A former public defender and Democrat for 33 years, Maud Maron — who says her last campaign donation was to Bernie Sanders in 2016 — is running for Manhattan District Attorney as a Republican. Amidst a rash of violent subway crime and assaults, are New Yorkers ready to dispense with party loyalty to vote Republican this year?

Ms. Maron’s challenge to progressive incumbent Alvin Bragg will be an uphill battle in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one. Vice President Harris won Manhattan with more than 80 percent of the vote, even as President Trump made inroads in working class enclaves of Queens and the Bronx.

Yet despite Democratic numerical advantages, Republican Party leaders see the district attorney’s race as one of the most winnable this cycle. Ms. Maron’s heterodox positions and history as a Democrat may help — but the main reason, put simply, is crime.

“I don’t think I have to pitch how Bragg failed. I think we all see it with our own eyes,” Ms. Maron tells the New York Sun. “We have people marauding around Midtown with machetes. We have a woman being burned alive, and someone being pushed in front of the subway and people being stabbed all in the first week of 2025. So you can massage the crime stats all you want, but we New Yorkers know that our city is less safe, less clean, less just and fair than it has been in the very recent past.”

Ms. Maron is running as a centrist, tough-on-crime prosecutor who would restore the city to its pre-pandemic crime lows. Ms. Maron notes that there were zero subway murders in 2017. There were eleven in 2024. Illegal marijuana shops now proliferate, every product is locked behind glass at the pharmacy, and subway fare evasion has become so rampant that the MTA says it is losing $700 million a year to the problem.

“I would absolutely prosecute fare evasion,” Ms. Maron says. “There’s a lot of discretion that district attorneys have, and what we’ve seen from Alvin Bragg is that he has chosen to downgrade felonies to misdemeanors or to not prosecute altogether crimes that in previous administrations would have absolutely been prosecuted.”

Mr. Bragg built his national profile prosecuting Trump, and he raised more than $850,000 after securing Trump’s conviction. He also led the failed prosecution of Daniel Penny, which divided the city. In New York, he is the face of criminal justice reform.

When Mr. Bragg entered office in 2022, he issued a “Day One” memo in which he ordered his office to focus on reducing pre-trial detention, to invest in diversion programs for offenses like low-level drug dealing, and to stop prosecuting subway fare evasion, shoplifting, marijuana misdemeanors, resisting arrest, prostitution, and other minor crimes.

“We’ve basically engaged in a real-time giant civics experiment. If you stop prosecuting these laws will more people break those laws? And the answer is yes,” Ms. Maron says. “When you see people walking into pharmacies and scooping up product, putting it in bags, and walking out, you have this — it’s a fraying of civil society.”

Mr. Bragg’s campaign website suggests he is working on a rebrand. His website in 2021 highlighted “equality and fairness” and “criminal justice reform,” while his current one has a banner that reads, “Being serious about safety.” The site lists reductions in major crime categories — a 16 percent decline overall — from 2023 to 2024.

Yet compared to 2019, all major crime categories except rape are up, including a more than 35 percent increase in felony assaults from 2019 to 2023. Ms. Maron calls Mr. Bragg’s claims of crime reduction “gaslighting.”

“The quality of life — of daily life in New York — has deteriorated,” Ms. Maron says.

Mayor Adams, who ran in 2021 as a tough-on-crime former police officer and is now running for reelection, is also feeling the heat. At a press conference earlier this month, Mr. Adams said the police were doing their jobs, “but we need every part of the criminal justice system to play their role.” This was a clear dig at district attorneys’ offices, criminal justice reformers in Albany, and the 2019 bail reform legislation then-Governor Cuomo signed in 2019. Mr. Cuomo is expected to announce a run for mayor in the next few weeks.

“The decline to prosecute is a real issue for us, particularly as it relates to misdemeanors.” Mayor Adam’s new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said at the press conference.

A backlash to criminal justice reform is happening nationwide. San Franciscans recalled their progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in 2022. Los Angeles voted out their Soros-backed district attorney, George Gascon, in November. Oregon partially repealed its drug decriminalization law, Measure 110, last year. California passed Proposition 36, which, among other things, repealed the state’s lenient shoplifting laws.

Yet when San Francisco voted out their mayor in November, they replaced her with a moderate Democrat, not a Republican. A Democratic strategist, Hank Sheinkopf, says Ms. Maron’s new party affiliation with the GOP could prove daunting to New Yorkers.

“The Democrats don’t have balls so they didn’t put anybody up against him,” Mr. Sheinkopf tells the Sun of Mr. Bragg. “Can Maud Maron win the argument? Yeah. Can she win the race? Very tough.”  

“She’s got to run as a candidate who’s not a doctrinaire Republican but a doctrinaire Manhattanite,” Mr. Sheinkopf says.

Ms. Maron says her “views are pretty in line with most Americans and most New Yorkers.” She is a mother of four children, all of whom went through or are in New York City public schools. She first became politically active opposing Mayor DeBlasio’s attempts to change the admissions process for selective middle and high schools in the name of equity. She serves on the Community Education Council for District 2.

Ms. Maron is pro-choice, supports gay rights, and calls herself classically liberal. She says she first strayed from Democratic orthodoxy when she opposed Covid school closures and masking and how race was being taught. She unsuccessfully ran for City Council and Congress as a Democrat. In 2023, she very publicly left the party over the Biden administration’s attempts to censor Americans on social media, which the Twitter Files exposed.  

“The Democratic Party went galloping to the far left and I stayed where I was,” Ms. Maron says.  

She hit a real nerve, though, when she started speaking against transgender participation in women’s sports and transgender medical care for children. In March, she led the passage of a resolution in the education council asking the city’s Department of Education to reconsider its transgender athletics policy. The issue has riled District 2 meetings since and prompted the former schools chancellor to boot her from her post, though she successfully appealed in court.

“I’m not really going to get perturbed by the fact that you’re going to call me right wing over those things because, frankly, most Americans agree,” Ms. Maron says. “The Democrats in the city are too busy complaining about the fact I object to males in female sports to actually have a meaningful conversation about how to solve crime in the city.”

The trans issue, though, and her participation in a Moms for Liberty town hall last year, will no doubt be used by Mr. Bragg and the Democrats to attack her as “right wing.” That she voted for Trump in November will also make attack ads. Ms. Maron brushes the criticism off, saying it’s never a liability to “stand up for what is right.” 

If the district attorney’s race stays focused on crime, Ms. Maron could have a shot. Even Democrats like Scott Stringer, who is running for mayor, are rejecting their former “defund the police” message and are advocating for more cops on the street. Republicans point to Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg to say New Yorkers do have a history of electing GOP leaders. The city’s murder rate, though, was six times as high in the early 1990s when Giuliani first won.

“The Democrats who want to push far left policies like Alvin Bragg, they need to run on their record now, and their record is one of increasing violence and increasing lawlessness,” Ms. Maron says. “People are voting with their feet already. The New Yorkers who are still here need to vote at the ballot box.”