Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón is expected to advance to a November runoff, but it’s too early to tell who his challenger will be.
Although polls show Gascón has grown deeply unpopular with a significant portion of L.A. County residents, polls and local political observers have suggested that his strong progressive base will carry him out of a crowded primary field replete with challengers who spent more time attacking him than they did defining their own candidacies.
Four years after taking office on a popular criminal justice reform platform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Gascón found himself facing a different political landscape in this primary cycle. Multiple polls showed the incumbent with a disapproval rating of more than 50%, and a mix of frustrations with his policies and his perceived vulnerability led 11 candidates to challenge him.
Gascón spent the early evening fielding questions from reporters in Grand Park in the shadow of the downtown criminal courthouse. The incumbent said he felt good about his chances and plans to watch results roll in with his family at home in Long Beach.
“This has been an arduous primary, we’ve had a lot of community support but it’s obviously been very heavily contested,” he said.
Gascón has undoubtedly had some successes in his term — including stepped-up efforts to exonerate those wrongfully convicted and an increased focus on prosecutions of police officers accused of misconduct and excessive force — but his term has been rocked by public disputes with his own prosecutors and a litany of civil suits that have already cost the county roughly $7 million. Some of his reforms were deemed illegal by a judge in 2021 and critics have also blamed his policies directly for heinous crimes.
Property and violent crime rose in L.A. County from 2019 to 2022, according to California Department of Justice data. But other counties with more traditional prosecutors saw violent crime surge at much higher rates in the same time frame, a data point Gascón often stresses. LAPD data also show homicides and robberies have declined over the last two years and criminologists argue that its disingenuous to solely blame a district attorney’s policies for crime surges or declines.
The field chasing Gascón includes four prosecutors from within his own office, three judges and two former federal prosecutors. With resumes and messages that largely mirrored one another — 10 of the 11 challengers promised to roll back nearly all of the policies Gascón announced during his inaugaration speech — it became hard for a challenger to stand out from the pack.
Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor who unsuccessfully ran for state attorney general in 2022 as a Republican, raised the most money in the primary. Now running as an independent, Hochman promised to “get politics out” of an office he says was made increasingly partisan by Gascón and the broader progressive prosecutor movement nationwide. Dozens of Hochman supporters noshed on an international selection of cheeses and mini creme brulees at the Luxe Hotel while they awaited early results Tuesday evening.
Although he favors alternative sentencing outcomes for nonviolent defendants struggling with mental illness or drug addiction, Hochman also promised to seek the death penalty in some cases and make use of sentencing enhancements for gang and gun crimes, measures that can sometimes double the prison time for certain defendants. Critics have argued that enhancements are disproportionately used against people of color.
Running as a moderate who can balance reform with justice, ex-federal prosecutor Jeff Chemerinsky was one of the lone candidates to embrace criminal justice reform while challenging Gascón. Chemerinsky disagrees with much of what Gascón has done, but also said he’d largely eschew trying juveniles as adults and had serious reservations about the use of gang enhancements. Such positions have led other challengers to describe him as “mini-Gascón.”
Chemerinsky invited supporters to take in the results with him on the second level of T Boyle, a Pasadena bar accessible only through an alley. He shook hands and mingled while bar trivia unfolded in the background and college basketball played on a big-screen TV.
Other top challengers include Deputy Dist. Attys. Jonathan Hatami and Eric Siddall, and Superior Court Judge Debra Archuleta.
Hatami was one of the three biggest fundraisers in the field, and the pugnacious prosecutor’s long history of publicly criticizing Gascón and his involvement with attempts to recall the district attorney made him popular with victims’ rights advocates. He was the only candidate to break from the pack in a USC/Dornsife poll earlier this year, snaring 8% of the vote and finishing a clear second to Gascón. Along with Archuleta, he received the endorsement of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the largest law enforcement union in L.A. County.
Siddall, a veteran prosecutor of cases involving gang crime and attacks on police officers, bagged the endorsement of the union representing rank-and-file prosecutors and has also frequently antagonized the district attorney through the union. Siddall was also running as a moderate, claiming to represent a “new generation of prosecutors” who want to balance reform and aggressive prosecution of violent criminals, but he and Chemerinsky often found themselves fighting for the same airspace.
Gascón maintained that he did not believe that any of his challengers made a substantive argument as to how they could do a better job serving as the county’s top prosecutor.
“People can throw rocks, they can say whatever they want to say,” he said Tuesday, adding that he was hopeful for a more policy-focused general election.
