The Revolution Reaches Portland

Multnomah County in Oregon, which has not voted for a republican president since 1960, is poised to replace its uber-progressive, Soros funded District Attorney with a former republican law-and-order prosecutor.  A piece by Johnathan Martin in Politico reports that the current DA, Mike Schmidt, was swept into office during the George Floyd riots in 2020 with 77% of the vote.  Schmidt ran on the same criminal justice reform platform as other Soros-bankrolled prosecutors including Chicago’s Kim Foxx, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, and Los Angeles DA George Gascon.  The main tenet of that platform is that police, prosecutors and punishment are racist constructs of the white male ruling class and social justice requires that they be abandoned.  UPDATE:  Schmidt was defeated Tuesday by longtime prosecutor Nathan Vasquez with 54% of the vote.

While reduced sentencing, tolerance for drug abuse and vagrants have been the norm in Portland for years, after the 2020 riots, the county’s police budget was cut by $15 million and within a year the number of officers dropped to a 30-year low.  Under Schmidt crime has increased dramatically with homicides nearly tripling by 2023 and vehicle thefts increasing by over 69%.  This has occurred as prosecutions have declined by 50%.  The city also suffers from annual double-digit increases in the homeless population and fatal drug overdoses.  Earlier this year, in response to rising crime and homelessness, the county signed a $40 million contract with a California-based firm to provide security guards for libraries, county offices and homeless shelters.  Schmidt’s opponent, longtime prosecutor Nathan Vasquez  told reporters “What I hear when I’m knocking on doors is `hey, I consider myself very liberal but this is out of step—we’re not getting served well.'”

“People are risking their catalytic converter to come downtown for dinner,” Betsy Johnson, a salty, Democrat-turned-independent former state senator told me. “And now some of the rich people in the southwest and northwest hills [of Portland] have seen the chaos in downtown and they’re wondering: when do we have to get a guard for our community?”

Former U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton, a democrat, told the author,

“The white left decided anarchists were better than cops”… faulting “folks outside Portland treating us as a lab for policy experiments and what were clearly failed experiments.”

Portland is not the only place where the voting public is beginning to recognize those failed experiments.  In March, Chicago’s Soros-bankrolled top prosecutor Kim Foxx was replaced by a former judge who pledged to crack down on crime.  In 2022 San Francisco’s DA Chesa Boudin was dismissed by 60% of voters for his soft-on-crime performance, while across the bay progressive Alameda County DA Pamela Price, the first black female elected to that office, is facing a recall this summer.

And in Los Angeles, George Gascon, who’s called himself the “godfather of progressive prosecutors,” is facing a challenge this November from a former Republican, who’s decrying “a culture of lawlessness” and sounds a lot like a subscriber to the broken windows theory of law enforcement.

“It may start with smash-and-grab car theft but it then escalates into violent crimes,” Nathan Hochman, the challenger in Los Angeles, told me. Hochman, now an independent, said he’s up by double-digits in his polling for one straightforward reason: “Angelenos feel less safe today than when Gascon came to office.”

The conventional wisdom is that in presidential elections people vote with their wallets.  This year it appears that in local and perhaps some state and national elections people will be voting for their safety.

Welcome to the revolution.