lives Matter and many of the fellow reformers occupying DA seats across the country. He promised to do more to reduce police shootings and pledged to re-open some of the investigations into such shootings that had been closed by incumbent Jackie Lacey.
But the result was also a demonstration of how much money is required to compete in a major DA race these days. The price tags for political races at all levels has been going up, and DA contests are no exception, with more than $19 million being spent between Gascón and Lacey.
How money drives competition in DA races
The source of each candidate’s money is revealing—as the Los Angeles Times put it in an October story on the race, most of Lacey’s funds came from law enforcement unions leery of the progressive reforms Gascón might put in place, whereas most of Gascón’s donations came from wealthy individuals. His top donors read like a who’s who of spenders in the criminal justice reform space:$2.25 million from George Soros, a combined $2.1 million from Netflix CEO and his wife Patty Quillin, $448,000 from Akonadi Foundation founder Quinn Delaney, $225,000 from Open Philanthropy founder Cari Tuna.
These donors have directly or indirectly funded a number of progressive candidates for district attorney’s races across the country, especially in Democratic strongholds like LA. For the past few years, the criminal justice reform movement has realized the power of elected prosecutors to charge police officers who have engaged in egregious misconduct and avoid bringing the hammer down on nonviolent drug offenders and others. The relatively new focus on DA contests has led to some notable victories, like that of Philadeliphia DA Larry Krasner in 2017. It’s also caused the cost of these campaigns to balloon as pro-reform PACs battle it out with law enforcement unions and funnel millions into races that used to be relative political backwaters.
The Democratic primary that Krasner won in 2017 (essentially winning the office) saw over $4 million in campaign spending, twice as much as the previous race, an amount that was sizably bumped up by a $1.5 million spend from a Soros-funded PAC. The following year, Oregon’s Washington County (which borders Portland) hosted the most expensive DA race in state history, with progressive Max Wall getting boosted by $700,00 from a PAC linked to Tuna, who with her husband, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, funds a variety of criminal justice reform causes. The couple’s 501(c)(4), the Accountable Justice Action Fund (AJAC), donated $2 million to the Law and Justice PAC in 2018, which in turn has back Wall and spent $1.2 million to support progressive challenger Robert Langford in Nevada’s Clark County DA race that year (that’s the county that includes Las Vegas). The AJAC also donated nearly $300,000 to another pro-Langford PAC.
Langford, like Wall, lost, but they both forced their opponents to spend lavishly to defend their seats. That sort of conflict has repeated all over the country as individual county DA races set records. In Michigan this year, both the Washtenaw County and Oakland County DA contests setting records for fundraising even without the kind of outside PAC spending seen in denser urban areas. Another notable DA race saw José Garza oust incumbent Margaret Moore in a landslide in Texas’s Travis County (which includes Austin). Garza was backed by the Soros-funded Texas Justice & Public Safety PAC and the Real Justice PAC, which was co-founded by celebrity activist Shaun King and has received more than $1.8 from Tuna.
Democrat-on-Democrat warfare
One quirk of many of these races is that they are fought between Democrats who are all trying to claim the mantle of progressivism, even if they are entrenched incumbents getting money from law enforcement unions. In the LA race, Lacey presented herself as a progressive realist in a debate during the primary earlier this year. (Thanks to California’s jungle primary rules she and Gascón faced off in both the primary and the general.)
Given that environment, the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May clearly gave a boost to reform-minded candidates. For weeks, the country was freshly focused on the institutional racism endemic to law enforcement, and police unions like those that support Lacey became politically toxic practically overnight. Many people and institutions examined the ways they contributed to racism and white supremacy; philanthropists who were already funding criminal justice reform redoubled their efforts, with Soros’s Open Society Foundation pledging to spend $220 million on racial justice efforts.
The Floyd protests clearly had some politicians rethinking their positions, with several high-profile California figures withdrawing their support of Lacey, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who switched his endorsement to Gascón. And the upheaval did not create fault lines that followed race or ethnicity: Lacey, a Black woman, was protested regularly by Black Lives Matter, which endorsed Gascón, who was born in Havana.
In most intra-Democrat fights, it's progressives who are at a money disadvantage; centrists tend to be more favored by deep-pocketed corporate interests, whereas the left is often more dependent on small donors. But when it comes to criminal justice reform, enough mega-donors have taken up the cause that progressives often have the edge—so much so that it inspires complaints from Soros-targeted incumbents. But with law enforcement unions increasingly deploying their resources to fight off reform, those donors are going to have to pony up even more if they want to continue flipping DA races.
