Did “defund the police” deflate the “blue wave”?

The past few years have been difficult for the advocates of justice. For most of the time I have been doing this work (since late 1986), the one thing we could always count on was that the people were with us. The courts might misconstrue the Constitution. The legislature might pass some harmful bills and kill all the good ones, but a solid majority of the people always had their heads on straight when it came to law and order.

That started to change when a well-funded and clever disinformation campaign convinced a large portion of the population that our prisons were chock full of harmless minor offenders who could be released without harm to anyone. That was false, but people bought it. Libertarians and many small-government Republicans climbed on board the “reform” movement, giving it a bipartisan cast.

I always knew that the tide would turn back, but how long would it take? How much innocent blood would be spilled before people realized they had been conned? We may have seen the inflection point this year. The pro-criminal crowd may have gotten so overconfident that they showed their true selves with “defund the police,” and the scales have fallen from the people’s eyes. Or at least started to.

Kris Maher and John McCormick report for the WSJ:

In the state where “defund the police” became a progressive rallying cry following the killing of George Floyd, the phrase is now being blamed for harming down-ballot Democrats both here and nationally after some suburban voters were repelled by the message.

President-elect Joe Biden easily carried Minnesota, but the push to cut police funding contributed to Democratic losses of a U.S. House seat in western Minnesota and six state Senate races, say political strategists here. They add that critical Republican ads that followed the defunding calls also hurt Democrats.

The people seem to be turning around where the issue is clear and simple. “Defund the police” is so obviously, patently stupid that no amount of spin and backpedaling can cover up the stupidity.

In California, the ballot measure results were mixed. The measure to eliminate cash bail went down by a 13% margin. Everybody knows what bail is and could understand the issue.

On the other hand Proposition 20, a very modest measure to undo some of the damage from Propositions 47 and 57, was trounced. Did 3/5 of the people of California really vote to effectively decriminalize shoplifting so that slow-motion looting can decimate retailers, drive up prices for honest shoppers, and put brick-and-mortar retailers at such a disadvantage to online shops that many of them close? Did 3/5 really vote that people who commit a host of crimes that every rational person would consider violent should remain eligible for the generous parole provisions that were advertised as being for “nonviolent offenders.”

I can’t believe that. The relative complexity of the issues, a massive funding imbalance in the campaigns, and a misleading description by our shamelessly partisan Attorney General must have misled a great number of people as to what they were actually voting on.

“Point of inflection” does not mean we have turned the corner yet. It means the other side’s momentum is slowing. We have a long way to go, but there is hope. When it comes to elections, advocates of justice need to follow the KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid.