Alvin Bragg Is Cruising To Reelection — And He Has Donald Trump To Thank

NEW YORK — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is cruising to reelection — and he has Donald Trump to thank for his good fortune.

The president-elect’s criminal case has loomed over Bragg since his first day on the job. That ended Friday with Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case. Trump received a slap on the wrist and gets to declare victory. But so does Bragg.

The Democrat now enters his fourth year in office as one of the most famous district attorneys in America — and the only prosecutor to ever convict a president-elect on felony charges. It also marks the completion of a full rebrand for Bragg, who entered office as a progressive champion focused on criminal justice reform. His campaign website this time around indicates he is focused on fighting crime, a stark shift from his 2021 platform.

Not a single challenger is running against him in this year’s Democratic primary. And his Republican foe will have a tough time convincing voters in the deep-blue borough to cross the aisle.

“I’m sure there are plenty of Upper West Siders who cheer him on for maintaining the rule of law,” said Chris Coffey, chief executive of Tusk Strategies, referring to the Trump conviction. “I think there are other folks who would say: Hey, shouldn’t our focus be making sure the city is safe? During times when folks feel public safety is the No. 1 concern, I think you see elected officials become more moderate.”

When Bragg first took office in Jan. 2022, New Yorkers concerns’ had drifted away from criminal justice reform and toward crime rates exceeding pre-pandemic levels. New York City Mayor Eric Adams — whose boisterous style contrasts sharply with that of the more reserved Bragg — won a crowded primary by focusing on public safety.

Now, it’s Adams who’s on the political ropes and Bragg on a breeze path to reelection.

Bragg relies on the NYPD to make arrests that eventually turn into prosecutions. And in sharp contrast to the district attorney — who met expectations he would prosecute Trump — Adams has not delivered on his central pledge to reduce crime: While shootings and murders have declined dramatically under the mayor’s watch, felony assaults and rapes are increasing. Major felonies on the whole are actually up by roughly 20 percent compared to 2021 when Adams was campaigning on making the city safer.

In 2022, Bragg had a far different state of play to contend with.

Just weeks into his tenure, he released a memo indicating he would stop prosecuting certain low-level crimes and would opt out of seeking bail for others. The backlash was intense and instantaneous, and it led the newly minted prosecutor to quickly mount a full retreat.

And while neither Bragg nor any of his competitors focused their campaigns on going after Trump, the investigation was top of mind for voters and the press — and the staff he inherited. Shortly after Bragg took office, a high-profile mutiny related to the value Trump placed on his real estate properties further fueled perceptions the office was floundering. In February 2022, a pair of prosecutors leading the probe into the now president-elect resigned, citing Bragg’s resistance to moving forward with the valuation charges. One of them even wrote a book about it. Bragg fought unsuccessfully to keep that tome from publication, and said upon its release that the case being pursued by the two attorneys needed more work.

With pressure coming from both the political right and left, Bragg’s tenure was already imperiled. But in March 2023, he secured an indictment of the president-elect on the hush money charges. And in the wake of the memo debacle, he began to refocus on crime in a way that tracked with changes in his electoral coalition.

In the 2021 Democratic primary, Bragg won big on the Upper West Side, a bastion of white liberals who fell hard for his progressive messaging about police and criminal justice reform. Similarly affluent voters in the West Village also delivered a key bloc of support.

“The fight for criminal justice reform is the fight of our times — and it is the fight of my life,” Bragg boasted on his original campaign website, pledging to focus on reversing mass incarceration and creating a unit to investigate police misconduct.

Those same neighborhoods have since raised serious concerns about crime, bringing them in line with Harlem — Bragg’s home turf and another main pillar of his campaign. Voters there went for Adams’ public safety message in the 2021 mayoral race.

Bragg seems to have noticed.

“Ending the scourge of gun violence is Alvin's top priority,” his current website reads. “He’s brought 20% more gun cases than the previous year; partnered with police to stop the flow of guns into New York City; invested in young people to prevent shootings from happening in the first place; and hosted successful gun buyback events to get these weapons off the streets.”

The district attorney’s office pointed to several other high-profile wins during his first term: Bragg secured a conviction of the Trump Org., indicted 30 gang members accused of a rash of gun violence and indicted the accused CEO shooter Luigi Mangione. Bragg has also brought corruption cases against members of the Adams administration and straw donors to the mayor’s campaign.

Bragg’s metamorphosis has come with some missteps and political damage to Democrats.

In December, he failed to secure a conviction in the case against Daniel Penny, the former Marine who put Jordan Neely into a chokehold on a subway car. Neely later died, and his death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner.

And while the case against Trump might have bolstered Bragg’s prospects in Manhattan, it also emboldened the president-elect’s followers elsewhere around the country. On Friday, Trump used the light sentence to bash Bragg’s office once again.

“Radical Democrats have lost another pathetic, unAmerican Witch Hunt,” he wrote on Truth Social.

More broadly, Bragg continues to serve as a convenient foil for Republicans.

“He became a national embarrassment, a caricature of woke DAs, and allowed Republicans all over the country to use his image and likeness to demonstrate how much of a disaster liberal criminal justice policies are,” New York Council Member Joe Borelli, who leads the body’s Republican caucus, said in a text to POLITICO. “If [Republican National Committee Chair] Michael Whatley could cut a deal wherein the GOP didn’t run against Bragg in Manhattan, but could run against the idea of Bragg in the other 3,243 counties in America, he would take it in a heartbeat.”