With the midterms approaching, voters, investors, and crime experts are trying to assess what the outcome of the recall efforts of the district attorneys under way in San Francisco and Los Angeles might mean for the future of justice in America. Emblematically, rather than being a simple expression of local political dynamics, those two recall efforts could presage a wave of recalls of district attorneys around the country.

Start with the district attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, whose fate the voters will decide on June 7. Mr. Boudin, a child of members of the  Weather Underground — a radical left-wing militant organization active in the 1960s — who were convicted for murder as accessories in the 1981 Brink’s robbery in Rockland County, New York. Mr. Boudin credits visiting his parents in prison for forming his vision of public justice and understanding of the American prison system.

A Rhodes scholar with a Yale Law degree, Mr. Boudin joined the San Francisco public defender office in 2012. He came into the DA’s office in 2020 on the wings of the Black Lives Matter and Stop Police Brutality protests on a progressive agenda centered around the diversion of offenders into retraining programs rather than jail.

Although the city’s data suggest that crime in San Francisco has been at a historical low since 2017 — and Mr. Boudin’s office last year filed criminal charges at a higher rate than any of his predecessors since 2011 — Mr. Boudin, who’s accused of being soft on crime, is held responsible for the state of social disarray in the city. Political cognoscenti consider his recall likely to be successful.

The most recent poll found that the recall campaign is leading 57 percent to 22 percent, with 21 percent undecided, and has created a unique convergence of interests, making bedfellows of Republicans, moderate Democrats, the police union, and PACs financed by billionaires, hi-tech companies, and wealthy financiers. Altogether, they have outspent Mr. Boudin almost three to one.

Meantime, the district attorney of Los Angeles County,  George Gascon, is in a similar predicament. Accused of being soft on crime and hard on businesses like his Northern California colleague, Mr. Gascon has already been subjected to a failed recall attempt last October.

Now a second effort is under way to recall Mr. Gascon, who was elected in 2020 on a progressive agenda that included stopping trying juveniles as adults, reducing jail times, turning many crimes into misdemeanors, and abolishing cash bail for most offenses. This time he has genuine reasons to worry about his fate. On May 13, with 50 days to go before the deadline, the petition for his recall surpassed the threshold of the 450,000 signatures and needs only 62,000 signatures to get on the ballot. 

Messrs. Gascon and Boudin are but two of a dozen prosecutors targeted by Senator Cotton, who decries their liberal views. Many of these prosecutors had the support of political action committees linked to George Soros. 

Mr. Cotton has been at the helm of a campaign against what he calls “Soros prosecutors” since the middle of 2021. In two articles, one of them titled “The Only Good Soros Prosecutor Is a Defeated Soros Prosecutor,” Mr. Cotton focused on prosecutors including the states attorney of Cook County, Illinois, Kim Foxx. Mr. Cotton also cited Manhattan’s DA at the time, Cyrus Vance Jr., and Baltimore’s prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, though they have not received funding from Soros-backed groups. While Mr. Vance has since retired, his successor, Alvin Bragg, who follows the same policies, is now subject to a similar recall petition.

He also focused on Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, and the Suffolk County, New York, attorney, accusing them of refusing to charge criminals for crimes ranging from shoplifting, drug use, vagrancy, resisting arrest, and making criminal threats.

“The massacre in Waukesha is horrifying. It was also preventable…Soros prosecutors unleash havoc and violence when they take power,” Mr. Cotton tweeted the day after the attack. The alleged driver of the car that plowed into the crowd, Darrell E. Brooks Jr., had been freed shortly before the incident on $1,000 bail. There’s no evidence of Mr. Soros helping finance the Milwaukee County prosecutor who was involved in the case, John Chisholm, who protested the bail being set so low.

Mr. Cotton’s verbiage has made its way into the political discourse and has been adopted by other conservatives. “The Waukesha terrorist is just one of many criminals that Soros-backed prosecutors have released into our cities,” an Ohio U.S. Senate candidate, J.D. Vance, tweeted after the attack. A Republican radio broadcast in January also published a “Soros’ Prosecutors” list; it comprises 18 large and medium-size cities whose prosecutors are flagged for recall.

Two law analysts, Franklyn Zimring and Jonathan Simon, both professors at  Berkeley Law School, see a political side in these efforts. However, Mr. Simon cautions that money is only one of the equation’s variables, that the sentiments are real, and that they are bubbling up among the people. The editor of the San Francisco Standard, Jonathan Weber, agrees with Mr. Simon.

“It can’t be reduced to politics,” Mr. Weber says. “Popular sentiments have changed. The pandemic and strife in the streets, cancel culture. The idea of canceling Abraham Lincoln’s name off one high school, particularly during the pandemic, has for sure driven the recall of the Board of Education in San Francisco. But it is a national trend; people want to pay attention to concrete problems and are aiming for law and order. The liberals haven’t realized that they are falling out of touch.”

Case in point? An effort is under way at San Luis Valley, Colorado, to recall the 12th Judicial District Attorney, Alonzo Payne. He doesn’t figure on any list, and his recall is supported by a number of domestic violence victims who felt that he had been too lenient with the perpetrators. Recalling the DAs who are perceived as soft on crime is becoming a crusade that goes beyond the Soros Prosecutors and is hitting America’s backroads.

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Correction: Chesa Boudin, Cyrus Vance Jr., and Marilyn Mosby are prosecutors targeted for removal by Senator Cotton for their liberal views. Mr. Cotton has also sought to unseat a liberal prosecutor, Kim Foxx, who had received financial backing from groups linked to George Soros. This is reflected in the above corrected version of this dispatch.

This article has also been updated to reflect that the recall effort against District Attorney Alonzo Payne is supported by a number of domestic violence victims.