Good afternoon. We typically only aggregate the news, but when we see a gap in coverage, we fill it. In today’s exclusive explainer, I’m writing about a rightward shift in California politics.

It wasn’t shocking when San Francisco’s moderate Democratic mayor said she’d join Republicans calling for rollbacks to Proposition 47, a controversial ballot measure that eased penalties for some low-level crimes. 

It also wasn’t much of a surprise when Democratic lawmakers joined Republicans calling for significant restrictions on homeless encampments across the state earlier this month.

But what those two moves signaled might be something larger: Could California Democrats maybe — just maybe — be shifting to the right?

A course correction

Yes, said Dan Schnur, who teaches politics at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine. There has been a shift.

“What we’re seeing now is not necessarily a return to the 1990s, but perhaps just back to the 20-teens,” Schnur said.

In the summer of 2020, the high-profile killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor turbocharged what had been a steady leftward shift in the national conversation about criminal justice over the past few decades. 

But that might’ve pushed Democrats too far left, Schnur said. Today’s policies are adjusting for that.

“‘Course correction’ is probably the right word to use,” said Bill Lockyer, the former California attorney general. “But I would say it’s a four-degree shift, not an 80-degree shift.”

Lawmakers don’t always get everything right on the first try, and Lockyer said he sees things like proposed rollbacks to Prop. 47 — the 2014 crime measure that the moderate mayors of San Francisco and San Jose want to amend — as fine-tuning of legislation.

Note that although the decade-old measure isn’t a product of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is an obvious target for any lawmaker looking to crack down on crime: Republicans have already mounted a perennial effort to roll it back. 

But today’s rightward tilt could have as much to do with the rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement as any particular policy.

“I think there will be studies in the future about the degree to which the phrase ‘defund the police’ contributed to this countershift,” Schnur said.

Defunding the police, a rallying cry during 2020’s massive protests, was never a popular front. It isn’t particularly hard to see how a moderate frustrated with crime today might conflate those far-left cries with criminal justice reform in general.

“‘Defund the police’ was one of the dumbest political slogans ever invented,” Lockyer said. “It wasn’t going to happen — it was kind of a phony issue. And it was a way to label reformers badly and say ‘They just don’t want police, they want anarchy.’”

Perception over numbers

Prop. 47 was intended to reduce overcrowding in state prisons by reclassifying some non-violent property and drug possession crimes as misdemeanors. On that front, it worked, and it likely didn’t contribute to any rise in crime while at it.

Crime statistics are often mixed and sometimes misleading, and it’s not always clear what drives the ebbs and flows. But we do know that crime spiked during the pandemic then leveled off, and San Francisco and Los Angeles have generally gotten safer over the last few years. Notably, though, retail theft went up in 2023, and the state has found itself in the throes of a deadly opioid epidemic. 

But how voters feel about crime often has nothing to do with the actual numbers.

“Voters react very strongly to particular instances,” Schnur said. “The statistics are important to them, but the memory of a specific crime resonates even more deeply.”

So when footage of smash-and-grab robberies at California retail stores aired day after day on TV last year, voters were watching. Same for when a tech executive was murdered on the street in San Francisco. 

Never mind that Prop. 47 only loosens penalties for stealing under $950 — which a lot of the theft on TV was almost certainly above — or that the executive was killed by somebody he knew, not some random criminal. Right now, voters are concerned about drugs and crime, and lawmakers are responding to that.

What about homelessness?

As with crime, the rhetoric doesn’t always match the stats in the homelessness debate. For instance, it’s become something of a cliche to rag on San Francisco when talking about the state’s homelessness crisis, but the city doesn’t even have the largest unhoused population in the state.

LA, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento and San Diego beat it out in that order. In fact, San Francisco’s homeless population has actually declined in recent years.

That’s in contrast to other California cities, where homelessness has gone up. But most of that increase is because of people housed in shelters, not tents out on the street, meaning the increase hasn’t necessarily been visible.

So Democrats’ recent willingness to ban encampments near schools and parks — and entirely, when there’s shelter space available — might be more a reflection of voter fatigue than any particular spike. Lawmakers are frustrated by the seemingly intractable problem, and the easiest solution is to limit its most visible expression.

“The general public has gone from considerable sympathy for people who are unhoused to significant anger about it,” Lockyer said. “It has kind of owned the present.”

Election clarity

The true extent of any rightward shift will be more obvious after the November elections. Police unions are throwing money at candidates that they hope will oust progressive city councilmembers. Tech millionaires are funding moderate ballot initiatives to fight the leftward swing of the last few years.

And in one particularly high-profile case, LA County’s progressive district attorney, George Gascón, is facing a slate of moderate candidates who say he’s too soft on crime. He’ll look to avoid the fate of a similarly progressive district attorney who was ousted by San Francisco voters in 2022.

But in many ways, Gascón’s reelection bid is already telling: The debate centers on the best way to fight crime, rather than how to reform police departments and fight racial disparities as it did when he won in 2020. The mood has clearly shifted.