The Memo: Lightfoot is latest Democrat to fall to anger over crime

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is the latest Democrat to fall for public concerns about crime.

Lightfoot suffered an ignominious fate on Tuesday when she failed to even make the runoff in her bid for a second term.

Paul Vallas, a centrist Democrat who led the Chicago poll by a comfortable margin, has pledged to take a more vigorous look at the crime problem in the country’s third-largest city — and has been backed by the Fraternal Order of Police.

In contrast, Lightfoot had once attempted to take about $80 million from the police department’s budget.

“Paul Vallas, speaking out extensively on this issue, was one of the reasons he was able to get the largest share of the vote on Feb. 28,” said Tom Bowen, a Chicago-based Democratic strategist who worked for both Lightfoot and its predecessor Cream worked Emmanuel.

A Chicago GOP analyst, Chris Robling, agreed, calling the issue of crime “crucial.”

“The Vallas campaign made public safety and personal safety the focus of his campaign,” Robing added. “Obviously, the campaign’s polls and Vallas’ own feeling for the electorate was, ‘We’re not going to go wrong if we focus on public safety.'”

Of course, there were other factors in the mayor’s defeat – not the least of which was her penchant for alienating former allies and her failure to win the unwavering allegiance of a larger constituency in the city.

Still, the result is another data point that demonstrates the political dangers for Democrats who fail to convince voters that they are tough enough on crime.

In 2021, several progressive candidates hoping to run for mayor of New York City were defeated by Eric Adams (D), a former cop and centrist, in the Democratic primary.

That same year, voters in Minneapolis — the city where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in 2020 — strongly opposed an electoral measure that would have replaced the police department with a public safety department.

In June 2022, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin (D) was recalled by voters unhappy with his lenient approach to crime.

And although Democrats suffered fewer losses than expected in last November’s midterm elections, they were hit hard in upstate New York, where Republicans won four seats in the House of Representatives and polls showed crime was among voters’ top concerns.

Democratic strategist Basil Smikle claimed that “crime has always been a very important topic of conversation for the right” and that “conservatives have often racialized and urbanized crime”.

But he also conceded, “Democrats still have trouble talking about how to reduce crime” because the nuances the party often favors don’t always convince moderate voters.

This problem is particularly evident when crime rates rise, as they have during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now there is a new challenge on this topic.

President Biden faces a difficult policy decision thanks to a reformist law passed by the District of Columbia City Council.

The revision of the district’s penal code includes a number of changes that ease penalties.

When the law goes into effect, mandatory minimum sentences for all offenses other than first-degree murder will be abolished – and even then, the length of a compulsory sentence will be reduced from 30 years to 24 years.

The law also reduces maximum penalties for a range of crimes – often significantly. The maximum sentence for armed carjacking, for example, has gone from 40 years to 24 years. The maximum limit for unlawful possession of a gun by a criminal has been reduced from 15 years to 4 years.

The DC law is so far-reaching at a time when crime rates in the district are elevated that Mayor Muriel Bowser, a mainstream Democrat who clashed with then-President Trump during the George Floyd protests, vetoed it. But the reformers in the council easily rallied the votes to override their veto.

The Republicans in Congress are now pressuring the Democrats as they push through a so-called rejection resolution on the DC bill. The rebuke that would overturn the DC bill has already passed the House of Representatives and appears to have a strong chance in the Senate as Senator Joe Manchin (DW.Va.) has expressed support for it.

In this scenario, Biden would be seriously stuck on how to use his veto power.

If the President lets the DC changes pass, Republicans will accuse him of being soft on crime. If he opposes them, he will offend progressives — and anger advocates who want the District of Columbia freed from congressional oversight.

Republican strategist Brad Blakeman told The Hill that the label of being lax on crime is “utterly toxic” to Democrats, including Biden.

“But you can’t expect anything else when people feel unsafe and feel like the criminals are running the city,” Blakeman added.

Center Democrats have had concerns about their party’s political vulnerability to crime since at least 2020.

The slogan “Defund the Police” in particular was viewed by many as disastrously counterproductive – and the reason the party failed to perform exceptionally in the 2020 congressional election, even as Biden ended Trump’s tenure in the White House.

In his first State of the Union address in March 2022, Biden prominently called for “funding the police.”

Some Democratic strategists like Bowen believe a modulated approach can pay off for his party.

Voters “want their leaders to fight a complex problem with complex solutions,” he said.

But so far, Democrats are struggling to unlock the code on the matter.

The memo is a column by Niall Stanage.