Who would have thought that San Francisco, the most progressive big city in America, would lead a pushback toward a more moderate political consensus? Yet on Tuesday voters recalled their progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin by a 60 percent to 40 percent margin.

This has turned into a major national news story given its impact on criminal-justice reform and the man-bites-dog story of a liberal city turning to the right.

The Boudin recall follows on the heels of San Franciscans’ February recall of three leftist school-board members. Voters had tired of a school board that had spent more time on a politically correct quest to rename schools in the midst of the school shutdowns. They punished board members for ignoring their core responsibilities.

That’s the same takeaway from Tuesday. Boudin focused on highly charged ideological issues as a crime wave spread, leading to a general feeling of insecurity. The statistics don’t entirely fit the anti-Boudin narrative. But elections never center on a nuanced analysis of the data.

Boudin was perhaps the highest-visibility and most ideological “progressive DA” in the country. Such prosecutors say they want to shake up the status quo where district attorneys, closely allied with police departments, put conviction rates above a quest for justice.

As news reports explain, Boudin and others in this camp refused to seek the death penalty or charge minors as adults, focused on drug treatment rather than prosecution, and stopped using sentencing enhancements. Instead of taking a nuanced approach, however, these DAs often applied hard and fast rules that gave a pass to genuinely dangerous street thugs.

It’s hard to shake up an entrenched system in an era of low crime rates, but nearly impossible amid perceived chaos. “(R)ecall supporters have told a simple, yet effective, story of a radical district attorney who has worsened many of the city’s ills,” noted the Los Angeles Times.

Recall supporters had plenty of emotional ammunition, the article added. This includes a vicious hit-and-run robbery that killed two women allegedly by a man who police had arrested and released several times. The headline argued that the “recall could set back (the) national justice reform movement.”

We’re not so sure. Clearly, progressive DAs are backpedaling, with Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón recently backing away from some policies such as never sending a prosecutor to parole hearings. Voters might indeed return to the law-and-order days, where the toughest-talking prosecutor tends to win office.

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We’re hoping instead that reform-minded district attorneys will glean the right lessons. It’s laudable to seek alternatives to incarceration, stop overcharging defendants, provide low-level criminals with treatment options, only charge juveniles as adults for violent crimes, hold misbehaving police officers accountable and to try to put “justice” back into the justice system.

But prosecutors can at the same time take a hard line against violent predators, street crime and public disorder.

Ironically, Orange County’s Republican DA Todd Spitzer, who cruised to re-election on Tuesday on tough-on-crime themes, had the best take on the recall: “The progressives just took it too far…they went too far, too fast. There are things we can find common ground on,” he told the Orange County Register.

Justice reform isn’t necessarily dead. The movement might just move toward a better, more balanced approach.