Republicans’ California-bashing is full throttle. Will it hurt Kamala Harris’ White House bid?
Republicans want you to know that Kamala Harris is from California, a state where anything goes, crime is out of control and undocumented immigrants and homeless people are everywhere.
The GOP’s California-bashing has gone full throttle, reminding voters that the vice president was a former San Francisco prosecutor, state attorney general and U.S. senator from the Golden State.
“Republicans are attempting to portray Kamala Harris as a cackling far-left elitist from deep-blue California with its supposedly failed policies on immigration, homelessness, business retention, crime, and more.,” said Kambiz Akhavan, executive director of the Dornsife Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California.
“That is a right-wing stereotype of top California leaders that is being aggressively promoted. Whether America believes the stereotype has a lot to do with what media they consume and who their friends are,” he said.
The state has been “more progressive on issues that you can distort,” said Steve Phillips, a San Francisco author and lawyer and Harris supporter.
On environmental issues, for instance, Republicans like to talk about how the government is going to ban gas stoves (it’s not but wants to make them more energy-efficient) or plastic straws (Harris does support banning them).
And then there’s immigration.
“If she becomes president, Kamala Harris will make the invasion (of undocumented immigrants) exponentially worse, and just like she did with San Francisco, just like she did with the border, our whole country will be permanently destroyed,” former President Donald Trump told reporters last week.
Harris had nothing specifically to do with undocumented immigrants in San Francisco, but is enduring all sorts of California-bashing. It may have an impact.
A California Democratic first?
Harris is trying to become the first California Democrat to ever win the White House. Three Republicans–Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan–have won the White House.
Harris has a California winning streak. She won a tight race for attorney general in 2010, but easily won a second term in 2014 and a U.S. Senate seat in 2016. California is a heavily Democratic state that last elected a Republican statewide in 2006.
Republicans see California as a contrast to their cultural conservative message, their eagerness to Make America Great Again.
California “is not a great state anymore…the world is being dumped into California. Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients,” Trump told the state Republican convention last year.
Even among California Republicans, the image of Democrat-created chaos is a political weapon..
“We’ve had a front-row seat to Harris’s soft-on-crime policies for two decades,” California GOP Chair Jessica Millan Patters wrote in an op-ed Thursday for the Washington Examiner.
Earlier in the week, Rep. Kevin Kiley,, R-Roseville, posted a lengthy tweet detailing what he said was Harris’ crime record.
“California’s crime crisis has three main causes: 1) Rogue Prosecutors, 2) Reckless Laws, 3) Attacks on Police. Kamala Harris has been at the center of all three,” he said.
Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011, and the state attorney general from 2011 to 2017.
As a U.S. senator from 2017 to 2021, and vice president since then, she has supported a series of criminal justice reforms. As attorney general, she called herself the state’s “top cop” and was criticized in many communities of color for being too tough on crime.
California as a liberal playground
The state’s reputation as a liberal playground dates to the 1960s, when San Francisco became a counterculture epicenter.
In 1974, Californians elected Jerry Brown, then 36, as governor, and he became one of the leading national figures in the baby boomers’ ascension.
Brown ran for president in 1976 and was hurt by his late start, as Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Brown’s progressive views and austere personal style got him derided by critics as “Governor Moonbeam,” and his 1980 and 1992 White House runs were flops.
The other prominent California Democrats to run for president in the modern era were Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty in 1972 and Sen. Alan Cranston, who tried to lead a nuclear freeze movement as his chief campaign plank in 1984.
Yorty’s bid went nowhere. Though Cranston would wind up winning four Senate terms, his presidential bid ended when he finished seventh out of eight in the nation’s first primary, in New Hampshire.
The Republican Californians who won did share one trait with Harris. They became known nationally before their presidential runs. Hoover was a Cabinet secretary and known for his leading World War I relief efforts. Nixon was vice president for eight years, and Reagan had a long movie and television career.
Reagan was a different kind of candidate, able to mobilize a conservative constituency that had not been a major force in national politics. Can Harris overcome Republican taunts about her California roots and win with a different sort of new constituency?
“The Golden State has passed some of the nation’s toughest laws on climate change and gun control. Vice President Harris’s California roots resonate loudly with Gen Z and Millennial voters who see those two issues as existentially important,” said USC’s Akhavan..
She’ll also benefit from the state mega-donors who will be behind her, eager to pour millions into her bid.
.”California has tremendous political and economic power, and those resources will largely flow to support Kamala Harris, especially because she is matched up with Donald Trump, someone who many Californians perceive as exceptionally divisive and unfit for office,” Akhavan said.
Whether Harris can overcome the challenge of being from what many regard as the nation’s liberal laboratory, though, remains an open question.
Much depends on how Republicans define her in the voters’ minds. After all, said Fortier, “She really is pretty unknown. There’s a lot of room for opposition research.”
This story was originally published August 1, 2024 at 4:40 PM with the headline "Republicans’ California-bashing is full throttle. Will it hurt Kamala Harris’ White House bid?."
.jpg)