Not surprisingly, this 12 months’s presidential marketing campaign pitting Vice President Kamala Harris in opposition to former President Donald Trump features a sharp battle over whether or not California is a shining mannequin of prosperity and inclusiveness to be emulated or a dystopian hellhole of crime, squalor and oppressive politics.
Whereas deeply blue California has lengthy been a rhetorical punching bag for Trump and different Republicans, it’s much more so this 12 months as a result of it’s Harris’ residence state.
“We’re not going to let Kamala Harris do to America what she did to California,” Trump trumpeted throughout a weekend rally in Coachellareferring to the state as “Paradise Lost.”
Trump ticked off the well-worn record of California’s supposed sins — its embrace of undocumented immigrantsits big inhabitants of homeless folks and its regulatory thicket that makes doing enterprise troublesome.
Trump was particularly scornful of unlawful immigration, a problem that resonates in different states. “Your children are in danger,” Trump advised the rally. “You can’t go to school with these people; these people are from a different planet.”
In actuality, Harris had nearly nothing to do with any of these points whereas holding workplace in California, or the others that Trump and different Republicans typically cite, corresponding to crime. Although she was an area prosecutor earlier than turning into lawyer normal in 2011, she shunned public involvement within the sharp battles over prison justice reform a decade in the past that gas this 12 months’s Proposition 36.
However California’s dimension, uniqueness and world cultural influence make it a lightning rod for political, media and tutorial consideration. In singling it out, Trump is hoping that it’s going to assist him with swing state voters who maintain darkish ideas about California.
By default, Gov. Gavin Newsom, moderately than Harris, is California’s defender when Trump points his periodic denunciations — a bit ironic, on condition that Newsom is broadly considered in political circles as a Harris rival moderately than an enthusiastic supporter. Certainly, if Newsom harbors presidential ambitions himself after his governorship ends two years therefore — which he denies — they might solely succeed if Trump defeats Harris this 12 months.
Throughout his Coachella rally, Trump referred to Newsom as “New-scum” and repeated his risk to disclaim firefighting assist if the state doesn’t facet with farmers within the decades-long battle over flows within the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
A number of days earlier than the rally, Newsom predicted that Trump would tee off on California and to counter it repeated his personal mantra about California having the world’s fifth-largest economic system and extra Fortune 500 corporations than another state.
The nation is politically polarized over seemingly numerous points and California’s picture is clearly one among them, though the fact in regards to the state is way more nuanced than the variations both its critics corresponding to Trump or its advocates corresponding to Newsom peddle to the general public.
That’s significantly true about California’s economic system.
Sure, California does have an economic system equal to that of a serious nation, and it’s residence to many Fortune 500 corporations, as Newsom brags.
Nonetheless, it additionally has one of many nation’s highest unemployment charges, in addition to its highest ranges of poverty and homelessness, twin crises rooted in very excessive housing prices. Furthermore, the California economic system is rising slowly, has been shedding inhabitants to different states and practically six million college students in its faculty system fare poorly vis-à-vis these in different states in tutorial achievement assessments.
Newsom typically appears unwilling to concede that California’s critics have some legitimate factors, nevertheless politically motivated they could be. Continued failures to cope with existential points corresponding to housing and academic shortcomings may end in California’s turning into the dystopia Trump and others painting.
