In 2020 Democrats Embraced Black Lives Matter. In 2024 They’re Running as Cops. (2024)

In California’s 41^st District, a showdown is taking shape that almost eerily mimics the showdown at the very top of the ticket. There, the Republican congressman is someone who was caught soliciting a sex worker early in his tenure; has consistently been deemed one of Congress’ most corrupt members over the years, thanks to his success securing legislative earmarks that directly benefited his properties; and even came under FBI investigation in 2010 over what media outlets referred to at the time as “an alleged inside deal to buy publicly-owned land.” Running against him is a former prosecutor from a marginalized background hoping to flip the seat blue.

That incumbent is Ken Calvert, the longest-serving Republican in California’s congressional delegation. Calvert is serving his 16^th consecutive term, having represented his corner of the Inland Empire since Bill Clinton won the presidency, and lasting through decades of redrawn maps, demographic shifts, corruption scandals, formidable electoral challengers, and even his denial of the 2020 election results. At present, the district retains a slight Republican tilt, and he already beat his current Democratic opponent in 2022, a year that saw plenty of other Democratic upsets.

So why does Will Rollins—a gay former assistant U.S. attorney who has taken on Jan.6 insurrectionists in court and who previously worked for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger—think he can take out Calvert this time?

One thing Rollins will tell you is that the numbers are on his side. That 2022 race was a loss but a narrow one; Calvert, usually a double-digit victor, saw his lead shrink to 4.5 points. Rollins outperformed most of the other Democrats who’d run for GOP-held districts that year—plus, in that go-round, he didn’t get much attention or support from the national Democratic Party. (This year, major Democratic institutions and leaders like Hakeem Jeffries have helped fundraise for him.) After a slight shift in its borders, the 41^st is also a more diverse and tolerant district than ever, with more registered Democrats than Republicans and the inclusion of the LGBTQ-friendly Palm Springs. As Rollins told me, citing district analyses, tens of thousands of liberals skipped the typically low-turnout midterms cycle but may be persuaded to hit the ballot box this time—especially given the wave of excitement ushered in by top-ticket candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

About that connection. Rollins is running on an image that just so happens to align with the fellow Californian his party is nominating for president: weaponizing his prosecutorial background against a GOP that has famously nominated a convicted felon to the top of its ticket. Not only has Donald Trump been convicted of 34 felonies of falsifying business records (sentencing to be determined), found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, and banned from doing business in New York, but he also faces federal charges on a still-pending Jan.6 case. Which is part of why, even before Harris was on the ticket, Rollins was planning to draw upon his experience prosecuting Jan.6 insurrectionists under the Department of Justice.

As the Democratic National Convention showed us last week, there’s one key frame for the overall election cycle: that 2024 is a righteous matchup between a former prosecutor and a convicted felon. (Or, as Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett memorably put it, a woman with a “résumé” versus a man with a “rap sheet.”) The four-day ceremony did not, this time, invite the parents of police-brutality victims like Sandra Bland and George Floyd to speak. The party did, however, invite a Michigan sheriff who teamed up with a far-right conspiracy group for a purported anti–sex-trafficking operation, a Texas sheriff who has been calling for immigration crackdowns, and two officers who were present for the Jan.6 riot. The exonerated Central Park Five did speak, but they were there primarily to opine against their historical villain Donald Trump. Everything else was relatively pro-cop: Harris, in her acceptance speech, presented herself as a prosecutor on behalf of the people. “In the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge, and I said five words: Kamala Harris, for the people. And to be clear—and to be clear, my entire career, I’ve only had one client: the people,” she proclaimed to the adoring crowd. “In our system of justice, a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us.”

It all marks a stark turnaround from a party that is still reckoning with the complex legacy of Black Lives Matter and the 2020 protests against George Floyd’s murder. (Normally, you could expect Republicans to platform cops like former Sheriff David Clarke.) Studies have shown that the record-breaking 2020 protests helped Democrats win the presidency and Congress that year, thanks to increased awareness of systemic racism and voter mobilization downstream of the protests. Yet the politics of backlash in 2024 have demonstrated that if Harris is elected this fall, she will have done so while proudly embracing the label of “cop.” Rollins is hoping for the same—and, at least according to a campaign-commissioned poll that shows him leading Calvert by 1point, it just might work.

I first heard about Rollins in late 2023, about a year after Elon Musk had taken over Twitter and began reshaping it into the far-right cesspool it is today. For a very hot minute, there was no better exemplar of X’s dark turn than the Rollins campaign account’s mentions. Hammering on the type of pro-democracy, anti-insurrectionist messaging that helped Democrats in the 2022 midterms, Rollins had been tweeting consistently about how, in his capacity as assistant U.S. attorney in the Central District of California, he assisted the DOJ in pursuing the cases it eventually lodged against hundreds of Capitol rioters. Throughout October, brigades of Trumpists with paid-for blue checks—like Dinesh D’Souza and Lara Logan—barraged his replies by calling him a “commie” or a “Nazi” or a “soy boy” or a hom*ophobic slur, even under a campaign video in which Rollins describes a case he’d worked on against a conspiracy-addled train engineer who attempted to destroy a Navy hospital ship. The flood of hatred got his campaign some attention from sympathetic liberals and inspired Rollins to call out the Big Tech and media complexes that spread the disinformation that inspired both the Jan.6 agitators and the wannabe Navy saboteur.

In late June, just a few days before Joe Biden’s career-ending debate disaster, Rollins had come to New York City for some Democratic Party business. I took the opportunity to chat with him at a Manhattan diner. Before our scheduled meeting, he’d been speaking with members of the International Law Enforcement Officers Association, an organization that focuses on fostering healthier relationships between police officers and their local communities. (The association had endorsed Rollins back in April.) Rollins’ emphasis on his law enforcement connections and endorsem*nts—including from retired Republican officers—certainly makes sense for a toss-up race in a swingier district. But, I asked him, how does one target traditional GOP voters when the majority of that party no longer blames the insurrectionists or Trump for the horrific violence of Jan.6? Particularly at a time when tech platforms now all but refuse to vigorously counter misinformation?

“I lean into the part of what is correct about their worldview, which is that the system is corrupt,” Rollins told me. “Trump has said it’s the fault of migrants, it’s the fault of Democrats. What we need to say is: It’s the fault of a system that is fundamentally broken, and the guy who’s going to fix it is not the former host of The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Rollins has a whole list of policy prescriptions he sees as addressing the corruption of a GOP that, he says, has come a far way from the Republican Party of his grandparents, World WarII veterans drawn to presidents like Eisenhower and Reagan. Voters like his grandparents were supportive of law and order and allergic to a government that interfered too deeply with their lives. Donald Trump and Ken Calvert have turned those values inside out, he says, evading accountability for their own lawbreaking, using their elected positions to enrich themselves, and becoming “obsessed with what’s happening in your kids’ locker room, with what’s happening in your bedroom, with what’s happening in your exam room.” (Notably, he’d referred to all this as “weird” culture-warring even before Tim Walz popularized the term.)

By embracing his prosecutorial bona fides, Rollins is behaving as the perfect natural opponent of a known criminal. Before our meeting, Rollins’ campaign shared with me flyers from Calvert’s campaign and its supporters that consistently labeled Rollins as “soft on crime,” suggesting that his leniency with criminals has spurred an influx of fentanyl across California and allowed violent offenders to run free. Rollins’ campaign counters, in turn, that it is in fact Calvert who is “weak on crime” and unable to keep the public safe. Between the more recent “soft on crime” jeer and Bill Clinton–era “tough on crime” policy, Rollins echoes a middle-of-the-road message that Harris has long touted: being “smart on crime.”

“I hope Calvert makes this race about crime. He’s got a lot to answer for on his own,” Rollins told me at the diner. The line Rollins straddles here, at least rhetorically, is fascinating. He can sound downright progressive on the need to address root sources of crime instead of just building maximum-security prisons, to invest in public education and neighborhoods of all sizes, to attack white-collar criminals as aggressively as petty ones, and to not return to the overly punitive crackdowns of the war on drugs. At the same time, he talks up the line about how California’s Proposition 47—a 2014 ballot initiative that reclassified certain nonviolent felonies as misdemeanors—increased the rate of “smash-and-grabs” in the state, while defending the often-controversial Border Patrol and insisting that increased representation in law enforcement is what will heal rifts between marginalized communities and their cops. “You can’t have trust between the police and communities unless, first of all, law enforcement looks like the community that we are serving. And that includes not just race, gender, religion, political party, sexual orientation—it includes people from all different kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds too,” he told me. “The far left was trying to demean Harris’ record by calling her ‘Kamala the Cop.’ I think that it’s not going to be effective, and it hasn’t really stuck in the way that I think Trump has been hoping it would,” he said.

Of course, the way LGBTQ communities have historically been targeted by police officers—and remember that discriminatory treatment all too well—resonates particularly with him. “It’s not lost on me that we haven’t yet had an out member of Congress from law enforcement in U.S. history, ever,” Rollins said. “I think that my own experience growing up with stigma, and being told by your government that there’s something defective about who you are when you’re thinking about enlisting in the military, is something that I understand personally.”

So, can two Californians—one a Black and South Asian American former state attorney general, the other an openly gay former federal prosecutor—open up public safety opportunities and heal historic rifts between cops and marginalized communities by dint of beating their crooked politicians, serving in the federal government, and, quite simply, being up there in the seats of power? I followed up with Rollins earlier this month, after the Biden–Harris switch-up was official. He told me the constituents of the 41^st—roughly 40percent of them voters of color—are certainly jazzed to give the prosecutors on their ballots a shot.

“The enthusiasm that [Harris] has generated has been unlike anything I’ve seen since 2008,” he said. “It feels much less like we are running against something, or as a firewall against something, and more like we’re running for the future and for optimism and hope and making politics fun again.” He also positively cited Tim Walz’s “Chris Farley–level energy” and noted the downstream effects on his campaign: a surge in individual contributions, a “70percent increase in our volunteers,” and even an uptick in rally attendees.

The post-2020 moment, for better or worse, seems to have spurred interest in those who won’t shy away from law enforcement but still continue to make it more diverse—to make it at the very least look more like Harris and Rollins, as the latter has championed. In the grand scheme of things, looks might only go so far when it comes to truly reforming our criminal justice system. But the strategy could certainly place these reformers in lofty positions of power.