Campaigning this summer and into the fall, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that crime is plaguing American cities and what the country needs is a return to law and order — more cops, and consequently, more prosecutions. Aside from the fact that crime in most American cities remains at historic lows, voters in jurisdictions across the country seem to have something different in mind — a shift toward more progressive leadership within the criminal justice system, judging from recent district attorney elections.

In Chicago, a city Trump has repeatedly pointed to in his speeches, two-term incumbent Cook County prosecutor Anita Alvarez lost her March primary battle to Democratic challenger Kim Foxx. Alvarez was excoriated for her inaction in the wake of the Laquan McDonald shooting and has been criticized for her defiance and foot-dragging in wrongful conviction cases. “Our criminal justice system is profoundly broken,” Foxx said during a debate. And Alvarez “doesn’t even realize that it’s broken.”

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But recent elections suggest that may be changing, said Medwed and David Alan Sklansky, a professor at Stanford Law School. A former prosecutor himself, Sklansky notes that traditionally there have been two lines of thinking about prosecutor elections. The first is that they’re “totally useless” and “superficial.” The second is that “they’re just a terrible idea … because why would you ever want prosecutors elected? You don’t want prosecutors thinking about politics, you want them thinking about justice.” But the recent spate of high-profile ousters of prosecutors from office may be “casting both of those old stories about prosecutor elections into doubt,” he said. “And that also provided fuel for the hope that prosecutors could be the engines of criminal justice reform.”