Introduction
There has been growing attention to backlash against elected officials, political violence, and the challenging of democratic norms, institutions, and processes throughout the United States. The impact of political violence and anti-democratic sentiment is apparent not only in national politics but also locally. Recall elections, legislative preemption, and overt verbal attacks and physical threats against local elected officials have become commonplace. School board members, city councilors, election officials, and local prosecutors have all been subject to direct and indirect challenges to their power, their livelihoods, and even their lives. This article explores the impact of backlash against local prosecutors,Footnote 1 focusing on the ways that prosecutors interpret, make sense of, and respond to what they understand to be backlash.
In 2016, Kim Foxx began her first term as State’s Attorney in Cook County, Illinois, having run a reform platform that highlighted conviction integrity, police accountability, and a focus on violent crimes (Chicago Sun Times 2020). This campaign, and others like it (Pfaff Reference Pfaff2023), differed from typical prosecutorial campaigns, where candidates emphasize their conviction rates (Wright Reference Wright2009). An emphasis on convictions, according to scholars, conveys competence to voters (c.f., Gordon and Huber Reference Gordon and Huber2002). Foxx’s election, however, suggested that another model was possible, and it inspired many other reform-interested candidates to run for prosecutor while instead emphasizing second chances and the root causes of crime.
Soon after, reform-oriented prosecutors came under extreme scrutiny from both the media and politicians, who began to second-guess prosecutorial reform, often pointing to public safety concerns. President Donald Trump, for instance, supported a criminal justice reform in his first term in office, with the First Step Act of 2018 (Kanno-Youngs Reference Kanno-Youngs2025). Yet, in his second term, President Trump has followed the path laid out in “Project 2025” (Dans and Groves Reference Dans and Groves2023), which proposed the use of the military and federal law enforcement to fight crime on American streets, as well as to “prosecute locally elected officials who do not adhere to the priorities of a potential second Trump administration” (Davis Reference Davis2024).
In this political climate, prosecutors have come to the fore on many nationally important issues, ranging from criminal justice reform (Hessick and Su Reference Hessick and Su2023; but see Bellin Reference Bellin2019) to reproductive rights (Habig Reference Habig2024) to the very functioning of democratic elections (Helderman and Gardner Reference Helderman and Gardner2022; Singh Reference Singh2025). Local prosecutors simultaneously have been subject to political attacks and have been asked to leverage the law against whole categories of people, including immigrants, protesters, and people seeking or providing abortions, among others. These attacks have been especially prominent against reform prosecutors, who seek to implement reforms and move away from traditional, tough-on-crime approaches to prosecution. Reform prosecutors see these efforts not as legitimate expressions of disagreement about the prosecutorial role, but instead as extraordinary, politicized backlash.
How do prosecutors make sense of backlash to reform policies? How do reform prosecutors respond to perceived attempts to limit their discretion, remove them from office, or otherwise inhibit their ability to do their jobs? To explore these questions, we conducted 68 interviews with prosecutors or candidates for prosecutor who are associated with reform policies. Our interviews reveal that prosecutors define three impacts of backlash: (1) no impact on reforms, as reformers simply continue to pursue their reform agendas, (2) a slowing or stymying impact on reforms, as reformers act more strategically while in office or even opt into other career paths, and (3) a quieting impact on reforms, as reformers try to pursue reforms under the radar. Ultimately, given the prevalence of prosecutors reporting either a slowing and stymying effect or a quieting effect, we conclude that perceived backlash has had a chilling effect on reform prosecutors, pushing some reformers out of office and forcing others to abandon reforms or try to carry out reform agendas under personally and professionally fraught conditions.
In this project we take an interpretive empirical approach (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea Reference Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2013), seeking to understand how local prosecutors think about and make sense of their jobs, the reform policies they wish to enact, the risky environment in which they carry out their jobs, and the options available to them in the context of those risks. Our focus is not on the effectiveness of particular policy interventionsFootnote 2 or whether or not reforming prosecution on the whole is normatively good.Footnote 3 We consider the experiences of a key set of actors whose choices impact the functioning of the criminal justice system at the local level and who have been increasingly asked to weigh in on matters of national importance.
This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship examining the politics of backlash against local prosecutors (e.g., Hessick and Su Reference Hessick and Su2023; Goldstein Reference Goldstein2024; Bowman Reference Bowman2025; Davis and Taylor Reference Davis and Taylor2025; Goldberg Reference Goldberg2025) and other local elected officials (e.g., Watters et al. Reference Watters, Lee and Gottlieb2022; Simi et al. Reference Simi, Ligon, Hughes and Standridge2024). First, by putting legal scholarship on prosecutors into conversation with political science literature on electoral accountability and nonvoting political participation, we draw important insights for understanding the relationship between reform prosecutors, their electoral incentives, and the nonelectoral challenges they face while attempting to remain in office and pursue their reform agendas. Second, we offer a unique empirical contribution to this body of literature. Rather than relying on secondary sources or focusing on a small set of high-profile cases, we conducted interviews with 68 local prosecutors and candidates from 33 states, across urban and rural jurisdictions, partisan affiliations, and professional backgrounds. As such, the article offers a deep consideration of the perspectives of a wide range of reform-oriented prosecutors on how that backlash impacts their work – and moves us closer to an accurate understanding of the full landscape of reform prosecution.
Methods and methodology: Interviewing and interpreting reform prosecutors
To examine the impact of perceived backlash on elected chief prosecutors, we draw on 68 interviews conducted between November 2024 and October 2025.Footnote 4 We focused on prosecutors or candidates for prosecutors who are associated with at least one of the following: restorative justice programs, diversion programs, alternative justice programs, problem-solving courts, collaborative courts, sentencing reform, bail reform, community-based policing, anti-death penalty initiatives, police accountability initiatives, conviction integrity units, and discretionary choices, like the decision not to charge for technical violations of parole. These policies and programs are associated with contemporary reform prosecution, in various ways moving away from purely carceral approaches to criminal justice. They also feature in the agendas of ideologically diverse reform-oriented organizations, including the Vera Institute for Justice (1961), Right on Crime (2007), the Nolan Center for Justice (2014), the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution (2016), and Fair and Just Prosecution (2017). By turning to the adoption or approval of specific reforms, we can clearly define the population of prosecutors we wish to study and explore the environment of reform prosecution broadly.
We consulted with these organizations directly or sought out information about reform prosecutors on their websites. Building on that initial list of reform prosecutors, we also examined the candidate webpages for everyone who ran for prosecutor in 2024 (both their campaign websites, if available, and their official webpage on the office of the prosecutor’s website, if they were the incumbent) to see if they positively mentioned any of those reforms. We also asked prosecutors for suggestions about who else to interview. Between these sources, we ended up with a list of 332 potential interviewees. Not every prosecutor or candidate for prosecutor who we sought to interview uses the label “reform prosecutor,” though all are involved with specific prosecutorial reforms. They vary substantially in their approach to prosecution, identifying as tough on crime, progressive, and everything in between (and in at least one case both progressive and tough on crime). Our list of potential interviewees included prosecutors from across the country and across the political spectrum, and these potential interviewees vary substantially in terms of how well known they are, how publicly tied they are to prosecutorial reform, and their specific views on different reform policies or approaches.
We emailed or called every elected prosecutor on our list who we could find working contact information for, and we reached out to about half of the unsuccessful candidates. Some of the time, potential interviewees agreed to an interview right away, and other times, we met with the communications teams of potential interviewees, sharing our interview guide with them and answering questions about our research goals. We ultimately interviewed about 20% of these prosecutors or candidates (68/332), and we were also in touch with many others who expressed a combination of openness to and wariness of sitting for an interview before ultimately ceasing communication. Several potential interviewees declined to speak with us expressly because they felt that the topic had been politicized and that speaking with us could put them or their work at risk.
We interviewed reform-associated prosecutors or candidates for prosecutor from 33 states (of the 45 states that elect local prosecutors), as shown in Figure 1. Local prosecutors are not elected in the states in white. We were not able to identify a reform-oriented prosecutor or candidate for prosecutor as of the 2024 election cycle in the states marked with the black and white diagonal pattern. Dark gray indicates states with reform prosecutors who either did not respond to our interview requests or declined an interview. 12 of our interviewees ran in nonpartisan races, while 38 ran as Democrats, 15 ran as Republicans, and two ran as Independents.Footnote 5 We also interviewed one line prosecutor, who had not run for office under any affiliation, at the request of her boss. About 40% of our interviewees are women, 26% people of color, and 15% women of color.
Interviewees by State.
Figure 1. Long description
The map displays the distribution of interviewees across the U.S. states.
Western Region:
* Washington: 1
* Oregon: 3
* California: 6
* Nevada: Dark gray, no number
* Idaho and Montana: Dark gray, no number
* Wyoming: White with diagonal stripes
* Utah: 1
* Arizona: 1
Central and Mountain Region:
* Colorado: 3
* New Mexico: 1
* North Dakota and South Dakota: White with diagonal stripes
* Nebraska: 1
* Kansas: 5
* Oklahoma: 1
* Texas: 3
* Minnesota: 2
* Iowa: 2
* Missouri: 2
* Arkansas: White with diagonal stripes
* Louisiana: Dark gray, no number
Eastern and Great Lakes Region:
* Wisconsin: 3
* Illinois: 2
* Michigan: 3
* Indiana: 1
* Ohio: 2
* Kentucky: 1
* Tennessee: Dark gray, no number
* Mississippi: 1
* Alabama: Dark gray, no number
* Georgia: 4
* Florida: 1
* South Carolina: Dark gray, no number
* North Carolina: 2
* Virginia: 2
* West Virginia: 1
* Maryland: 1
* Pennsylvania: 1
* New York: 2
* Vermont: 1
* New Hampshire: 1
* Massachusetts: 4
* Maine: 2
* Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware are shown with varying shades but no visible numbers.
Non-Contiguous States:
* Alaska: White outline, no data
* Hawaii: 2
Our interviews followed a semi-structured guide that included questions about the interviewee’s personal and professional background, their campaign(s) for office, they changes they made while in office, the reactions that different groups of people (line prosecutors, media, law enforcement, other elected officials, the public) had to those changes, their views on prosecution, and the challenges facing prosecutors today. We moved away from the interview guide to follow up on specific reforms or challenges and to accommodate different schedules.
We transcribed all interviews, and we took a grounded theory approach to identify emergent themes and tensions in the interview transcripts (Charmaz and Thornberg Reference Charmaz and Thornberg2021). Both authors read every transcript in full, noting interesting, common, or unexpected passages. We then returned to the transcripts to make comparisons across them, paying careful attention to actors, events, and types of backlash described by our interviewees.
The quotations in the sections that follow are lightly edited to remove repeated or filler words. We attempt to share direct quotes, at times in extended form, in addition to our analysis of those quotes to the extent possible. This allows the reader to assess for themselves our evidence and conclusions.
We take an interpretive-qualitative approach in this study (e.g., Yanow and Schwartz-Shea Reference Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2013), with the aim of “developing a deep understanding of how [local prosecutors] interpret their situation, in its fullest complexity, and how they think about what they are doing when they act in response to it” (Fischer Reference Fischer2025, 372). In other words, our object of inquiry is the experiences of local prosecutors as they understand them – and the meanings they ascribe to those experiences.
While our focus is on how our interviewees categorize and make sense of their beliefs and experiences, we do not simply take their word for it. Instead, we situate each interviewee’s perceptions of backlash in the context of the perceptions of others (across party lines and other categories of difference), as well as news media reports (e.g., Goodman Reference Goodman2023; Lartey Reference Lartey2023), triangulating these sources to better understand the production of meaning about prosecutorial reform and backlash (Tarrow Reference Tarrow2019). To be clear, our claim is not that our interviewees always accurately characterize their worlds (even to themselves), that they always make the optimal choice when pursuing reform goals, or that their critics are always or entirely without merit. In fact, several of our interviewees criticized each other’s choices about how to roll out policies or the specifics of those policies. Still, how our interviewees understand the world around them and how they describe that world to others both impact what they do. As Schatz (Reference Schatz2009, 13) explains, “we can only discern what is ‘real’ by taking people’s worldviews seriously.” Thus, the worldviews of our interviewees provide an important source of data that helps us better under the politics and dynamics of reform prosecution today.
Democratic feedback, responsiveness, and backlash
This section first provides an overview of scholarship on how voting behavior and nonvoting political participation provide feedback to elected officials, as well as scholarship on elected officials’ responsiveness and accountability to their constituents. It details how this accountability framework does and does not apply to local prosecutors, before turning to the question of what differentiates legitimate feedback on policy in practice versus politicized backlash. We draw on the scholarship discussed in this section to make sense of how prosecutors describe backlash (or what they perceive to be backlash) to their work in office in the sections that follow.
Once in office, the thermostatic model (Soroka and Wleizen Reference Soroka and Wlezien2010) suggests that public opinion both drives (policy representation) and responds to (public responsiveness) policy changes (Pacheco Reference Pacheco2013). Elected officials and the public adjust to one another in a self-correcting system, through a series of feedback processes. Another body of scholarship, however, holds that not all publics hold equal sway on elected officials. Wealthy actors and interest groups are better able to compel responsiveness to their preferences (Gilens Reference Gilens2012), while racialized minorities and especially race-class subjugated communities (Soss and Weaver Reference Soss and Weaver2017) are met with responsiveness deficits.
While scholarship on elections and responsiveness has tended to focus on state- or national-level legislative or executive elections, the underlying logic ought to apply to local officials, like chief prosecutors. As McCannon (Reference McCannon2013: 696) argues “the dominant form of accountability is that prosecutors must be reelected by the voters.” This accountability function works if voters assess their own preferences and how prosecutors act while in office. Yet, the complex nature of the legal process makes it difficult for even the most motivated voter to accurately assess the effectiveness of elected prosecutors (Gordon and Huber Reference Gordon and Huber2002). A lack of nuanced media attention to prosecutorial races (Bibas Reference Bibas2009) or media attention at all (Wright Reference Wright2009) undercuts this accountability function even more. In low information environments, challengers play an especially important role, as they “can ‘audit’ incumbent performance and advertise deficiencies to voters” (Gordon and Huber Reference Gordon and Huber2009, 143). However, elections for chief prosecutor are often uncontested (Hessick and Morse Reference Hessick and Morse2020; Hessick et al. Reference Hessick, Treul and Love2022), limiting potential auditing. Further, special interest contributions to prosecutorial campaigns may dilute or distort electoral feedback from constituents (Hessick and Pinnell Reference Hessick and Pinnell2021). These factors lead many scholars to note that there is too little (electoral) accountability for prosecutors (e.g., Wright Reference Wright2014).
Elections are not the only source of feedback or accountability for elected officials, however. They also receive feedback on their policies and practices outside of election cycles, through what Fitz and Saunders (Reference Fitz and Saunders2024) call “nonvoting participation.” Nonvoting participation is a broad category that encompasses activities like critiquing or expressing support for policies directly to elected officials or through mediated platforms, among other things. One limitation of the focus on elections and voting versus nonvoting participation is that such a focus implies that feedback will come from constituents, rather than external actors. Yet, nonconstituents can protest, campaign, contact public officials, and comment online – and it is reasonable to suspect that, at least some of the time, the speech and actions of these nonconstituents is impactful. This kind of nonconstituent intervention may be particularly prevalent when it comes to local prosecutors.
Feedback in the form of disagreement and critique is a long-standing and accepted component of democratic politics. While elected officials may not enjoy hearing dissenting views, the expression of mere disagreement is conceptually distinct from political backlash. We follow Alter and Zürn (Reference Alter and Zürn2020) by taking the word “backlash” literally. The Merriam-Webster (2026) definition of backlash is: “a sudden violent backward movement or reaction.” Alter and Zürn (Reference Alter and Zürn2020) build on that definition and explain that political backlash implies a retrograde perspective, extraordinary goals, claims, or tactics, and popular attention. Strezhnev et al. (Reference Strezhnev, Kelley and Simmons2021, 73) similarly define backlash as “a strong, negative, public, and often angry societal reaction to political or social change.” Applying these definitions to the case of elected reform prosecutors, backlash amounts to violent, angry, or otherwise extraordinary calls to move away from reform policies that involve noninstitutional means or the stretching or abuse of institutional means, and that have generated at least some public support. This conceptualization offers a general understanding of backlash and does not confine the origins of backlash to particular actors. While some recent scholarship has sought to distinguish mass-driven or popular backlash from elite-centered “frontlash” (Weaver Reference Weaver2007) or “toplash” (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2024), much of what is described as backlash involves both popular and elite actors, as popular actions can have hidden elite underpinnings and elite-led actions can feature broad public participation.
It can be challenging to differentiate some forms of exuberant and negative – but legitimate – feedback from anti-democratic backlash.Footnote 6 If a prosecutor’s policies have strayed from the preferences of their community and their constituency, it may be appropriate for that prosecutor to face pushback and critique, whether during or outside of an election cycle. Elected officials, local prosecutors included, may interpret appropriate feedback as backlash.Footnote 7 Yet, this possibility is not as troubling for our analysis as it might first seem. How individuals categorize and make sense of their worlds influences how they react to external stimuli – which means that even if a prosecutor sees something as backlash but a “neutral” observer categorizes that same action differently, the prosecutor will react as if they experienced backlash.
A more vexing challenge is that different prosecutors may disagree on where to draw the line between feedback and backlash. Consider the following three takes on recall elections from our interviewees. One held, “If they ever want to do a law that says that I could potentially be recalled, go ahead. Because I will work hard and do my job, understanding that if I get recalled, it is the will of the people, and I will accept that.”Footnote 8 In this case, the prosecutor views a potential recall election as appropriate democratic feedback instead of as an extraordinary challenge or a form of anti-democratic backlash. In contrast, another prosecutor explained that recalls are “offensive as a process.”Footnote 9 “How hard is it to get people to go out and vote?” they asked.Footnote 10 A recall election means “stealing people’s votes, and saying that their vote didn’t count,” because it means the undoing of an election.Footnote 11 A third further argued that “It’s being used as a way to discipline and eliminate independence from elected officials.”Footnote 12 While not all of the prosecutors we asked were skeptical of the democratic legitimacy of recent recall elections, almost all were. Still, rather than impose an artificial distinction between critique and backlash and categorically define certain actions as one or the other, in what follows, we defer to the frames our interviewees used to describe their experiences, focusing on what they deemed to be backlash and how they navigated that backlash. To counter these challenges, where possible, we share our interviewees’ perspectives on their own experiences and the perspectives of the peers, as well as media accounts and public record documentation of the events that our interviewees describe as backlash.
A brief introduction to backlash
Before turning to the question of the impact of backlash, we first detail the kinds of backlash described by local prosecutors. Backlash against local prosecutors, especially reform-oriented prosecutors, runs the gamut from the use and abuse of formalized institutional processes, like recall elections, that put prosecutors’ jobs or power at risk, to informal sanctions, like being castigated at the grocery store or threatened with physical violence, that put prosecutors’ lives or quality of life at risk. This backlash comes at the hands of political officials, like state legislators and governors; judicial system actors, including judges, other elected prosecutors, line prosecutors, and law clerks; law enforcement personnel and organizations; as well as members of the public. As noted above, expressions of discontent may be read differently by different people. Where one person sees justifiable disagreement, another may see untoward backlash. In this section, we briefly describe the acts that our interviewees categorized as backlash and emphasize when they understand that backlash to be anti-democratic in nature.Footnote 13
About 79% of our elected interviewees (46/58)Footnote 14 described facing backlash of some kind, and two noted that, while they had not personally faced backlash, this was something that other elected prosecutors had to contend with. 13% of Democratic Party-affiliated prosecutors (5/38) did not highlight any backlash, suggesting for example, “if there was pushback, I didn’t really hear it.”Footnote 15 The same goes for 50% of Republican Party-affiliated prosecutors (7/14).Footnote 16 One Republican prosecutor, in fact, pointed to support across the political spectrum for reform programs: “I’ve never seen any real pushback from the community. In fact, what I’ve seen is the community supports these programs. Liberal, middle of the road, and conservative, everyone supports these programs.”Footnote 17 Interestingly, both of the prosecutors quoted here described not facing “pushback” rather than “backlash.” Almost all prosecutors who ran in nonpartisan races (11/12) mentioned facing backlash, and both Independent prosecutors did. While facing backlash is not a universal experience for elected prosecutors, factors like partisanship, the population density of their district or county, and demographic identity affected the experiences of our interviewees.
The elected prosecutors who did not describe any backlash tended to emphasize fruitful outreach efforts and personal relationships with law enforcement, political officials, and the public.Footnote 18 However, those who reported facing backlash also noted an emphasis on trying to build such connections, too, which suggests that not every prosecutor, despite their purported openness, is equally able to develop strong ties with actors who might initially be skeptical of their approach to prosecution. Others mentioned partisan homogeneity in their counties or districts as a factor that gave them a little more leeway in pursuing their agendas.Footnote 19
At least 16 reform prosecutors have faced recall efforts, and some have faced multiple such campaigns.Footnote 20 Ten elected prosecutors brought up recalls in the context of backlash to reform prosecution during our interviews (21% of those facing backlash).Footnote 21 While recall procedures are designed to serve an accountability function, local prosecutors consider them to be backlash, because they are – in the view of these prosecutors – abused and incumbents are to be challenged in atypical ways, with a goal of unseating reformers rather than combating misconduct. Questioning the democratic legitimacy of the recalls of Boudin and Price, a former Republican prosecutor reflected, “I never thought that was fair. They never even had enough time to do anything, to create the situation that they were accused of.”Footnote 22 She concluded, “to only give a person a year or two in office… is wrong.”Footnote 23 Another prosecutor – a Democrat – surmised that “recalling progressive prosecutors is a thing [now]… and people have gotten into their head that that’s the appropriate remedy” when their preferred candidate loses a regular election.Footnote 24 Here, the conclusion is that recalls against local prosecutors are simply unfair and extraordinary attempts to remove elected officials.Footnote 25 This view comports with scholarly evaluations of the use of recalls beyond the case of reform prosecutors (e.g., Holland and Incio Reference Holland and Incio2019; Moylan Reference Moylan2026).
Other formal or institutionalized forms of backlash come from the state legislature and executive. Eleven elected prosecutors brought up legislature- or executive-led backlash during our interviews (24% of those facing backlash). Local prosecutors describe these efforts as backlash when state actors move away from normal procedural checks and balances to specifically target individual prosecutors or issue what they see as extraordinary directives in response to actualized or potential changes to the way the office of the prosecutor is run (for instance, issuing blanket directives to act or not act in a particular way). One example of this kind of backlash is legislative preemption, which involves passing bills to limit the jurisdiction or power of local prosecutors to make charging decisions. Policy analysts hold that different iterations of legislative preemption have been “driven by the same goal of limiting the economic, political, and social power of people of color, women, and low-income workers” (Blair et al. Reference Blair, Cooper, Wolfe and Worker2020).
State legislatures have drafted dozens of bills throughout the United States targeting local prosecutors (Camacho et al. Reference Camacho, Goldrosen, Su and Roy2023). A particularly remarkable bill in this vein was the Cook County State’s Attorney Recall Act of 2022 (Illinois H.B. 5712), which would have allowed for a recall against only the Cook County State’s Attorney, no other local prosecutor in Illinois. At the time, the Cook County State’s Attorney was a reformer, Kim Foxx. One of our interviewees explained that the other local prosecutors in the state, both Democratic and Republican, “were not in favor of it,” because “voters elected her twice.”Footnote 26 He explained, “I disagree with her philosophy very much, but I respected her as a person and as an elected official. She won the election. She had a right to implement her agenda, which she did.”Footnote 27 The implication is that a targeted removal like this is fundamentally anti-democratic.
State governors have also taken steps to remove prosecutors from office or limit the scope of prosecutorial power, often moving beyond traditional procedures meant to provide checks and balances and instead overriding the choices of voters. Notably, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis removed two local chief prosecutors – Andrew Warren in 2022 and Monique Worrell in 2023 – explicitly over objections to reform policies (Fineout Reference Fineout2023). Our interviewees across the political spectrum viewed such acts as inappropriate and anti-democratic. As one Republican interviewee put it, in these situations,
you have a state elected official affirmatively taking powers back or removing positions from somebody that a local community elected… They elected that prosecutor to do a job for them… If that local community is fine with them, then let them be. Because all you’re doing then is taking away trust in the system.Footnote 28
Such removals, then, are anti-democratic and may have impacts well beyond any one prosecutor.
Less visible types of backlash at the hands of judges or other prosecutors, law enforcement, and members of the public also inhibit the ability of prosecutors to carry out their jobs and turn their campaign promises into policy.Footnote 29 For example, judges can serve as a veto point for reform agenda when they refuse to accept plea agreements. Much of this happens “behind the scenes,” as one prosecutor explained.Footnote 30 They continued, “the judges were fighting us… I did not anticipate the money factor, because cases mean money for the prosecutors, cases mean money for law enforcement, for the courts, for the community.”Footnote 31 Similarly, line prosecutors and law enforcement officers can refuse to partner with local prosecutors and stand in the way of reform agendas. Fourteen elected prosecutors brought up backlash to reform prosecution by judges or other prosecutors during our interviews (30% of those facing backlash), while 23 described law enforcement-led backlash (50% of those facing backlash). By inhibiting prosecutors’ ability to carry out the reform policies they campaigned on, these actors stand in the way of voters’ preferences being realized and undermine the value of democratic elections.
Informal threats of violence or social sanctions present a further challenge for local reform prosecutors, as well as other elected officials (Katz et al. Reference Katz, Rippberger and Urby2025; Kornberg Reference Kornberg2025, Reference Kornberg2026). Fourteen elected prosecutors brought up these kinds of threats during our interviews (30% of those facing backlash). Numerous interviewees shared how community members confronted them in front of their children.Footnote 32 For example, one prosecutor shared that
some woman came up and started screaming and yelling at me when I was in the Fourth of July parade [in my town] … People in the parade route were screaming at me, and my son was really upset. Somebody squirted me, a man squirted me in the face with a water gun while I was walking in the parade.Footnote 33
Other interviewees faced repeated death or rape threats sent to their office or home addressFootnote 34 and made over social mediaFootnote 35 or the dark web.Footnote 36 In one instance, someone broke into a Latina prosecutor’s yard and left a noose on her patio table.Footnote 37 A white male prosecutor described himself as being “written off as the pariah, the guy who betrayed his race, or, you know, became woke and all this stuff.”Footnote 38 The disparaging use of the term “woke prosecutor” during removal efforts is widespread, having been documented in at least Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas (Kramon Reference Kramon2024). The section that follows describes how reform prosecutors viewed the impact of both visible, institutionalized forms of backlash and informal or social backlash.
Prosecutors on the impact of backlash
How exactly does this possibility of political backlash impact reform prosecutors? We organize this discussion along three themes that we inductively identified in our interview responses. First, backlash may have no impact on reformers, as reformers attempt to ignore the “noise” and focus on the job they promised to do while on the campaign trail. Second, the negative attention may prompt those interested in pursuing reforms to stop doing so or to do so more selectively. Third, in the face of potential negative publicity and political backlash, prosecutors may simply continue to adopt and expand reforms but stop talking about them. In what follows, we offer an analysis of how the 68 prosecutors we interviewed described the risks, examining each of these three themes, as well as the influence of local contextual factors.
No effect on reforms?
There are several reasons that backlash may not impact prosecutors. It could be that backlash is not sufficiently strong or targeted in specific cases to elicit behavioral change. Or it could be that particular prosecutors view responding to backlash as inappropriate, holding, for instance, that they have a democratic mandate to act in ways that are consistent with how they campaigned – and ultimately carry out a reform agenda. For these prosecutors, changing their approach, especially in response to nonconstituents, would mean sacrificing their values and reneging on their commitments.
Around one-quarter of our elected interviewees claimed to be unbothered by backlash. For instance, a prosecutor from the Midwest said, “I definitely don’t let them see me sweat.”Footnote 39 He added: “I tell the people in the office: ‘Focus on your job. Focus on the work… Nothing that they’re doing or saying is going to prevent you from helping people… It really is just noise.”Footnote 40 A prosecutor who has been subject to removal legislation told us that it did not particularly concern him: “This is a field of work where if you don’t have the fortitude [you won’t last.] Look, trial lawyers go into court and fight losing battles with zeal all the time.”Footnote 41 Another prosecutor reiterated the need for fortitude and to proactively claim space for the kind of work they do: “even some of the folks who talk about communications within our circle say you shouldn’t use [the term] ‘progressive prosecutor.’ It’s poisonous. And I say, ‘Fuck that.’”Footnote 42 They held that prosecutors should “never apologize for our principles.”Footnote 43
Several prosecutors expected backlash to specific choices or policies would negatively impact their re-election campaigns or future career prospects. This expectation, they held, did not impact how they carried out their job. For instance, a prosecutor from Illinois considered how backlash to specific programming she pursued might result in her losing her job during the next election cycle. In one recent program, a few participants “failed miserably, [and] well, they’re on their way to prison right now.”Footnote 44 Those cases generated a lot of attention. However, this prosecutor explained that she was “willing to take all the backlash from the failure, understanding that we have way more success than we have failure. And again, if I did my job to keep it, then I am not doing my job.”Footnote 45 Similarly, a prosecutor from a Southwestern state shared, “I won’t lie and say that sometimes I don’t think to myself, ‘This is gonna really suck for me.’” They described making charging decisions in a “high-profile case…that very much could have affected my re-election.”Footnote 46
Other prosecutors made more general claims about the importance of not catering to electoral concerns. An Illinois prosecutor cautioned: “If you’re so worried about losing your job, then you’d be so inclined to not necessarily do what is right.”Footnote 47 A prosecutor from a Western state held, “I would rather lose re-election and say I did my absolute best and followed through my promises and followed my values and delivered some modicum of change than sacrifice some of those things and maybe still lose.”Footnote 48 And a prosecutor from Oregon noted
if the fine people of [this] county decide not to elect me in four years, that’ll be okay. I’ll retire and go into some other area of law. I genuinely and desperately want to continue this work because I believe in it. But I’m going to do it in a way that I think is right.Footnote 49
Still others pointed to the value of communicating why they were not going to change their approach despite backlash. One prosecutor from the Southeast held that they have “a responsibility to be accessible and responsive” to their constituents.Footnote 50 A Midwest prosecutor explained that he “went out and did a lot of community meetings and answered questions” about the work his office carried out.Footnote 51 He continued: “It just is what it is. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat things. I’m not going to try to hide things. We’re just going to have a conversation.”Footnote 52 A Western state prosecutor shared, “I never cared about removal… Some decisions I make people have issues with, one way or the other, and that’s part of it, and I just try to communicate about why I made that decision.”Footnote 53
Some prosecutors described efforts they made to communicate directly with law enforcement to get ahead of any anticipated backlash by police. A prosecutor from Maine described an unpopular decision he made not to charge protestors following a Black Lives Matter demonstration: “It was one of those things where I ended up actually going and talking to a lot of police about my decision, and a lot of them didn’t have questions. They just had statements that they wanted to tell me, and I listened to them.”Footnote 54 A prosecutor from the Midwest told us about a change in policing that they championed:
Obviously, there was a lot of pushback, and I was kind of the face of this change, and so there were negative things that were targeted at me. But we got through it, and we launched some new research that showed that actually we didn’t have any negative impact on public safety.
The policy also had achieved its goal “which was to reduce the [racial] disparity” in traffic stops.Footnote 55 This same prosecutor, after introducing another new policy, faced additional pressure. As they recounted, “the sheriff wrote a public letter about my ‘crime but no punishment’ [approach], but I didn’t leave that relationship.” They explained that the sheriff “completely blindsided me with a public open letter that he released to the media. And he had gotten information from inside my own office, but at the end of the day, the public needs for us to be able to work together.”Footnote 56
These efforts to communicate show, however, that while prosecutors remain committed to their reform projects despite backlash, backlash does have an impact on their work and how prosecutors talk about their work. If backlash were not a concern, prosecutors would not need to strategically develop communications strategies that differ based on audience. They would not feel the need to reframe or rename programs. For instance, a prosecutor from the Southwest shared “I’m very gun shy—no pun intended—about the term restorative justice. I want to use different terminology for it.”Footnote 57 They told us that while they had “backed away from the term,” they hadn’t “backed away from the overall idea of it.”Footnote 58 Similarly, another prosecutor laid out the case for ignoring backlash but also being strategic about reform. First, they held,
You cannot be afraid… This is hard work. It’s real decision making. You are having an impact on people’s lives every single day, and if your decision is going to be based on somebody coming after you, threatening to remove you, or the police [who] don’t like the decisions that you’re making, don’t do it.Footnote 59
They continued, however: “You got to be fearless, but you also got to be practical too. You have to pick and choose your fights. Not every single thing is a hill worth dying on.”Footnote 60
In these ways, many prosecutors simultaneously declared the importance of ignoring backlash while also noting how they acted in ways to mitigate or avoid that backlash. This emphasis on acting strategically, renaming programs, and proactively communicating with both the public and law enforcement offers reason to suspect that it is uncommon for there to be no impact of potential backlash for our interviewees. In fact, while 79% of our elected interviewees reported facing backlash, under 10% of all elected interviewees claimed that backlash did not affect them and did not describe efforts to avoid or attenuate backlash.
Stymying or slowing reforms and reformers?
Rather than having no effect on reform prosecutors, backlash can instead incentivize reformers to slow down, to act more strategically, or even to opt into other career paths. This was the case for about one-third of our elected interviewees. These interviewees reported trying to mitigate or cope with backlash in several ways. Some detailed rolling back more progressive or innovative policies, for instance, limiting diversion programs to those that focus on nonviolent misdemeanors, shuttering restorative justice approaches for more serious offenses, and reducing efforts to hold police accountable for misconduct. Others noted that backlash had the effect of deterring individuals from running for office in the first place or seeking re-election. These prosecutors indicated that they had to act strategically as elected officials if they wanted to stay in office or described how they opted out of the reform space out of a desire for self-preservation.
Backlash “absolutely has a chilling effect,” a former candidate for prosecutor from the Midwest told us, highlighting the deeper challenge that reformers report facing in a political climate inundated with misinformation.Footnote 61 Another Midwesterner echoed the concern: “I can’t convince people a fact is a fact.”Footnote 62 As a result, prosecutors have scaled back, slowed down, or abandoned reforms, our interviews suggest. “Everybody’s talking about reversing policies,” bemoaned a Republican prosecutor from a Western state.Footnote 63 Interviewees across the country voiced similar concerns. “Sadly, I just think a lot of the reforms have just [been] rolled back… out of fear of backlash,” a candidate for prosecutor from the South stated.Footnote 64 , Footnote 65
Our interviews revealed several notable examples of prosecutors rolling back reforms, in particular when they involved police. “Bluntly, I caved to some pressure,” a prosecutor from the Midwest said, reflecting on a decision to request a more serious penalty than they otherwise would have to appease local law enforcement.Footnote 66 A Republican from California reported seeing examples of police misconduct related to Miranda warnings, search warrants, and individual protections under Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments: “It’s clear that people’s rights have been [violated] and instead, they’re continuing to fight those cases because they don’t want to take the backlash from law enforcement.”Footnote 67 The prosecutor added: “I see a lot of DAs who say, ‘I can’t make a decision. It has to go up the food chain’… It breaks my heart.”Footnote 68
Our interviewees described how backlash intimidates prosecutors into not seeking election or not running for re-election. A former candidate for prosecutor summarized this concern:
We’re seeing a shift in who’s running, because as more and more people like myself just look at the cost benefit analysis, it’s not worth it, and then you’re also going to see the people who do run, they’re not going to be as open and bold about what they’re doing that’s progressive in nature. They’re just going to do it and not advertise it.Footnote 69
Other prosecutors told us that backlash “absolutely”Footnote 70 affects who will seek office and warned that “good people are not going to run for that job.”Footnote 71 A candidate for prosecutor from North Carolina said they were “really concerned to see what the next wave of serious, competitive candidates looks like.”Footnote 72 A prosecutor from Illinois further cautioned: “It makes people not want to run for office. And then we have people who are not qualified, or frankly whackadoodles, who run for office.”Footnote 73 Yet another prosecutor reflected on how his “very uncomfortable and disappointing”Footnote 74 experience with backlash influenced whether or not he would recommend that others follow in his professional footsteps:
When you’ve spent your whole career as prosecutor and fighting for victims and there’s [a campaign against you,] they’re going to spend tens of thousands of dollars smearing you as anti-victim. It’s hurtful, and you sacrifice a lot to go into public service. That doesn’t make me want to recommend this job to anybody.Footnote 75
Attacks on reform prosecutors have resulted in high-profile exits from office, as well as decisions not to seek re-election. Notably, Kim Gardner, who was elected in 2016 as the first Black circuit attorney in St. Louis, resigned in 2023 “after brokering a deal to kill a bill that would allow a state takeover of the city prosecutor’s office” (Rivas Reference Rivas2023). Kim Foxx declined to seek re-election after a state legislator introduced a bill that would have allowed recall elections, but only her office (Foody Reference Foody2023). A candidate for prosecutor from a Southern state likened conservative efforts to chill reformers to “a game of whack-a-mole.”Footnote 76 She lamented, “We’re not in a place where we’re going to get another Kim Foxx or we’re going to get Chesa Boudin or anything like that. The backlash has been too strong and too swift, so everyone who’s left is still just hanging on.”Footnote 77 Looking back at her time in office, a former prosecutor from the Midwest declared, “There is absolutely no fucking way I would sign up to do that job again,” adding, “it just got to be abusive.”Footnote 78 Similarly, a prosecutor from the Southwest shared how a colleague in another district had handily won two elections, but “he was attacked relentlessly and mercilessly by the local police union and decided that he needed to position himself in a more moderate or conservative way, and then he eventually just decided he wasn’t going to run.”Footnote 79
Our interviewees expressed concerns about the long-term effects of the backlash faced by reformers. A prosecutor from California worried that “the normalization of threats and verbal abuse” would deter candidates “in a way that was not true in prior moments in American history.”Footnote 80 A sitting prosecutor from the Midwest shared how Republican legislators in his state “openly bemoan the fact that we don’t have enough prosecutors, and then in the same breath, attack the largest prosecutor’s office in the state.”Footnote 81 He added: “You wonder why people don’t want to do the job, right? It’s like, well, no shit, you just spent the last twenty minutes talking about how awful we are.”Footnote 82 The backlash faced by Black women, particularly Kim Foxx and Kim Gardner, prompted one Midwestern prosecutor to seriously reconsider their candidacy: “That reality was probably the biggest reason why I tried to talk myself out of running.”Footnote 83
Threats and abuse also impacted prosecutors’ personal lives. Our interviewees described feeling “lonely,”Footnote 84 “unprotected,”Footnote 85 “isolated,”Footnote 86 and “outcast.”Footnote 87 Multiple interviewees not only left office but also left the state.Footnote 88 Others described the strain on their families, particularly their spouses and children. “It was the loneliest job you can ever imagine,” said a Democrat prosecutor, who recounted how her spouse and son moved to another town following a series of physical threats and instances of police surveillance.Footnote 89 “It was scary. My son was in high school for part of this, and I had to send him to live somewhere else,” explaining, “Because if I did get hurt, I didn’t want him to see it.”Footnote 90 The prosecutor, who said they were confident they could have won re-election, declined to run because “I would probably be divorced.”Footnote 91 Along similar lines, a Republican prosecutor moved to another state after leaving office out of fears of reprisal by local police. “I am completely unprotected because there is no check on the people that carry the guns,” he said.Footnote 92 “I wanted to signal to my political enemies that I’m completely out of it, and just to leave me alone,” adding that the backlash “had a devastating effect on my children.”Footnote 93
Other prosecutors described experiencing economic impacts of backlash. A prosecutor from the Northeast said they struggled to get work after leaving office: “It was starting to get down to the wire where it was like, ‘Am I gonna keep the lights on here?’”Footnote 94 He added: “It’s like every door is closed to me, and I’ve gotten some feedback that I’m not good for business.”Footnote 95 Monique Worrell experienced something similar after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis removed her, and that led one of our interviewees to consider the potential employment consequences of pursuing reform prosecution. This interviewee shared what she witnessed after Worrell was removed from office:
what she went through in terms of trying to make a living while fighting the governor, and nobody really wanting to hire you, because they’re like, “Oh, in two years, you’re gonna run again. So why am I gonna give you a job for two years or gonna draw the governor’s ire?”Footnote 96
Beyond the threats to candidates seeking office and to prosecutors who attempt to enact reforms, many of our interviewees pointed to a far greater concern – that the backlash they faced signaled a challenge to democratic norms.Footnote 97 Interviewees cited examples of prosecutors who were removed from office, including Monique Worrell, who was removed by Gov. DeSantis, and Pamela Price, who was recalled in 2024 after serving as the first Black district attorney in Alameda County, California. A prosecutor from a Southern state viewed these state government actions as forms of voter nullification. “The messaging is that voters are not smart enough to pick their leadership. That if the powers that be disagree with the philosophy, the policy, the statements of an individual, that they will be taken out of office without the voters,” they said.Footnote 98 A prosecutor from California, reflecting on their time in office, shared:
As much as we like to think people are kind of free to do whatever they want and to call the shots, the reality is more complicated. There are lots of ways in which other government actors, agencies and even the civil service bureaucracies… serve as very, very powerful checks on the independence of elected officials.Footnote 99
In addition, a prosecutor from the Midwest raised the concern that “if you don’t cooperate with the federal government, you’re going to be prosecuted.”Footnote 100 They noted, however, that reform prosecutors “will continue on” to the extent that constitutional rights continue to exist.Footnote 101 A prosecutor from the Northeast was less optimistic. The backlash to reform prosecutors was “one of the early attacks on the democratic process, on democracy,” they said, warning that such attacks are “a harbinger of things” to come.Footnote 102
Thus, a plurality of our interviewees described pressure to abandon reform policies, to leave office, or to not run for office in the first place. Some even noted the possibility of local prosecutions facing prosecution themselves. What results from this pressure, they hold, is a chilling effect on reform prosecution that may have a lasting impact on both criminal justice reform specifically and democratic norms on a grander scale.
Quieting reforms
About one-quarter of our elected interviewees indicated that backlash has the effect of quieting reforms, as prosecutors attempt to continue to adopt new reforms or expand existing ones but do so under the radar. In other words, while there might not be a chilling effect on the actions of these prosecutors, perceived backlash still has a chilling effect on the way that they talk about their work with the media and the public. In this case, prosecutors shy away from discussing reform policies with the public, downplay current or past ties to progressive organizations, do not define themselves as progressive prosecutors, and instead adopt new labels or eschew branding entirely.
For much of the 2010s, reformers won elections while embracing a “progressive” label. But things began to change by the early 2020s. “We had our high point, and it’s gone,” said a Democratic prosecutor who ran for office as a progressive in 2016.Footnote 103 “Now I think people are more cautious.”Footnote 104 Another Democratic prosecutor expressed regret about the way that the term was adopted: “We came out there branding ourselves… we probably have realized that it’s just better to move quietly.”Footnote 105 It was not just Democratic prosecutors who questioned identifying with a progressive or reform approach to prosecution. A Republican prosecutor shared, “there has been a consistent pattern that if you, as a Republican in a heavily Republican district, try to push this idea of redemption, this idea of mercy, you will lose your job. And most politicians don’t like to lose,” he said.Footnote 106 While all our potential interviewees made their way into our sample because of their affiliation with reform organizations or their promotion of reform policies, less than half identified as progressive or reform prosecutors at the time of our interviews.
Several of our interviewees expressed a need to be careful in how they discuss reforms publicly. “We’re not bragging about some of the work we’re doing in the same way that we felt comfortable doing before,” said a prosecutor from the Northeast.Footnote 107 They described how reform-oriented prosecutors are now less willing to sign on to public declarations of support for particular policies, because the risk of backlash outweighs any benefit that comes with doing so. “You’ve got to be very careful about what you say and how you say it and to whom you say,” a prosecutor from Hawaii similarly warned.Footnote 108 “The more successful politicians will be the ones who understand the need for that sensitivity and are skillful in navigating [it].”Footnote 109 A former prosecutor explained, “I totally understand why they’re silent.”Footnote 110Another retired prosecutor shared that “the advice I gave the prosecutor who replaced me was keep your head down, like as low down as you can keep your head, and just do the best you can.”Footnote 111
A common thread was that backlash forced our interviewees to separate out what they say from what they do. One prosecutor explained that, as a result of perceived backlash from state-level politicians, they no longer talked about not prosecuting low-level drug offenses: “They’ve changed the way we talk publicly, but they will not be changing how we do business.”Footnote 112 Similarly, a prosecutor from a Southern state shared how a legal threat forced her to rescind a “day one memo” announcing her intention not to prosecute marijuana and truancy cases.Footnote 113 The prosecutor added that, while she rescinded the memo, “it didn’t necessarily change anything that we were doing in the office.”Footnote 114 She argued that, “By saying it out loud, it made me accountable to the community.”Footnote 115 Other prosecutors, including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, faced similar pressure to pare back their own policy memos (Katersky Reference Katersky2022).
Another factor that prosecutors considered was the speed of reforms. A candidate for prosecutor said she knew better than to discuss potential reforms with the public. “You gotta be smart about this,” she said. “If you want to burn something down around here, you gotta do it in pieces so people don’t recognize that you are disturbing their status quo.”Footnote 116 An elected prosecutor similarly explained, “I don’t think the public wants a zealot as a prosecutor. They want somebody who’s more judge-like or more balanced and thoughtful. But if you’re acting like a politician, I think that makes people nervous.”Footnote 117
The hope, several of our interviewees noted, of working slowly and quietly to implement reforms is that the public will be more receptive to a discussion about such policies after they are in place. “People see the world doesn’t end, and then you can talk and say, ‘These are changes prosecutors can make without jeopardizing public safety, that save taxpayers money, that make communities safer,’” said one prosecutor.Footnote 118 More specifically, another prosecutor urged reformers to frame their message around public safety: “We should be mindful of the fact that every improvement we make, every reform we make, we should tie back to public safety. We should be vocal about the connection between those two things.”Footnote 119
In the short term, however, many of our interviewees felt that backlash or potential backlash had forced them to talk about their work differently. Some reported having to reconsider what kinds of announcements would draw undesirable attention from public or private actors. Others talked about downplaying ties to other reform prosecutors or reform organizations. Ultimately what they described was a chilling effect, not necessarily on what they did while in office, but on how they communicated about their work.
Making sense of backlash
Taking these views into consideration, we conclude that overall, backlash has had a chilling effect on reform prosecutors – whether in terms of what reform policies prosecutors see as available to them, the speed at which they can pursue those reform policies, or the extent to which they can publicize their reform agendas. Trying to ignore backlash may come with serious costs. While a handful of our interviewees have continued to loudly pursue reforms while maintaining their elected position, others suffered serious personal and professional consequences that ultimately drove them out of the reform space. Those in the latter group stopped short of expressing regret about their commitment to reforms, despite their difficult experiences while in office and the challenges some continue to face today. More commonly, however, prosecutors have responded to backlash by trying to mitigate or avoid it, even if those prosecutors also declare that backlash does not affect their commitment to their reform agendas.
Efforts to mitigate or avoid the political backlash described by our interviewees include: slowing down reforms, potentially reversing reform policies, opting out of the profession of prosecutor (as either a would-be candidate or a formerly elected prosecutor), and pursuing reform policies without drawing attention to them. The collective use of these strategies indicates an overall chilling effect on reform prosecutors, both in terms of how reforms are talked about and enacted. Perhaps particularly concerning for those interested in reform prosecution is the reversal of policies and the driving of qualified and dedicated prosecutors away from the profession. The quieting of reforms could also have damaging long-term consequences for reform prosecution, however. As one of our interviewees pointed out, if prosecutors are not open about the reform policies they enact or revise, that “kind of stifles that whole education process” and inhibits “lifting up best practices.”Footnote 120 They continued that reform
becomes part of the common consciousness when it’s reported on, when it’s discussed and people are like, ‘Oh, we could do that here.’ But when nobody’s talking about what they’re doing, then you feel like either A), you’re an outlier in trying to execute this particular policy, or B), you think that it’s just impossible.Footnote 121
How might prosecutors adapt to political headwinds moving forward? A prosecutor from the South concluded that “some people will adapt to lay low. Some people hunker down. And some people ride the waves.”Footnote 122 Many prosecutors pointed to the idea of a pendulum in preferences regarding criminal justice, arguing, for instance, that “the pendulum kind of shifted back, and that makes it more challenging for reform.”Footnote 123 Some maintained optimism about the long-term future of reform prosecution. One prosecutor held that the reform approach “is very slowly wiggling its way into the larger psyche, and I hope that we take another few steps forward, understanding that right now we’re probably taking a step back [today].”Footnote 124 Another pointed to a belief that “reform prosecutors are still winning.”Footnote 125 In their view, “there’s a lot more of us coming through than people realize, so I think we’re going to continue to progress and have real criminal justice reform across the country.”Footnote 126 Whether this optimistic view is correct or whether the current chilling effect of backlash described by our interviewees will endure over the long term remains to be seen.
Conclusion
Local prosecutors have come to take a prominent position in contemporary US politics, holding a large degree of power to influence how the criminal justice system functions (e.g., Stuntz Reference Stuntz2001; Bibas Reference Bibas2009; Pfaff Reference Pfaff2017; but see Bellin Reference Bellin2019) and coming under national scrutiny for the choices they have made while in office. Reformers have consistently won elections across the country, representing urban, suburban, and rural jurisdictions in almost every state that elects local prosecutors. These reformers span partisan affiliations and professional backgrounds. Yet, they have increasingly faced backlash through institutionalized processes, like recall elections, legislative preemption, and removal efforts from state governors, and noninstitutionalized means, including foot-dragging by line prosecutors, resistance from judges, challenges by law enforcement and police unions, as well as overt threats of violence (Hessick and Su Reference Hessick and Su2023; Goldstein Reference Goldstein2024; Davis and Taylor Reference Davis and Taylor2025).
Drawing on 68 interviews with reform prosecutors or candidates for prosecutor, this article situates local prosecutors with respect to other elected officials in the United States, describing how voting behavior and forms of nonelectoral accountability impact elected officials. Prosecutorial elections are typically low-information elections and are often uncontested (Hessick and Morse Reference Hessick and Morse2020; Hessick et al. Reference Hessick, Treul and Love2022), but even so, prosecutors are not wholly insulated from the public or other political actors. In particular, when reform candidates run for prosecutor, those elections are often contested elections and feature both media coverage and public scrutiny (c.f. Chavis Reference Chavis2024). While acknowledging the importance of critique and dissent for democratic politics, this article focuses on prosecutors’ perceptions of extraordinary pushback, drawing on political science conceptualizations of backlash. In doing so, we consider how prosecutors understand backlash and how they differentiate it from legitimate critique. Our interviewees describe backlash that moves beyond traditional democratic feedback in terms of both its source (often nonconstituents) and its content (often violent).
We examine three potential impacts of backlash described by our interviewees. First, if reformers are able to ignore pushback and continue to enact their agendas, there may be no impact of backlash on reforms. Second, to the extent that reformers are incentivized to act more strategically – whether that means slowly down reform programs, selectively deploying them, or retiring from the reform space – backlash may have a stymying effect on reform prosecution. Third, if reformers seek to continue to pursue their reform programs but are driven to do so under the radar, backlash could have a quieting or damping effect on reform prosecution. The quieting of reforms may inhibit learning or diffusion processes.
Overall, our interviews indicate that backlash has had a chilling effect on contemporary prosecutorial reform by creating conditions such that prosecutors feel that they must take on exceptional personal and professional risk to continue reforms. Reform prosecutors are not equally likely to be exposed to these risks. Backlash against male prosecutors appears to largely center on efforts to remove them from office. Female prosecutors – particularly women of color – have faced far more severe forms of backlash where the stakes can be career- and life-threatening. A Latina prosecutor from a Southern state observed: “When it’s a male, it’s about getting him out of the seat. When it is a female, and the majority of us have been women of color, it is about systemic annihilation. They have to destroy us.”Footnote 127 Another prosecutor agreed, adding that the goal of backlash to female prosecutors of color is for them “to be not only out of office, but completely discredited, unemployable, incarcerated, and almost assassinated, certainly politically, certainly professionally.”Footnote 128 Whether pointing to removal efforts or violent threats, our interviewees held that reform prosecutors faced backlash that moved beyond ordinary forms of electoral accountability or feedback through nonvoting participation. Future research should explore the temporal dynamics of this backlash in greater detail. What currently amounts to a chilling effect could moderate and in retrospect appear as a temporary cooling period, as reform prosecutors adjust to their political environment or as the political pressures shift, or backlash could solidify and fundamentally reshape who participates in local prosecution and the extent to which reform prosecution endures.
Our interviewees further noted that the anti-democratic and violent nature of this backlash also poses a threat to possibilities of the criminal justice system and the value of local elections. The chilling effect on individual prosecutors and their choices while in office that we describe above means that the decisions by voters about who ought to oversee the provision of criminal justice in their communities are questioned, undercut, or circumvented, often by nonconstituents. One prosecutor summarized the problem these actions pose: “You don’t want these outside interests coming in and squeezing the lifeblood out of a prosecutor when the local jurisdiction elected them.”Footnote 129 She explained, “We are elected. I was elected by a body, and I had a very clear mandate… I wanted a fairer criminal justice system. These are things I campaigned on and I talked about, and I was elected by wide margins.” Despite the democratic legitimacy underpinning her position in office: “I couldn’t speak to this statewide apparatus that wanted to hurt me, or the FOP who didn’t even live in my jurisdiction. I don’t know how to fix that.”Footnote 130 As she put it, “it’s the faults of America, the weight of America, the dysfunction [that] is showing up in this context, in this little space of prosecutors and how we work.”Footnote 131
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Gabriela Calvillo Alvarez, Letícia Luna, Edward Monares, Sambhav Sharma, and Bianca Sieraski for their research assistance, as well as the anonymous reviewers, Tom Clark and the editorial team of the Journal of Law and Courts, Chuck Epp, Joe Margulies, Abby Matthews, Jamie Rowen, Avery Schmidt, and Sid Tarrow for their helpful feedback on earlier version of this manuscript.
