ATLANTA — The cheers and whistling from the crowd greeted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as her black SUV crawled along the Edgewood Avenue parade route last weekend.
“Keep it up!” one spectator yelled.
“Put him in jail, Fani,” shouted another.
“You’re doing great,” a third bellowed.
Standing up through the Chevy Tahoe’s open sunroof, Willis beamed and waved a campaign sign as her well-guarded mini-motorcade made its way through the Inman Park Festival Parade.
The celebrity-like reception from the left-leaning in-town crowd made it feel almost unfathomable that Willis just six weeks earlier had been in the political fight of her life.
Nine teams of defense attorneys had tried, unsuccessfully, to remove her from the election interference case against former President Donald Trump and 14 of his allies because of her one-time romantic relationship with her lead prosecutor. Aside from one spectator who booed as the DA passed by, the disqualification saga felt like a distant memory.
Willis has become a national figure for her sprawling racketeering case against Trump. But as she runs for a second term, the veteran prosecutor is far more likely to talk about her office’s anti-recidivism efforts and a youth mentorship program than she is the former president.
The Democrat is toeing a delicate line as she seeks to win back the politically and demographically diverse coalition that powered her decisive victory four years ago — including many moderates and right-leaning voters. Willis is emphasizing how she won’t hesitate to punish the people who commit violent crimes, while also championing some of the criminal justice reform proposals the liberal wing of her party has championed in recent years.
“My office aggressively prosecutes the most dangerous criminals, including gang leaders and sexual predators. We are all safer,” Willis states in one recent radio ad. “But that’s only part of the job.”
Willis is entering the race as the overwhelming favorite. She has the benefits of incumbency, a national platform and a deep donor base. (She had raised roughly $326,000 as of late January, the latest fundraising figures available.) And Willis has notably avoided the level of organized backlash that some of her counterparts in cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis have received for their more progressive approaches to prosecuting crimes.
But unlike in 2020, when Willis was viewed as a politically moderate insurgent challenging her former boss, she now has a record on which her opponents, Democrat Christian Wise Smith and Republican Courtney Kramer, can try and capitalize.
She has angered many on the right for her case against Trump and other GOP figures, which they see as politically motivated and a waste of taxpayer resources. Willis has generated pushback for her office’s use of rap lyrics as evidence in its Young Slime Life gang case, as well as her fondness for large racketeering cases, which some critics say have been pursued at the expense of other day-to-day priorities.
And then there’s the disqualification fight, which generated months of salacious headlines about the DA’s personal life. While it may be out of mind for some of the DA’s supporters, it is very much a part of the GOP narrative against her, on the campaign trail, in the Legislature and in court, where Trump and others have appealed a recent ruling that allowed her to stay on the case.
“She’s made a mockery of politics, and she’s made it into a clown show,” said Kramer. “I think she’s using her office for political reasons, and that’s not what the office of district attorney is meant to do.”