California is known for having some of the most progressive laws in the country. But in Tuesday’s election, the state lurched rightward as voters sent a clear message that they were fed up with crime and homelessness in their state.

Frustrated by open-air drug use, “smash-and-grab” robberies and shampoo locked away in stores, California voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure, Proposition 36, that will impose harsher penalties for shoplifting and drug possession.

Voters in Oakland and Los Angeles were on their way to ousting liberal district attorneys who had campaigned on social justice promises to reduce imprisonment and hold the police accountable. And statewide measures to raise the minimum wage, ban the forced labor of inmates and expand rent control, all backed by progressive groups and labor unions, were heading toward defeat.

Amid a conservative shift nationally that included Donald Trump’s reclamation of the White House, voters in heavily Democratic California displayed a similar frustration, challenging the state’s identity as a reflexively liberal bastion.

And Trump appears to have gained ground in California compared with four years ago, based on initial election returns, despite facing Vice President Kamala Harris in her home state. (She was still ahead by nearly 18 percentage points after a vote count update Thursday, but Joe Biden won in 2020 by 29 points.)

The mood this year was “very negative about the direction of the country especially, but also the state,” said Mark Baldassare, who is a political scientist and the statewide survey director for the Public Policy Institute of California. “Lots of concerns about the direction of the economy, and worries about the cost of living and public safety.”

In San Francisco, the ouster of Mayor London Breed was the latest sign of discontent in a city that began moving away from its liberal moorings two years ago. Voters this week replaced Breed with Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat who is an heir to the Levi Strauss clothing fortune. Breed herself was moderate, but voters were unhappy with her handling of the city’s crime and homelessness.

In Los Angeles County, the district attorney, George Gascón, was overwhelmingly defeated. Four years ago, his election was seen as a monumental moment for a national movement to elect progressive prosecutors.

This time, his opponent, Nathan Hochman, who is a Republican turned independent and a former federal prosecutor, won with roughly 60% of the vote in initial returns.

Hochman’s message: Los Angeles is a lawless dystopia that needs a heavier hand in the prosecutor’s office.

During Gascón’s tenure, police officers have complained about his policies, calling them lenient and saying that in some cases, they have been reluctant to make arrests because they believed he would not prosecute.

Hochman had a very different message at his election night party Tuesday in Beverly Hills.

“Here’s what I’m here to tell the police department: Your hands are not tied anymore,” Hochman said, to cheers. “The DA’s office will not have a political agenda ruling what goes on and what gets prosecuted. We will go back to two things: the facts and the law.”

From one perspective, Gascón’s election in the first place was an anomaly born from a burst of social justice momentum during the pandemic, just months after the murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis. Voters were receptive to widespread calls for police accountability and to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

But California and Los Angeles in particular have a history of tougher criminal justice policies than many would think. Until a decade ago, the state had severely overcrowded prisons, the result of stiffer criminal justice laws and a strict three-strikes policy.

Tristan Fontaine, a manager at a Walmart in Los Angeles, once voted for Barack Obama for president. But he said that as he has grown older, he has become more conservative, mainly because of economic issues and the fact that his rent has skyrocketed. Even though Fontaine, 36, still describes himself as a moderate, he has now voted for Trump three times.

And this year, he voted against Gascón and in favor of Proposition 36, partly because, as an employee of Walmart, he has seen the problem of retail theft up close.

“It’s just kind of silly that so many people were getting away with large amounts of theft and not being held accountable for it, so I think that it was time for a change,” he said.

Farther north, in Oakland, fears about crime and a sense that the county district attorney, Pamela Price, was too lenient fomented a backlash that saw Price recalled from her job, which she had only assumed in January 2023.

Crime in California, like nationally, is generally at historic lows, although during the pandemic, there was a surge in homicides. Some property crimes, like theft, have increased in recent years. Shoplifting, for example, surged nearly 40% in California last year, according to the state’s Justice Department.

But the disorder in the streets is real, and even some activists who work on behalf of homeless Californians and people suffering from addiction said they welcomed tougher criminal penalties.

“People are tired of going to Walgreens and having someone unlock the door just to get a tube of toothpaste — including me,” said Del Seymour, known as the mayor of the Tenderloin for his activism in the neighborhood, a low-income area of San Francisco. “We’ve got to get some responsibility, or it’s just the wild, Wild West.”