Kathy Hochul speaks to supporters during her election-night party Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, in New York.
Hans Pennink/AP Photo

In 2019, Democrats’ criminal justice reforms were bolstered by campaigns from advocacy groups highlighting the aims of the laws: to create safer communities by ensuring thousands of mostly minority New Yorkers wouldn’t jam up the jail system pretrial because they couldn’t afford bail.

So where was the pro-bail reform campaign, not just defending, but championing the laws this year? Largely non-existent.

“I don’t know what the reason is,” said state Sen. Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx), who cosponsored the initial 2019 bail reform law and has fought against its changes. “I just know that one of the messages that we have to send to our advocates is that when we go out there and we fight for the right causes, we have to stay together to deliver messages so that the Republican Party doesn’t muddy the waters and uses certain areas to demonize us.”

One issue for Democrats was that some of those advocacy groups that lobbied for ending cash bail have since lost resources. One of the 2019 reforms’ big financial backers was billionaire hedge fund investor Dan Loeb through a coalition of local and national nonprofits called New Yorkers United for Justice. Loeb pulled his funding from the group this year, after the laws were passed and as the reforms became a matter of Democratic infighting.

Loeb spent this cycle pouring money into a curious blend of campaigns, including Republican Mehmet Oz’s U.S. Senate run in Pennsylvania and Republicans’ Senate Leadership fund, as well as Hochul’s campaign, Republican Harry Wilson’s run in the New York gubernatorial primary, and Fair Just and Safe NY PAC, which purports to support candidates who have advanced pretrial reforms and parole changes.

“Coalitions like New Yorkers United for Justice are so effective because they can bring diverse groups together to mobilize, energize and educate voters on why criminal justice reform is so critical,” said Kaplan, whose firm previously handled communications for the group. “There is a real opportunity for a new coalition to pick up the mantle of defending progress like bail reform and pushing and giving political cover to Democrats so they can go further.”

But it wasn’t just the availability of money and resources. Supporters of the bail laws arguably have a harder message to sell, said Marvin Mayfield, director of organizing at Center for Community Alternatives.

From a public messaging perspective, the narrative that bail reform is bad is straightforward and emotionally riveting. Explaining the nuances of it in a 30-second clip is more difficult.

Zeldin’s “Hochul Let My Family Down” ad, for example, highlighted the story of a 93-year-old woman who was “tortured and killed” at home by a suspect released after previous offenses. But much of the Republican rhetoric took liberties with hypothetical outcomes and often in the stories cited by Republicans, the bail laws had no practical effect on how the charges were handled.

Still, a story for the opposing narrative — why the bail laws are successful — isn’t so splashy, Mayfield said. And few individuals who experience a positive effect from the new laws are looking to highlight a low-level conviction to the masses, he said.

Mayfield himself spent 11 months on Rikers Island because he could not afford to pay bail, and then took a guilty plea for a crime he says he did not commit.

“For many, bail reform means they can return to their families and their jobs and, if their cases are dismissed, they can fully return to their lives without the trauma of pretrial incarceration or the coercion to plead guilty,” he said. “At that point, people do not want their names and faces splashed across the headlines; they simply want to move on.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams will be pushing Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers to continue to make changes to the state’s bail laws during the legislative session that starts in January.