Yesterday, Long Island voters swept Democratic district attorneys from office. In Nassau County, career local prosecutor Anne Donnelly upset Democratic state Sen. Todd Kaminsky, a former federal prosecutor and supposed rising star. Kaminsky voted for the 2019 law that eliminated cash bail for defendants accused of many misdemeanors and “non-violent” felonies.
Donnelly won by 20 points. Kaminsky is now a fallen star.
The story was similar in Suffolk County. There, Republican Ray Tierney defeated Democratic incumbent District Attorney Tim Sini. With most of the vote counted, Tierney was leading 57-43.
Unlike Kaminsky, Sini did not support bail reform. In fact, according to the New York Post, he was an early critic of it. He still lost.
Even though Sini criticized bail reform, he remained vulnerable to attack for being insufficiently tough on crime. In attacking the incumbent, Tierney said:
DA Sini has failed to utilize all of the prosecutorial tools to keep dangerous criminals off the streets. There are several instances, just this past summer, where he did not indict dangerous criminals despite having the circumstances and evidence to do so.
These individuals were free to go and they went on to either commit murder, or in the instance of the East End overdoses, they went on to continue with their drug dealing and six residents died. This will not happen in my office.
With violent crime on the rise, law and order has become a major issue in much of the country. Bail reform — “turn ’em loose” as Donnelly correctly characterized it throughout her successful campaign — has earned the contempt of voters. But, as the Sini-Tierney race shows, even apart from bail reform, voters understand Democrats to be on the wrong side of crime-related issues.
And just as is the case with education-related issues, that’s a bad place to be.
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