Former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman continued to hold onto a commanding lead over incumbent George Gascón in the Los Angeles District Attorney race as election results trickled in from the L.A. County registrar’s office late Tuesday, Nov. 5.
Hochman had a double-digit lead when the first set of results came out shortly after 8:30 p.m. and continued to lead by double digits through three subsequent updates. At 9:45 p.m., he had 61% of the vote while Gascón had 39%.
Election night results are only preliminary. The registrar’s office won’t finish tabulating votes for days and has until Dec. 3 to certify the results of the election.
LIVE ELECTION RESULTS: See a chart of the latest vote counts
Although Gascón is the incumbent and was the top vote-getter in the March primary election, he came into Election Day as the underdog. Recent polls had Gascón trailing Hochman by 24 to 30 percentage points.
Gascón, who is seeking a second term as L.A.’s district attorney, swept into office in 2020 on a progressive platform focused on criminal justice reform and police accountability that resonated with voters amid a national outcry over the killing of George Floyd while in police custody.
But he has struggled to gain the same level of voter support this year.
Although he finished first in the primary election, Gascón captured just 25% of the vote – which some political observers considered a poor showing for an incumbent. That race featured a crowded field of 12 candidates.
Hochman, meanwhile, ran on a tougher-on-crime platform. He crafted a narrative that L.A. County had become less safe over the past four years – and placed the blame squarely on Gascón for a rise in crimes. Hochman has repeatedly described Gascón’s policies, which he views as lax, as a “social experiment” that has “failed” and made criminals less afraid to commit crimes.
Whether Hochman’s message was effective in convincing enough people to vote for him will become clearer in the following days as more ballots are counted.
At least on election night, initial numbers from the registrar’s office showed Hochman with a comfortable lead over Gascón for the time being.
Heading into Election Day, many viewed the district attorney race as a referendum on the current state of public safety in the nation’s most populous county.
On the campaign trail, both candidates cited different statistics to make their cases about whether L.A. County is safer since Gascón took office nearly four years ago.
The current district attorney insisted that violent crime, including homicide, is down while acknowledging that some property crimes like car thefts have gone up. He said his office has addressed organized retail theft and has been “very aggressive” in tackling hate crimes, human trafficking and waste theft.
Countering claims that he is too soft on criminals, Gascón said under his leadership, the D.A.’s office has prosecuted serious and violent crime cases at rates comparable to before he took office.
At the same time, his campaign highlighted his work in criminal justice reform and in pushing for more police accountability.
Fourteen innocent people who were wrongfully convicted, some when they were children, have been exonerated under Gascón’s administration, his campaign said. The D.A.’s office has also filed five officer-involved shooting cases and 10 excessive force cases against law enforcement officers – a stark difference to the single officer-involved shooting case the D.A.’s office filed in the two decades before Gascón took office, according to his campaign.
About two weeks ago, Gascón announced he would ask a judge to consider resentencing Erik and Lyle Menendez, the high-profile case of two brothers who shot and killed their parents in 1989.
The brothers, now 56 and 53, are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, but Gascón wants the sentences reduced so the brothers can be released from prison on parole. Attorneys for the brothers say their clients were victims of sexual abuse by their father.
While Gascón’s critics have called him soft on crime, he has accused his opponent in the D.A. race of wanting to return to an era of mass incarceration that had disproportionately impacted people of color.
Hochman denied supporting either full-on mass incarceration or what he called “Gascón’s de-carceration” policy. Instead, Hochman said if he’s D.A., he would adopt a “hard middle” approach in which every case would be considered individually, based on a defendant’s criminal history, the crime or crimes committed and the impact on any victims.
Hochman also pushed back on Gascón’s claim that violent crime is down, saying the incumbent relied on statistics from the Los Angeles Police Department that only showed crime trends in the city of L.A.
On the other hand, Hochman said, data from the California Department of Justice, which take into account crime trends for all 88 cities in L.A. County, show that between 2020 and 2023, violent crime, property crimes and hate crimes increased by double digits while shoplifting skyrocketed 133% countywide.
On the campaign trail, both candidates also commented on their opponent’s past affiliation to the Republican party.
Hochman ran for state attorney general as a Republican in 2022 but switched to “no party preference” last year. He described himself as a “centrist” and said he ran as an independent this year because the D.A. is a nonpartisan office and the work of the D.A. should not be political.
Responding to his opponent’s criticism of his Republican past, Hochman said that Gascón had been a Republican for nearly twice as long as he had before either candidate switched parties. Gascón in turn noted that Hochman had been a Republican much more recently than him.
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