Chesa Boudin's future employment prospects still appear bleak

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

In San Francisco, the recall election seeking to remove soft-on-crime District Attorney Chesa Boudin is on June 7, a little less than six weeks away. The long lead time has given Boudin plenty of opportunities to polish up his image and assuage the anger expressed by a large number of voters who want to see him gone. So how’s that working out for him? According to a recent poll released by EMC Research, the embattled DA doesn’t seem to be getting his message across very well. Faced with the fairly basic question, “Shall Chesa Boudin be recalled (removed) from the office of District Attorney?” 68% of respondents said yes while only 32% said no. While it may be possible to overcome a more than two-to-one margin against you in 42 days, it doesn’t appear terribly likely.

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Fox News reporters hit the streets and talked to some of the people involved on both sides of the recall effort. Most people, including Democrats and self-identified liberals, said that they were simply fed up with the crime and they’re blaming Boudin. Some said they felt “duped” by his election campaign and were shocked to find that his primary goal was not to lower crime rates, but to drastically lower incarceration rates, no matter the cost. And it’s probably too late for the DA to change their minds at this point.

“Let me see … bang, bang, bang, you break something and … out the next day,” said Johnny, who works the docks at Fisherman’s Wharf. “Yeah, the DA has got to go.”

“That’s how a lot of people feel about it, because he’s not doing a job, and everybody is pissed off about it,” he continued. “Where is our protection?”

“A lot of voters who voted for him actually felt duped, felt like it was a bait and switch,” Richie Greenberg, a former Republican mayoral candidate and spokesman for the Recall Chesa Boudin Committee, told Fox News.

Conversely, representatives for a group named Stand With Chesa feel quite the opposite. They cited among Boudin’s accomplishments, “decarceration,” ending prosecutors’ requests for cash bail and reducing the jail population by 50% in the first quarter of 2020.

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You know, it may strike you as curious, but the Stand With Chesa people listed exactly the same things that the people saying they will vote to remove him said. Except, rather than seeing those things as “accomplishments,” they view them as the reasons that the streets aren’t safe and crime is off the charts. Funny how that works out, eh?

Attempts to paint this as some sort of secret Republican plan to oust Boudin have fallen flat. This was attempted by Boudin himself and a few of his supporters. But the reality is that the few dozen remaining Republicans in the San Francisco area (I’m exaggerating a bit, obviously, but you get the point) would never have been able to pull this off. When nearly 70 percent of the voters surveyed are calling for Boudin’s removal, that number has to include a massive number of Democrats.

A quick look at the San Francisco Election Board’s statistics shows that more than 67% of voters are registered as Democrats. Another 27% are independents with no party preference. And a whopping 6.7% of them are registered Republicans. If they managed to pull this off, that’s the most dedicated and diabolical 6.7% slice of an electorate in the history of American politics.

The reality is that even most of the Democrats are fed up with Boudin and his policies. And while miracles do sometimes happen in politics, there doesn’t seem to be one in the cards here. As far as I can tell, Boudin is toast. And if so, congratulations to the voters of San Francisco for finally waking up and smelling the coffee burning, assuming all of the coffee hasn’t been looted from the stores yet.

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John Stossel 8:30 AM | October 12, 2024
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