Democrats spent 2020 cheering the dismantling of American law enforcement. Now, with midterms looming and bodies still piling up in the communities they abandoned, the same party is desperately rewriting history and hoping voters have short memories.

The stakes are direct: every politician who called to strip police funding while neighborhoods burned owes the public an accounting of what their agenda cost in lives and livelihoods. Instead, they're getting cover from a press corps happy to frame the retreat as "grappling" rather than admitting they were wrong.

The Associated Press and SFGATE both report that Democratic candidates nationwide are scrambling to distance themselves from the "defund the police" movement they once championed. The framing is telling — both outlets describe Democrats as "grappling with their previous positions," as though the slogans just happened to them, rather than being choices they made and promoted.

The evidence of the flip-flop is stark. In Wisconsin, democratic socialist State Rep. Francesca Hong is running for governor after a career of radical anti-police rhetoric. After the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Hong posted in 2020: "I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police." A year later, still serving in the State Assembly, she doubled down: "Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can't be an option."

Now? Hong says she doesn't support cutting police funding. "The governor cannot defund the police and I'm not here to govern by slogan," Hong said in Tuesday's televised debate. "I'm here to make sure that I am the governor that is most serious about public safety."

That's not a clarification — that's a full reversal. The same woman who said reform wasn't an option now claims she's the candidate most serious about public safety. She hasn't disavowed her past statements; she's just hoping nobody notices them.

Hong isn't alone. In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who previously supported defunding police, is also facing questions about his record. The pattern is bipartisan within the Democratic Party — the left flank championed the slogan, the establishment fears the electoral fallout, and nobody wants to own the consequences.

Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright admitted the damage to the AP: "It was a serious debate in 2020 that arguably cost us some seats that year and caused us to lose on something where we should have had the upper ground." His solution? Democrats "have to define the narrative before others define us with the narrative" — a strategy about messaging, not about fixing what their policies broke.

Both outlets bury what matters most: the cost to ordinary Americans. Crime surged in city after city that cut police budgets. Residents who couldn't afford private security paid the price. The press frames this as a messaging problem for Democrats. For the working-class neighborhoods that lived through the experiment, it was a survival problem.

The question heading into November isn't whether Democrats can rebrand. It's whether voters will hold them accountable for what they did — or whether the establishment press will let them memory-hole the whole thing.