[what_is_orcas]

James Carville said, on PBS News Hour, that defunding the police was a losing strategy, which effectively told the voters where the establishment (even the left-leaning establishment) stands.

US politics are conservative. The "left" is middling-at-best.

There's also the concern of how police react to the "defund" movement. There have been a ton of accusations that the police slow down on purpose when their budgets get threatened because an increase in visible "crime" (in quotes because I don't think homelessness should be criminalized, but seems to be the underlying factor of a lot of what gets called crime near where I live) gets all sorts of people to call for an increase in funding.