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Nearly 40 years after his name became synonymous with one of the most consequential political ads in U.S. history, Willie Horton is back on the campaign trail.
Not William Horton, mind you, who is incarcerated in Maryland and who never actually went by “Willie.” Rather, it’s the Willie Horton of campaign mythology, a specter that has haunted American politics since the 1988 presidential election, and one that President Donald Trump has summoned in recent weeks, including in a social media post on Monday attacking North Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Roy Cooper.
Horton was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts when he was granted a weekend furlough in 1986, a common practice at the time. He fled, and was later convicted of assault, rape, and attempted murder in a 1987 Maryland home invasion. The following year, his case became the centerpiece of a notorious campaign ad attacking Democratic Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, over the state’s furlough program — essentially a warning about the dangers of policies that let people out of prison.
Now as the midterm elections approach, Trump and North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley are trying to draw a similar connection regarding Roy Cooper, the former governor of North Carolina, and the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death aboard a Charlotte light-rail train last year. The man accused of killing her, Decarlos Brown Jr., had a criminal history and was free awaiting trial on an unrelated misdemeanor charge.
There’s no evidence that Cooper’s policies were responsible for Brown’s release, but Trump has sought to pin the killing on the former governor, calling it a “Willie Horton — modern-day tragedy.” Trump’s retelling has embellished the Horton mythology too. The president has repeatedly claimed that Horton murdered three women after his furlough, a claim for which there is no known evidence.
Invoking Willie Horton is a particularly literal example of a broader Republican campaign strategy this election. The Associated Press reported earlier this month that GOP candidates in dozens of races across the country are attacking their Democratic opponents by calling them “soft-on-crime”, reviving exaggerated warnings about defunding the police, and promising more punitive approaches to public safety.
Many Democrats have responded in turn by burnishing their own law-enforcement bona fides. In Virginia, for example, House candidate Shannon Taylor aired an ad featuring endorsements from county sheriffs in response to attacks by opponent Rob Wittman that included a website focused on defining her as “soft.”
That dynamic — Republicans on the attack and Democrats on the defensive over crime and punishment — seemed to recede somewhat during the bipartisan criminal justice reform movement of the 2010s. Its re-emergence has come alongside a broader political effort to roll back some of those reforms, a recurring theme in this newsletter.
That political shift is also visible in the policies being put directly before voters. According to Ballotpedia, all 16 statewide ballot measures concerning criminal sentencing, penalties, and bail since 2022 have sought to make those policies more restrictive. That’s a sharp reversal from 2012 through 2020, when less punitive measures outnumbered tougher ones 11 to five, according to Ballotpedia.
But the criminal justice reform movement, it turns out, is hardly dead. In a report released this week, the Vera Institute of Justice identified 425 criminal justice reform and immigration laws enacted across 45 states and Washington, D.C., in just this year. "Reform held its ground through a national turn toward ‘tough-on-crime’ politics rather than giving way to it," the report concluded.
The laws have come from both parties, and more than a quarter of those laws were passed in states where Republicans control the legislature and governor’s office. Oklahoma, for example, passed legislation to automatically seal court records for people with eligible criminal convictions, reducing barriers to employment and housing. Lawmakers also passed measures addressing the incarceration of people over unpaid court fines and fees. As Oklahoma Watch reported last week, lawmakers agreed to study how often these arrests occur, after a more ambitious proposal to end the practice stalled. The Republican legislator behind the bill said he expects legislators to revisit the issue if the study reveals widespread arrests.
Elsewhere, state legislatures created alternatives to traditional police responses to mental health emergencies, added laws that allow judges to weigh a domestic violence survivor’s history of abuse or trauma at sentencing, and also passed laws restricting the use of automatic license plate readers, according to Vera’s analysis.
But legislative tallies have their limitations. Vera acknowledges that its report involved subjective judgements about which bills constitute “reform,” and the numbers don’t account cleanly for more punitive legislation passed alongside those efforts. Missouri, for example, enacted a record-sealing law in the same legislative session that it expanded mandatory minimums for certain offenses.
Still, bipartisan reform efforts persist, despite the “tough-on-crime” campaign rhetoric. Princeton University professor Udi Ofer, who has tracked state-level reform since 2021, told me the movement has become more decentralized, pursuing narrower changes than the more ambitious efforts of the previous decade — but that those legislative moves can still have huge impacts on people’s lives.
“A reform can be incremental relative to the scale of mass incarceration and still be life-changing for the person who gets to come home sooner,” Ofer said.
As for the seeming disconnect between 2026 campaign rhetoric and the steady drumbeat of legislative reforms, Ofer said that voters' views on crime and punishment are often more nuanced than the binary “tough” vs. “soft” political debate presumes.
“Voters can feel unsafe and want accountability while also supporting shorter sentences and meaningful second chances,” he said. “Those positions are not inherently contradictory.”
