Thien Ho’s DA race lead confirms a Sacramento truth: The capital is conservative on crime
On law and order issues, Sacramento County has traditionally leaned conservative, which made the capital of California impervious to the “defund police” movement. The Sacramento region has also been shocked by two mass shootings in recent months, a proliferation of homelessness in the last decade, and new spikes in violent crimes.
So when the legal and law enforcement community rallied around the county’s elite prosecutor, Thien Ho, in his run for district attorney, it figured that Ho would be tough to beat. The early election results from Tuesday night’s primary confirmed this, with Ho maintaining a commanding lead over progressive challenger Alana Mathews.
Ho was up nearly 20 percentage points at last count, which sets him up to make history. A Vietnamese immigrant who fled his birth country with his family in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Ho is on his way to becoming the first person of color to lead a Sacramento district attorney’s office that is more than a century old.
The historical significance of Ho’s ascension cannot be understated in a Sacramento community where Asian immigrants from Japan and China were terribly mistreated since the time of the Gold Rush, through World War II, and beyond.
A victory by Ho would also cap a stellar career for the 48-year-old prosecutor who has been the preeminent lawyer in his office for at least a decade. In the end, Ho’s superior legal credentials and Sacramento’s center-right leanings on law and order were too much for Mathews to overcome.
In a comparison of resumes, it was no contest: Ho is a giant in Sacramento’s legal community and Mathews is not. To win, Mathews needed to persuade voters to pick a progressive reformer and outsider who would change the nature of the office itself. It appears she didn’t come close to doing that.
Candidly, Mathews interviewed better than Ho in the run-up for Tuesday’s election. Though she was only a low-level prosecutor before leaving the district attorney’s office for a respected career in law and advocacy, Mathews’ answers were often clearer than Ho’s on questions relating to criminal justice reform, violence prevention, and gun violence, among other topics.
But the deck was stacked against Mathews in ways she could not control. First, she was challenging Ho in a non-presidential election year, when turnout is far lower. The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, with a majority of Democrats, has previously opposed the idea of moving the district attorney and sheriff’s races to presidential years when turnout is much higher.
That position has gotten almost no attention, but the numbers so far in Tuesday’s election are worth considering: At last count, only 22% of registered voters had bothered to cast a ballot in this year’s primary.
Mathews was able to land about every progressive endorsement in the region, but those endorsements did not translate into progressive votes. Her campaign fizzled just as the campaign for justice after the killing of George Floyd fizzled locally. It feels like that moment was lost, and in its place, we’ve gotten Sacramento the same as it ever was.
The few people who bothered to vote cast a ballot for Ho’s experience and law enforcement backing over Mathews’ ideas about justice reform, crime prevention, and holding police accountable more than previous DA’s.
Ho undoubtedly benefited from voters afraid of progressive ideas, though Ho is a Democrat himself and welcomes certain changes.
No matter. A lot of Democrats in Sacramento have been horrified by the rise of homelessness and crime on city and county streets. They want a district attorney who makes them feel safer.
Those feelings swept a progressive prosecutor out of office in liberal San Francisco on Tuesday and they fueled the election of Ho, a hard-nosed prosecutor, in center-right Sacramento.
This story was originally published June 8, 2022 at 1:03 PM.
