For decades, billionaire George Soros seemed to have a personal Midas touch when it came to international investing.

Now he has shown he also has it when it comes to very local politics. He has swayed a lot of elections pretty much on the cheap, for him, anyway.

Soros is seeking to reshape the nation’s criminal justice system, and the San Diego race for district attorney is his latest attempt to further the cause.

Demonization of his “outside money” hasn’t kept him from racking up quite a record. His candidates have won 12 of 14 district attorney elections in places as diverse as Philadelphia; Orlando, Fla.; Albuquerque, N.M., and Caddo Parish, La.


Soros has spent millions to elect candidates he believes will be reform-minded prosecutors. The people he backs often are civil rights lawyers or public defenders and tend to be establishment outsiders.

And when he goes in, he goes big.

Soros recently put $1.5 million into an independent campaign for a small handful of district attorney candidates, including Geneviéve Jones-Wright, a native San Diegan and deputy public defender who is challenging incumbent DA Summer Stephan.

That’s an unheard of sum in a San Diego campaign like this.


The Soros financed-committee, the California Justice & Public Safety PAC, has purchased some $400,000 in San Diego for air time, digital ads and mailings. He has spent in the neighborhood of $1 million dollars or more for district attorney candidates in each of seven past campaigns around the country, along with six-figure sums in several other races.

Generally, Soros-backed candidates, like Jones-Wright, want to reduce incarcerations for lower-level crimes, address racial disparities in sentencing, do away with cash bail or link it to one’s ability to pay, and establish independent reviews of shootings by police officers.

The playbook is fairly simple: Create a well-funded PAC several weeks before the election and spend heavily on television, digital ads and mailers just as voters are starting to pay attention. Mail ballots went out this week for the June 5 election. With only Stephan and Jones-Wright running, a district attorney will be elected next month without a November runoff.

Stephan’s campaign has been warning of Soros’ likely involvement for many months. His committee launched the first television ad for Jones-Wright last week. But while a big splash was expected, Soros’ entry into the race seemed more of a soft landing.


His political committees are known for airing tough attack ads against incumbent district attorneys or the establishment candidates. Ads critical of Stephan are almost certain to come, but his PAC started out with spots introducing Jones-Wright to viewers and bolstering her image as a reformer.

That’s typical campaign strategy, especially when the candidate is largely unknown to voters: flattering biographical spots followed by tougher ads on the opponent.

Stephan’s campaign didn’t wait for the attacks, however, and put out its own ad last week that contends Soros is trying “to elect a dangerous choice for district attorney.”

The 30-second spot also mentions Stephan’s 28-year career as a prosecutor, her support from crime victims and her work to combat human trafficking.


Stephan started out the strong favorite, having been appointed last year to the post vacated by Bonnie Dumanis, who is running for county supervisor. Early on, Stephan locked up backing from law enforcement groups and much of San Diego’s establishment, with some prominent Democrats sprinkled in with her Republican backers.

She is likely to be outgunned financially, but perhaps not by as much as some think. She has raised nearly $500,000 over the course of the campaign. The deputy district attorneys association spent $227,000 for her and the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce and Republican-leaning Lincoln Club just contributed $100,000 to a new PAC backing Stephan.

Furthermore, the power of incumbency puts Stephan in the news regularly, such as a press conference she held Tuesday announcing the distribution of high-quality cameras to law enforcement agencies around the county.

(The Jones-Wright campaign has raised about $200,000 and another $150,000 was contributed to a different PAC by the Akonadi Foundation, a group based in Oakland.)


The campaign has been shaping up to give San Diego voters a choice between an outsider who has never served as a prosecutor but promises to shake up the status quo, and an establishment insider with decades of experience who would provide consistency at a time of low crime rates, while pursuing methodical, internal changes.

The potential for high-minded debate about the criminal justice system is there. Whether we actually get that remains to be seen, as the tone of the campaign already is shifting.

Stephan’s campaign put up a website, ThreatToSanDiego.com, that has an even more ominous tone than her TV ad and focuses a great deal on Soros.

“Billionaire Social Activist George Soros has brought his war against law enforcement to San Diego and he’s spending more than $1 million to support anti-law enforcement candidate Genevieve Jones-Wright for District Attorney,” the website says.


“Soros backs anti-law enforcement candidates over experienced prosecutors, trying to tip the balance to the criminals,” it adds.

Andrew Dyer of The San Diego Union-Tribune last week noted that a photo of Soros on the website is superimposed over another photo depicting a demonstration by the far-left group Antifa, short for “anti-fascist.”

“Also on the site’s homepage, under the headline ‘Who does Soros support?’ is another photo of what appear to be Antifa demonstrators burning an American flag,” Dyer wrote.

Soros is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories and backing Antifa is one of them, though there appears to be no record of him doing that.


He is something of a mystery, but in the political context he might be considered a Democratic version of the wealthy, Republican-backing Koch brothers.

Soros is an 87-year-old Hungarian-born U.S. citizen who last fall transferred much of his wealth to the Open Society Foundations, a grant-making organization he established to support “vibrant and tolerant” democracies, justice, education and public health.

His bets against the currency in Britain and Thailand made him a lot of money but contributed to economic disruption in the 1990s. He was convicted of insider trading by a French court in 2002 and fined the equivalent of $2.3 million.

He puts his financial heft behind various liberal causes and has spent heavily to back candidates at the national level. He supports overhauling drug laws and famously was an early advocate of legalizing marijuana.


The Jones-Wright campaign, while thrilled with the development, says it has had no contact with the Soros campaign. Any coordination would be illegal. Jones-Wright says she has never met him. Nevertheless, she said Soros helps level the playing field, given the advantages of incumbency for Stephan.

With no control over independent expenditures, candidates run the risk that an outside campaign could do something that backfires. It’s a risk Jones-Wright is happy to take.

The question now is whether Stephan’s campaign will be overwhelmed by Soros’ money as has happened in other races.