Harris stays quiet as California voters threaten to roll back sentencing reforms

Democrats tried to head off Proposition 36 for more than a year, and Newsom’s argued that voters’ top concerns about retail theft are being handled right now, without undoing a historic reform.

“We didn’t just wake up to this issue,” Newsom said last month as he signed a law that would make repeated retail theft a felony, not a misdemeanor.

But the party isn’t united on what to do; Orange County Sen. Dave Min, trying to hold a swing seat vacated by Rep. Katie Porter, endorsed Proposition 36 days before that bill-signing.

“Democrats failed to persuade voters — even Democratic voters — that tinkering around the edges of the problem with some pieces of legislation was a compelling answer to the videos they see on the news every few days of gangs of ruffians swarming retail outlets to commit smash-and-grab robberies,” said longtime Democratic strategist Garry South.

And Republicans are united in favor of the measure, a change from 2014, when many conservatives endorsed lower sentencing requirements and smaller jail populations.

“It’s the first step forward in making crime illegal again,” said James Shook, the campaign manager for Rep. Kevin Kiley, who ran unsuccessfully in the 2021 recall election against Newsom and has campaigned extensively for Proposition 36.

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, elected in 2022, faces a recall vote in five weeks, powered by anger at a crime spike that preceded her tenure. In Los Angeles County, DA George Gascon is trailing a former Republican in his bid for a second term. PPIC’s poll showed Proposition 36 with overwhelming support in the Democratic county; Harris, who endorsed Gascon in 2020, has stayed neutral in the race this year.

Democrats trying to beat the new proposition say that Harris staying on the sidelines isn’t a concern for them — or a surprise, given the record. She had her own initiatives as San Francisco district attorney and as California attorney general. She helped craft the language for Proposition 47, and implemented it, but it was never her personal project.

“Obviously, the vice president has bigger fish to fry, and a lot of things on her plate — in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Georgia,” said Anthony York, a spokesman for the No on Proposition 36 coalition. “Our campaign was not predicated on support from the vice president, but a lot of us involved in this campaign have her back. And there’s an overlap. We’re using some of the same messaging — we’re not going back, either. But as it comes to her actual support, we’re not spending a lot of time worrying about it.”

Supporters of the proposition expect her to stay away, too. “We’ve seen from the polling that the public is fed up with retail theft and wants change,” said Matt Ross, a spokesman for Californians Against Retail and Residential Theft. “That’s why this is doing so well, regardless of what politicians are saying, on one side or the other.”

It’s the same recurring question about Harris 2024: How many of her old views, statements, and agenda she’s willing to stick with.

The Trump campaign portrays the 2020 vintage Harris as the real one, a San Francisco liberal who wants to “redirect” money from the police to social services and stop deporting illegal immigrants. Campaign tactics work best if they’ve been road-tested before the election, and we’re in year four of Republicans accusing criminal justice reformers of abetting retail theft and “migrant crime.”

Harris was a reformer — but she moved left, with Democratic activists, in the Trump years rather than in her prosecutor days. In this campaign, Harris has shifted her emphasis, talking about her own gun ownership while supporting an assault weapons ban, talking about prosecuting foreign criminals while, in the right settings, reminding voters that she wants a pathway to citizenship for most migrants.

So, Harris has not said whether she’ll support a ballot measure that rebuts one of Trump’s most common attacks. That’s not a huge surprise; Axios’s Alex Thompson has built a beat out of Harris’s non-answers to questions about her old positions. (I’ve wondered whether there are just so many shipwrecked Resistance-era ideas and chants that they blur together in a cloud of “oops” for voters at this point.)

The inevitable-looking gutting of Proposition 47 is, nonetheless, a big thing for Harris not to comment on. At the time, it represented a left/right convergence around the idea that too many people were filling prisons for minor offenses. Newt Gingrich, who endorsed Proposition 47, once asked voters to “imagine you have the power to decide the fate of someone addicted to heroin who is convicted of petty shoplifting.” He told Semafor that he still supported the principle, but understood the backlash.

“I believe adamantly, for non-violent crimes in particular, that you want to have a much better system of reintegrating people into society,” Gingrich said. “My sense is that she has a dilemma. In the black community, which she has to carry by a big margin, there’s not a great deal of affection for locking so many people up.”