Can we retire “public safety”?

Just talk about crime.

The politics of crime have changed significantly in recent years. (Photo by Thing Nong Nont via Getty Images)

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Nithya Raman — a left-YIMBY candidate who was in the Democratic Socialists of America but didn’t get its nomination and wasn’t supported by any of the D.S.A. members of the City Council — made it into a runoff with incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, an icon of the failed status quo in an American city that isn’t living up to its strong underlying fundamentals.

The third wheel in this race, Spencer Pratt, got a lot of attention from conservatives who don’t live in L.A. and raised some good points about problems in the city. But he fundamentally failed to even try to connect with actual public opinion in a place that is heavily Democratic.

Marc Novicoff (who longtime subscribers will remember from his days as Slow Boring’s very first research assistant) wrote a great piece about this fairly depressing three-sided race.

Now that it’s down to two sides, though, there are basically two ways it could break.

One is that Bass could mobilize fear of Raman’s more out there left-wing takes to reach Pratt supporters and the kind of low-engagement part of the electorate that doesn’t vote in primaries. The other is that Raman could make good on (1) the promise of big tent YIMBYism and (2) the reality that she doesn’t actually owe anything to the institutional forces of either the status quo or the far-left and put together a unifying reform message.

I don’t know her, or the city, or the different elite actors in Southern California well enough to know exactly how she’d pull that off.

I’d probably start by saying nice things about Dan Lurie in San Francisco, since he’s really the mayor who tapped into what’s good about Pratt (normie anguish about West Coast cities letting their downtowns turn into shitholes) but not into what’s bad about him (being a Republican who doesn’t actually seem like he could administer a city).

But a really quick piece of advice I’d offer to her, or to anyone looking to moderate their image, would be to run through all their communications materials and purge mentions of “public safety” in favor of the word “crime.”