Horowitz: Soros-backed DA candidate loses big in LA County Super Tuesday election

Forget about the Super Tuesday presidential primaries. The candidates are all a bunch of socialist anarchists who don’t believe in prison or punishment. The Super Tuesday election that really mattered was the Democrat primary for Los Angeles County DA – which featured a fight between the incumbent who still believes in a modicum of law and order and a Soros-backed public defender type. The law-and-order candidate appears to have won with more than 50 percent, thereby avoiding a runoff.

Jackie Lacey was elected as the first African-American DA of Los Angeles County, the largest prosecutor’s office in the country. As she seeks her third term, radical anarchists in the movement to abolish prison are upset with her. They view her as a traitor for actually still believing in prosecuting criminals, insinuating the offensive notion that somehow a black prosecutor has to be pro-criminal, when in fact weak-on-crime policies harm African-Americans more than anyone else.

So George Gascón, with the backing of Soros money, challenged her in the primary. Gascón did such a great job, as San Francisco DA, of transforming San Francisco into the homeless, drug, and feces capital of the nation that he wants to take his road show on to California’s largest city. Not surprisingly, he has the backing of Senator Kamala Harris. The other challenger was Rachel Rossi, a former public defender, running on a de-incarceration agenda similar to Gascón’s.

According to the early returns, Lacey appears to be on pace to avoid a runoff, with her two challengers hovering in the low 20s.

This race was a real test to see if even Democrat primary voters are nearly as radical as progressive activists and, frankly, many self-proclaimed conservative Republicans on crime. It appears that they have more common sense than the elites who work in politics.

According to a poll released last week by TP Research and KFI AM 640, which showed Lacey with a big lead, voters there want to focus on punishing criminals. When asked whether they prefer a “tough on crime” DA or one who focuses on police accountability for excessive force, voters chose law and order by 53%-22%. When asked whether they prefer "tough on crime" to "racial justice" policies, 50% chose tough on crime, vs. 29% who chose racial justice.

The reality is that this county, which voted for Hillary by 72%-22% and is majority non-white, recognizes that the biggest injustice – racial or otherwise – is not deterring criminals and allowing them to prey on victims, who most commonly are non-white. In this case, L.A. County voters appear to be to the right of all these pseudo-conservative organizations pushing the de-incarceration agenda, appallingly and erroneously, under the guise of racial justice.

For example, according to L.A. police data, in 2018, 47.5 percent of those arrested for homicide were Hispanic, 26.1 percent were black, and 19.9 percent were white. But, of the homicides where the victim’s race/ethnicity was identified, 45.5 percent of victims were Hispanic, 25.1 percent were black, 21.9 percent were white, and 7.5 percent were of other race/ethnic groups. Thus, by dismantling our deterrent against criminals, non-white people are most likely to be victimized by those policies.

Gascón charges that “Los Angeles County incarcerates more Black and brown people than anywhere else in the country for behaviors that often, in other places, would not have criminal consequences.” But to believe that, one would have to accept that, coincidently, and quite unlikely, police are disproportionately arresting non-white people for murder as well. But that is absurd on its face, especially given that almost an identical share of the victims were identified along the same racial breakdown. A dead body doesn’t lie.

As the ballots are still counted, one thing is clear: L.A. voters looked at what is going on north of them in San Francisco and said, “No, thank you.”