Democrats are soft on crime, progressive cities are plagued by public safety issues, and voters are fed up — this narrative is a familiar one by now. Analysts have claimed that, while progressive approaches to public safety experienced flash-in-the-pan popularity in 2020, urban voters now prefer tough-on-crime policies. But major wins by progressives in New York City’s and Seattle’s mayoral elections refute these claims. Incoming mayors Katie Wilson of Seattle and Zohran Mamdani of New York usher in a new era of progressive public safety policy and show that the progressive approach is still a winning one.
President Trump’s recent efforts to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles ramped up conservatives’ claims that liberal cities are spiraling into crime and chaos under Democratic leaders’ management. The GOP leaned into this narrative in the past two election cycles since 2020, often criticizing Democrats for wanting to defund the police.
Indeed, many Democratic leaders began reevaluating their public safety policies amidst national reckoning over police brutality in a post-Floyd America, which gave rise to progressive crime policies. And it’s also true that public opinion has since shifted back towards favoring more moderate public safety approaches: 41 percent of Democrats supported decreasing funding for the police in 2020, but support quickly dropped to just 25 percent in 2021.
This shift reflected growing concerns over public safety in liberal cities. In 2022, three of four violent crime categories increased in New York City and 76 percent of New Yorkers said they were concerned about becoming a victim of violent crime. Seattle’s violent crime rate hit a 15-year high that year, and skyrocketing overdose deaths in Portland led Oregon to recriminalize drug possession in 2024, only a few years after 58 percent of voters supported an initiative to decriminalize possession in 2020.
Many took former police officer Eric Adams’ win in New York’s 2021 mayoral race as a sign that successful Democratic candidates are those who take a strong, pro-law enforcement approach to public safety. Like Adams, Seattle’s current mayor Bruce Harrell is a pro-law enforcement Democrat who was elected in 2021. Their elections resembled a broader trend among establishment Democrats, including Kamala Harris, who staked out a tough-on-crime stance in the 2024 presidential election by emphasizing her background as a prosecutor.
Adams and Harrell benefited from the backlash to 2020’s progressivism in their first campaigns, but voters in Seattle and New York remained dissatisfied with how their leaders handled public safety. Fast-forward to 2025: both incumbent mayors were overtaken by progressives in competitive, high-turnout mayoral races, despite super PACs spending billions of dollars to preserve the establishment’s rule.
Mamdani and Wilson both ran on progressive public safety policies that cast compassionate crisis response, not law enforcement, as the solution to the cities’ public safety issues. Mamdani plans to create a Department of Community Safety and expand the B-HEARD program, which directs trained behavioral health professionals to respond to mental health crises instead of police officers. Similarly, Wilson wants to expand and improve CARE teams, Seattle’s version of B-HEARD.
On the campaign trail, the progressives’ establishment opponents tried to hammer them for being soft on crime. Both mayor-elects previously supported calls to defund the police in 2020 — a fact their opponents made a point of highlighting — but walked back that position during their campaigns. Now, their platforms present a new vision for a progressive approach to public safety: a pragmatic one that emphasizes the need to allocate funding and resources to alternative crisis responses, while maintaining the city police force’s funding and staffing levels.
While conservatives paint progressives as radical police-abolitionists, Mamdani and Wilson show the progressive approach is more than a slogan. By adapting their public safety agenda in response to voters’ concerns but maintaining a commitment to community-based responses, the Mayor-Elects articulated a winning middle ground.Their wins show that urban Democrats don’t want tough-on-crime posturing. Rather, they are excited to vote for public safety platforms that advance realistic solutions, not hardline rhetoric. In 2025, progressives are the ones offering that. The old narrative is ready for retirement — urban progressives aren’t losing on public safety, they’re winning.
The Zeitgeist aims to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
