Who Is Voting For Reform Prosecutors?

This story was produced in partnership with Split Ticket. 

Reform prosecutors entered the 2024 election year with significant headwinds: in recent years, they were recalled (Chesa Boudin in San Francisco), defeated (Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore City), and blowback to racial justice has mounted since the George Floyd summer nearly five years ago. 

But because prosecutors are elected at the county or circuit level, the politics of their elections are highly local. Prosecutor elections may not follow national trends —even as, for example, criminal justice issues like retail theft have become nationalized—and often reflect hyper-local sentiment about local criminal justice systems and the prosecutors themselves. For example, while Baltimore City’s Mosby received national media coverage for her reformist policies around marijuana prosecutions, she garnered the ire of local reformers and organizers for her relentless prosecution of Keith Davis, Jr. a Black man exonerated in 2023 for the 2015 murder of a security guard. Mosby’s successor Ivan Bates is often viewed as an anti-reformer, but he’s a difficult-to-categorize mix of reform and traditional prosecution. Bates is a former defense attorney who doggedly litigated cases involving The Baltimore Police Department’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force who also promised to pursue low-level, quality-of-life offenses. 

2024’s election results for reform prosecutors cannot be summed up in a single narrative like “Is the age of progressive prosecutors over?” Albany County, New York’s long-serving, regressive prosecutor David Soares was defeated by Democrat Lee Kindlon who will be Albany’s first new district attorney in 20 years. Democrat Amy Padden defeated Republican Carol Chambers in the race for district attorney for Colorado’s 18th Judicial District which covers Arapahoe County, home to nearly 700,000 people. Reformer Shaleena Cook Jones was reelected in Chatham County, the most populous county in Georgia outside the Atlanta metropolitan area.  There were wins for reformers in other big counties, but losses too —and one major, successful recall. Partnering with Split Ticket, The Garrison Project examined critical 2024 prosecutor elections in Texas, Florida, California and Michigan.

A good place to start is Monique Worrell, State Attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida which includes Orange and Osceola Counties, home to about 1.8 million people. Orange County is also home to Orlando, one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. In 2020, Worrell was elected by a huge, 30 point margin. But in 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis suspended Worrell, claiming that she failed to aggressively prosecute crime. DeSantis then installed a successor, Andrew Bain. 

This year, Worrell defeated Bain by 15 points and outperformed Kamala Harris by about 4.7 points. She outperformed Harris most among the most Puerto Rican-heavy precincts in southern Orange County as well as Osceola counties. Given that Osceola County voted for Trump outright, her overperformance is notable. Interestingly, Worrell did worse than Harris in Black areas of Orlando. But given that this race was Democratic vs Nonpartisan, it is possible that many blanks and undervotes diluted the actual electorate preferences.  

Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, had similar dynamics but different results. In 2022, DeSantis suspended State’s Attorney Andrew Warren and replaced him with Republican Suzy Lopez. In the 2024 election, Lopez defeated Warren by about 5 points. He also underran Harris. This is likely due to different electorates in Orange and Osceola counties. The western portion of Hillsborough County where Warren’s underperformance was starkest is home to some of the largest Cuban populations outside of southeastern Florida. Additionally, much of eastern Hillsborough is made up of educated white suburban voters, which in Florida, heavily favor the GOP in down-ballot races. Beyond these demographics, Warren’s strongest base remains the Black core of central Tampa, where his underperformance was the smallest. This coalition of Black and progressive white voters pitted against suburban and moderate white voters serves as a useful baseline framework for analyzing reform prosecutor elections. 

In Harris County, Texas, voters elected reformer Sean Teare as their district attorney. Harris County is the third-most populous county in the country, home to the large and diverse Houston metropolitan area. Until 2018, the GOP dominated local county-wide politics thanks to crushing margins with white voters. In 2016, Democrat Kim Ogg flipped the DA’s office on a moderate reform platform, beating Republican incumbent Devon Anderson. 

Ogg’s tenure was incredibly turbulent. She fired dozens of veteran prosecutors, changed a long-standing intake system (Teare called the change “the worst thing that has happened in [Harris County’s] criminal justice system in the last 20 years”), clashed with reformers on bail policy, and investigated staffers of  Lina Hidalgo, the county judge and leading progressive voice in the county. Ogg’s conduct allowed a primary challenger to emerge: Teare, a prosecutor in Ogg’s own office. Teare ran not as a hard-left progressive but as a standard bearer for reform, promising, for example, to reverse Ogg’s policy of opposing bail reform mandated by a consent decree implemented in 2019. 

Teare’s primary in March of 2024 was a rout, where he won 75% of the vote. In the general election this fall, however, Teare won by just 2 points.  The map below shows that Teare underperformed Kamala Harris’s 5 point countywide win, particularly with educated whites who have ancestral Republican voting tendencies. This makes sense because unlike in cities like San Francisco and New York City, Houston’s educated whites do not form as large a base of progressive voters. Very similar to Tampa, Teare underperformed most in ancestrally Republican areas while holding up best with minority voters who tend to live in areas most affected by criminal justice issues.

In Travis County, Texas, home to Austin and about 165 miles from Harris County, reformer district attorney José Garza easily won his re-election over criminal defense attorney Daniel Betts. Betts ran as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and got significant financial backing from Elon Musk. Musk has pumped millions of dollars into conservative candidates and campaigns in his adopted state of Texas, and this race was no exception. Garza slightly underperformed Harris; while she won Travis County by 39 points, Garza only won by 35. Similar to other counties around the country where reformers were rejected by white conservatives, wealthy white West Austin saw double-digit underperformances for Garza. 

In Los Angeles County—home to the nation’s largest jail system—reformer George Gascón was defeated by centrist Nathan Hochman in a non-partisan match up. After defeating incumbent Jackie Lacey in 2020, Gascón faced a serious, but failed recall attempt in 2022, the abandonment of major donors, organizers seemingly exhausted after helping defeat hardline Sheriff Alex Villanueva, and an electorate in California moving rightward on criminal justice. Voters approved Prop 36, which would increase penalties and lengthen sentences for drug possession as well as the theft of items valued at less than $950. 

Virtually every major demographic of voters, excluding a progressive white core in downtown and westside Los Angeles, voted for Hochman. Black voters seem to have narrowly split for Gascón but by less than their progressive white brethren to the north. The Latino and Asian enclaves further to the east, and south, approaching the Orange Curtain, were increasingly solid for Hochman. Coupled with wealthy white and Persian Jewish enclaves in the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Beverly Hills, the reform movement was thoroughly defeated. In an area as diverse as Los Angeles County, a reform candidate cannot win countywide without solid support from at least 1 minority group in addition to progressive white voters.

Elsewhere in California, in Alameda County, reformer district attorney Pamela Price was recalled by a 25-point margin, losing in every major area except for Berkeley. Even Oakland, the left-leaning hometown of Kamala Harris, saw precincts that voted for the recall. In the well-to-do and more established suburban communities, Price’s performance was even worse.  In the solidly Indian and Pakistani city of Fremont, the precincts voted very solidly for Price’s recall. 

There are harder-to-quantify lessons for the Price recall, too. Like Baltimore City’s Mosby, Price had an adversarial relationship with the press and organizers alike and was surrounded by legal troubles. Mosby famously flipped off a Keith Davis Jr. supporter and was later convicted in federal court on charges including perjury and making a false mortgage application. Similarly, Oakland mayor Sheng Thao, Price’s fellow progressive, was investigated by the FBI and, like Price, ousted in a recall during the 2024 election. Like Mosby, Price was hostile to the press —she often declined to give interviews, even to friendly outlets. She was also dogged by allegations that she gave jobs to people in her social circle.

Perhaps the most significant win of the 2024 election is Prosecuting Attorney Karen McDonald in Oakland County, Michigan. Her 2024 reelection was the largest victory in her career and was wider than Kamala Harris’s 12-point win. It’s an unusual margin for a reformer in wealthy high-education suburbs.

McDonald did four points better than Harris and outperformed her significantly among white voters. Her performance was weakest relative to Harris with Black voters, but that is to be expected given the strong Democratic campaign in the area aimed at turning out these voters for presidential and Senate races. She had a hometown effect strongest near Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham, but even in the exurban and rural north/west of the county, she outperformed significantly. McDonald’s overperformance might stem from her non-traditional record as a reformer: she was elected in late 2020 on promises to limit incarceration for nonviolent crimes and she established Oakland County’s first-ever Conviction Integrity Unit. But she also prosecuted the parents of school shooter Ethan Crumbley on involuntary manslaughter charges, an audacious, precedent-setting decision criticized by some as overreach. 

Going forward, thermostatic opinion may swing back in the direction of criminal justice reformers, especially if Trump uses the power of the federal government to incarcerate, deport, and isolate millions of Americans. At the same time, a rise in public disorder—or even the perception of such a rise—makes people more inclined to regressive and reactionary political impulses. 

There are interesting test cases ahead for the reform prosecutor movement. Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia, is arguably the most famous reform prosecutor and is up for his third term in May 2025’s primary. Given Philadelphia’s recent shift to the right, he could be in some trouble even though homicides declined there significantly in 2024. In Manhattan, Alvin Bragg is up for re-election and should win. In his 2021 victory, Bragg performed well in Harlem, demographically mixed, and the West Village, dominated by white progressives. It’s a coalition of reform-oriented white voters and Black voters that has long-proven to be successful for reform prosecutors. But given Bragg’s high-profile prosecutions—including Donald Trump and Daniel Penny—he’s sure to be a target for conservatives. 

The fact that crime is down in most major metropolitan areas should help reformers. However, social-media amplified incidents of criminal conduct—such as the murder of Debrina Kawam, who was set on fire in a New York City subway car—bring regressive politics to the surface.  In the Tri-state area, the Democratic Party has taken a hit; Republicans are rising with Asian and Latino voters. Democrats and progressives must work to fix this dynamic and make a strong, affirmative case for reform prosecution or members of their once-loyal base will continue to exhibit GOP-curious voting habits.