Larry Krasner Easily Wins in Philadelphia, Reinforcing Network of Reform DAs

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a national figurehead of the so-called progressive prosecutor movement, survived impeachment proceedings initiated by Republican lawmakers soon after he began his second term in 2022. Last year, Krasner was also hit by a state law approved by Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor that weakened his authority. And ahead of the 2024 presidential election, he clashed with Elon Musk over the billionaire’s electioneering schemes, drawing threats from Musk to target Krasner ahead of his run for a third term as Philly’s DA.

Even after all that, Krasner’s re-election bid this week turned out to be a carbon copy of his easy win four years ago over a more punitive challenger. The incumbent DA prevailed 64 to 36 percent in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, once again comfortably defeating an opponent who had called for increasing the volume of prosecutions.

Krasner is now overwhelmingly favored to secure a third term in a November general election in which he is currently unopposed. Krasner’s supporters celebrated his win on Tuesday night, calling it confirmation that voters support his reforms. 

“It’s encouraging to see that people continue to affirm the importance of reform work,” Nicolas O’Rourke, a progressive member of Philadelphia’s city council, told Bolts. “There is an overwhelming majority of people who recognize that we have a mass incarceration problem that does not actually create safety,” O’Rourke said. “What Krasner got elected on was recognizing these problems, that we don’t have to pretend that locking people up is actually creating safety, and he’s delivered on that.” 

Just like his reelection bid in 2021, Krasner drew endorsements from progressive groups like the Working Families Party but was conspicuously snubbed by the city’s Democratic Party. Musk appears to have stayed out of the race after all, even as Krasner campaigned on his opposition to Donald Trump and his immigration policies. 

The map of Tuesday’s results was also nearly identical to the outcome of Krasner’s 2021 primary, with just three of the city’s 66 wards flipping their preferences. Krasner won thanks to massive margins in his favor in Philadelphia’s predominantly Black neighborhoods and in the progressive Center City. He topped 80 percent of the vote in some of the wards with the largest share of Black residents in North and Southwest Philadelphia. 

“He’s created a broad coalition of people who want to see change in the justice system, who want to look to the prosecutor’s office, not as an office of vengeance, but as an office that can actually bring safety and justice to our communities,” said Robert Saleem Holbrook, a formerly incarcerated advocate who leads Straight Ahead, a Pennsylvania-based organization that pushes for reducing incarceration. “If you look at a map, the communities that have the highest rates of violence and the highest rates of incarceration, are the communities that are backing DA Krasner,” Holbrook told Bolts.

Also on Tuesday, Philadelphia voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure championed by local reform advocates like Holbrook to bolster oversight over the city’s deadly local jails, where conditions remain dangerous after previous attempts at oversight led to little accountability. The measure, which won in all of the city’s 66 wards, will create a community board tasked with investigating the city’s jails, holding monthly public hearings to share findings with the city’s jails commissioner, and making recommendations to improve treatment of people detained in Philly lockups.

Krasner’s victory reinforces the network of reformers who’ve won DA offices over the last decade. Krasner himself was a career civil rights attorney when he first won this office in 2017, heralding an era of increased attention toward prosecutor races by left-leaning groups wanting to reduce incarceration. Voters have ousted some of the movement’s most emblematic names in recent years, mostly in California with the recall of San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin in 2022 and the defeat of Los Angeles’ George Gascòn and Oakland’s Pamela Price in last year’s elections. Elsewhere, reformers have secured reelection or grabbed new offices—like Minneapolis, Austin, Ann Arbor, Burlington, Orlando, swaths of northern Virginia, suburban Colorado, and now Philly.

Patrick Dugan, a former local judge and Krasner’s opponent in Tuesday’s primary, lobbed familiar attacks against him, suggesting that Krasner had given up on going after criminals. 

“The first thing I’m going to do is I’m actually going to prosecute crime,” Dugan told the Delaware Valley Journal during the campaign. “I mean, imagine a prosecutor who is going to hold people accountable for breaking the law.”

Krasner’s 2021 opponent, Carlos Vega, had similarly assailed the DA for not being punitive enough. This year, Dugan took more pains than Vega to insist he wasn’t opposed to reforms, and he did not run as a police union ally like Vega. But he still focused criticism on what he described as leniency by Krasner in retail theft cases.

Reform advocates pushed back during the campaign, rejecting Dugan’s call for harsher punishment. “The consequences of going to jail, of having a criminal record, are immense,” Kris Henderson, co-executive director of the Philadelphia-based Amistad Law Center, told Bolts. “Retail theft in particular, this is something that people are doing because they have unmet needs. To try and get the harshest punishment for people who have done something that in the grand scheme of things is relatively minor, can lead to things like people losing their housing, their jobs, their children, people never really being able to live stably again.”

Henderson says Krasner brought needed changes to the DA’s office. His predecessors were known for being punitive and mired in allegations of misconduct; Lynne Abraham, the DA from 1991 to 2010, was nicknamed America’s “deadliest” prosecutor due to her exceptional predilection for the death penalty. 

Krasner stopped seeking death sentences once in office and he joined an unsuccessful lawsuit attempting to strike down the death penalty statewide. He downgraded most retail theft cases to a summary offense, which is the lowest tier of charges in Pennsylvania, below misdemeanors—a policy that drew the clearest pushback from Dugan this year. He also slashed the number of people living under probation in the city, a major overhaul in a city with very high rates of people living under state supervision. 

The number of people detained in the local jails has gone down considerably during Krasner’s tenure, according to data collected by the Philadelphia Inquirer; the jail population last month fell to a new low, down more than 40 percent since he took office in January 2018. Krasner has also made it considerably easier to review innocence claims, strengthening the office’s conviction integrity unit and instituting an ‘open-file’ policy that led to a string of high-profile exonerations. Henderson also said Krasner has supported other mechanisms of release for people serving time in prison like supporting people’s applications for commutation.

Krasner and his allies boasted during the campaign that these reforms have been accompanied by a steep drop in violent crimes and homicides in 2024 and so far in 2025, a trend that has been seen across the nation’s biggest cities.

But the DA has also backtracked on some of his reforms, with the Philadelphia Inquirer reporting earlier this year that his office keeps prosecuting children as adults and is using “coercive” techniques toward young defendants that Krasner once opposed. Throughout his time in office, Krasner has also drawn criticism for what some advocates see as broken promises, particularly on bail reform. Krasner said within weeks of coming into office that he’d stop seeking cash bail for low-level offenses, but Philadelphia court watchers said that the announcement did not match what they were seeing with their own eyes.

“There has been a lot of positive movement in other areas, but not so much when it comes to bail reform,” Candace McKinley, co-founder of the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund, told Bolts this week. “Cash bail is very much alive and well in Philadelphia, and still locking up hundreds of Philadelphians who are too poor to pay.”

McKinley says that line prosecutors have not followed Krasner’s policies and that the DA has not paid enough attention to ensuring their compliance, and she hopes Krasner pays more attention to this issue during his now-probable third term. “One thing I would like to see is really holding your staff accountable,” she said. “Why are your ADAs still appealing bail that is already set too high? … What about actually making your staff do what your policies say they will be doing?” (Krasner told Mother Jones this month that he should have fired more line prosecutors when he first became DA.)

But McKinley added that having someone like Krasner in office over the next four years would make it at least easier for an advocate like her to press her positions. “We don’t endorse candidates, but we would much rather deal with Krasner and trying to push him to actually keep his word, than have to deal with some people who are outright hostile and venomous and really carceral,” she said. 

Tuesday’s primary victory all but secured Krasner’s third term. No Republican has filed to run against him in the general election. GOP leaders asked voters to write Dugan’s name on their primary ballots so that Dugan could win their nomination, and it appears that this tactic succeeded on Tuesday given the high number of write-in votes in the GOP primary. (As of publication, election officials haven’t yet processed what named people actually wrote in.) But Dugan said before the campaign that he would not accept the Republican nomination, and his statement after his primary loss on Election Night implied he would stick to that. 

Even if Dugan changes his mind, Philadelphia is an overwhelmingly blue city and Krasner has easily defeated Republican opponents in past general elections. An independent candidate may also choose to file until August 1.

Many Philadelphia progressives expect that, under a Krasner third term, the state legislature would continue trying to meddle in local affairs and make life difficult for the DA. 

Holbrook says that Krasner’s reelection sends a message from city voters that the state should back off. “It’s definitely Philadelphia asserting this democracy,” he said. “We’re not a colony of the state legislature. Philadelphia is its own city, and Philadelphia has its own agency.”