California Update: Election Eve In The Golden State – The Times (And The L.A. Times) They Are A-Changin’

>> Jonathan Movroydis: It's Thursday, October 31st, 2024, and you are listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the free world. I'm Jonathan Movroydis, Senior Product Manager at the Hoover Institution and I'm sitting in the chair of Bill Whalen, a Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism.

So that he can answer questions and provide commentary about California policy and politics in which he is well versed. Bill Whalen, in addition to being a Washington Post columnist, writes weekly for Hoover's California on Your Mind Web channel. Whalen is joined today by a Lee Ohanian, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and Professor of Economics and Director of the Edinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ohanian also writes weekly about the policy environment of the Golden State for California on Your Mind. Good day, gentlemen, let's talk about the latest developments in policy and politics in the Golden State. Gentlemen, I'm not sure you are aware, but we have an election coming up.

>> Bill Whalen: No.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Bill, your California on Your Mind column this week focuses on one aspect of the 2024 election in California. Three incumbents struggling to stay in office San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Oakland Mayor, Sheng Thao and Los Angeles County District Attorney, George Gascon. Breed is facing a deep pocketed opposition.

Thao is the subject of a recall election on Tuesday and also the target of a raid by the FBI earlier this year. And Gascon finds himself under fire for struggles with public safety and rising crime in the Los Angeles area. Bill is what ails these three candidates as symptoms of the various challenges crime, homelessness, cost of living that big cities are facing in 2024.

And given that they are incumbents and California now is effectively a one party state, do any of them have a fighting chance?

>> Bill Whalen: Good questions, hi Lee, hi Jonathan, it's interesting. You look at the California ballot, you have to kinda go into it to look for trends and interesting narratives.

We obviously don't fit into the presidential narrative, because why it's the state's been reliably Democratic going back to the past century and Bill Clinton, so you don't look for drama there. The Senate contest is kind of a non-starter as well. We do factor into the House races, the House of Representatives, and who's gonna control that Chamber of Commerce next year.

But what I was looking at was, as you mentioned, Mayor Breed, Mayor Thao, and DA Gascon. And it came down to something very simple I figured out, which was that this is very different California in 2024 than it was in 2020 in this regard. Let's go back to 2020 in California for a second.

Joe Biden wins the state. He gets 11.1 million votes landslide, 62% statewide. 2.35 million more votes than Hillary Clinton in her election, so huge Democratic turn out. And you see this in Los Angeles County, especially Lee, which is interesting, the county has a 76% turnout in 2020. Biden gets 71% of the county vote, but Lee, George Gascone comes in at 53.5%.

He gets about a million fewer votes than Biden. But how does Gascon get into office? It's in partly, because of ballot initiatives. That year, you had initiative on the ballot, Proposition 20. Proposition 20 proposed to do what Proposition 36 does in this election. It wants to take shoplifting and theft crimes and re-elevate them to felony offenses, undoing part of Proposition 47, if you will.

Now in 2020, Lee and Jonathan, keep in mind this was after the George Floyd murder. This was after the riots and protests. Defund the police was the popular mantra. We did not wanna put people in jail. Indeed, in California, there was a push to thin the jails, cash bail, and so for forth, a very good environment for someone like George Gascone.

Just like with Chesa Boudin up in San Francisco, the DA who got recalled a couple years ago. So Gascon comes into office on May 31st of that year, though, Lee and Jonathan, Santa Monica gets hit by rioters out of the George Floyd situation. About 150 businesses hit and the city's never really recovered.

The point of all of this is that if you're Hascone and according to polls, you're now losing by almost 30 points in your race. If you're London breed fighting for survival in San Francisco to fear Sheng Thao, who was looking like she's getting it recalled next Tuesday. You're paying a very heavy price and it's because of conditions on the ground.

It's the public fed up with crime, with homelessness, which we'll get into in a minute. So that's a different California in 2024. Whereas woke anti-crime was very popular, I should say, almost pro-crime if it was popular in 2020. Now, it seems the pendulum is swung the other way.

Lee, what do you think?

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, yeah, it certainly has. Gascon, I believe the last time I checked was 30 points behind Nathan Hockman, who I believe was an assistant DA under Gascon in the County's DA office. And there's just a lot of backlash against a perception and a perception that appears to be real among many in law enforcement.

And many district attorneys throughout the state that Gascon simply wasn't prosecuting crime. And there's one very well publicized event that occurred a few months ago, was in Beverly Hills. And the reason it was so well publicized is because an estate that was just three or four houses down from where LeBron James has a property was being occupied illegally by what you would call for lack of a better term, squatters.

Squatters that occupied this estate, they were very good business people. They were leasing it out every night for parties. There was a lot of drug use and prostitution. And that house was illegally occupied for several months. Neighbors would call into the DA's office and explain this to them.

And what really made this story go viral is that the response they received from the DA's office was squatters have rights too.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Lee Ohanian: And it turns out that they don't under the law. But this, I think, was really the straw that broke the camel's back for Gascon.

And unless the polls are wildly off, he appears to lose and lose by a large amount next week.

>> Bill Whalen: Although you don't think he's rushing to the defense of the Menendez brothers is gonna turn things around for him, do you?

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, no, that's not a particularly good look for him, for those people who remember that.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, but I mentioned the Santa Monica situation, Lee and Jonathan, because there's a real interesting piece in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day about the Third Street Corridor. The wonderful car free promenade in Santa Monica, which is lovely because, again, it doesn't have cars, it just has shops, you could walk around.

It's very European, if you will, and that corridor is really struggling right now. And it's a combination of a couple of things. One, economic change in California as and elsewhere. A store like Barnes and Nobles just can't do the same business it used to. Small shops are getting eaten alive, because a company like Amazon will just chew them up and spit them out.

But it's also the crime factor, Lee and Jonathan, and these stores were hit. About 150 stores I mentioned were hit during the May looting in Santa Monica in 2020 and LA just hasn't bounced back. So it's a combination of business conditions in Los Angeles. It's a combination of just anecdotal evidence.

Most people just have a brush or just seem to know somebody who has had a brush with crime and Gascon pays the price for this. And again, it'll be very curious to see, especially up in San Francisco, if London breed's gonna pay a price for this as well.

And over in Oakland, Shinto, and I think that's the common denominator is what I call the enough is enough election in California. Whereas they rewarded these people two and four years ago, they're now gonna punish them, I think, this time around.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, I mean, Santa Monica, there's.

Enormous crime now associated with the promenade. People are scared of going there. And it's interesting, Bill, you mentioned London Breed. I can't imagine anyone who would want the job of being mayor of San Francisco, particularly given the Board of Supervisors that you have to deal with unless there's a total reset there with the election.

But the city's decline is well publicized. The drug problems, enormous homelessness issues, substantial crime issues, particularly retail theft, break ins into cars. And it's not just that, just economically the city has not come back. The sales of office buildings downtown are selling at discounts of up to 80% of their valuation just prior to the pandemic.

So you think about these $400 million buildings that are selling for now under $100 million. And at the same time, San Francisco has a very profligate budget on a per person basis. San Francisco's budget is about 40% higher than that of New York City. And there's no other government that comes close to either one of those.

And when you think about how much money is flowing through San Francisco government, it's perhaps not surprising that just corruption is just taken off within the city. For years there was a problem within their public works department. More recently some initiatives associated with several homes and several hundred million dollars that was called dreamkeeper.

That was to help African Americans in the city that's been just horribly managed and dollars are missing and there appears to be potential misappropriation of funds. So there's really not a lot that she can I think point to that would be, that would be a positive. But for the life of me, I can't imagine anyone who really would want that job other than those who just live and die for San Francisco and wanna try to bring it out of the drain.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, I've been in California for 30 years now. This is 2024 is the 30th anniversary of my coming out here to work for then governor Pete Wilson. And what I like to do in every statewide election is circle an initiative that I think is kind of the zeitgeist initiative for California.

In that year, in 1990 before it would have been Proposition 187, the now Infamous Anti-legal Immigration Initiative. Fast forward a few years, I might have pointed you to something like Proposition 8, which was the Defense of Marriage Initiative that actually passed in California, surprising people. And this election, Lee and Jonathan is pretty obvious which one you circle, and that's Proposition 36, which has barely been on the air advertising.

I think I saw an ad for it during the World Series game last night. Congratulations to you Dodgers fans out there, by the way. But it hasn't advertised much because it doesn't need to. Prop 36, which would undo parts of Proposition 47, which would reinstate felony punishment for certain property theft offenses.

It's been pulling over 70% and I keep waiting for gravity and reality to set into it cuz most initiatives that start that high invariably move down as skeptical voters take a closer look. Indeed, it started dipping towards 60%. And then I saw a poll last week, I think it was a Los Angeles Times Berkeley poll or I might be mistaken on that.

It's back over 70% percent again. So it's a monster, and it's a fascinating one, Lee, because it cleaves Democrats. So Gavin Newsom opposes it, as does the legislature. Have you seen the governor campaigning against it? He was asked by reporters. He said, I don't have the bandwidth right now.

Translation, I don't want to get run over by it. You have London Breed in San Francisco who supports it because she has been trying to move to the center to the right on crime to save her hide. Newsome has engaged on it in this regard. There is a congressional race here in Silicon Valley where Jonathan and I are right now and it features two Democrats because of California's open primary system.

One is Sam Liccardo, former mayor of San Jose, running against a very young gentleman named Evan Lowe, who is a state assembly member. And Newsome the other day came out in support of Lowe, which is interesting in two regards. Because one, Lowe is probably gonna lose the race.

But secondly, Liccardo has been a big supporter of Prop 36. So this is Newsom, I think, getting even on a very personal level for that. But 36 is coming along, it looks like it's gonna roll to an easy victory in California. And I think that's the zeitgeist in California right now.

Again, voters are just pushing it back against the status quo.

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, Newsom And others within the Democratic Party in the Legislative assembly and the state Senate are not fans of 36. There's a pure economic reason which they don't want 36 to pass, which is it's going to increase the state's prison population and my goodness, we have a really expensive prison system.

The cost of incarcerating individual in California, I believe it may be as high as 100. And the state budget is of course under enormous pressure after revenues have been coming in much lower than what they were anticipated. So they've been pushing back on this and voters are having none of that.

Bill you mentioned 70% approval within the polls. And what voters are really upset about is just the nexus between crime and homelessness and drug use. So the proposition does, I think, in my opinion, which are some common sense things, which is to reclassify some of the misdemeanors under the current act to be felonies, but that the charges would be dismissed if the individual completed a drug treatment program.

So seems totally sensible. And drug use, of course, is, there's very lax prosecution of drug offenses in the state. And it turns out that those who are homeless and obviously drug users, their crime rates are just enormously higher than anyone else. And not just retail theft and small crime misdemeanors, but violent crime.

So people are fed up with this and they see 36 as a sensible way of addressing this. Bill, it's interesting that the secretary of State gave Proposition 36 the very last number on the ballot. So you have to go all the way the end of the ballot to find it.

But it looks like people are doing that and looks like it's gonna roll the victory.

>> Bill Whalen: One other thing about 36 that I note, Lee, is it's going after repeat offenders. And this reminds me again of something 30 years ago when California voters approved the three strikes law through initiative form, I think in the prim.

What was three strikes? It was going after repeat offenders. And I think that's one thing that drives people crazy about the current situation in California. And I think you've written about that for California on Your Mind, Lee. It's story after story of the individual who has picked up shoplifting at Walgreens or CVS.

And you find out that they've done this tons and tons of times, just racked up all kinds of goods. They just keep going in the system, keep coming out of the system, commit their crime, go back in the system, process back out, and it's just turnstile justice. And it drives people crazy when you have somebody who is booted, shoplifted, hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods and they don't get punished for it.

People want a response to it. So I think that's what 36 is tapping into, plain and simple. Now the question is gonna be, then we can move on to next topic after this. The question is gonna be if this is just a one off in terms of anti crime initiatives in California or if this is a preview of coming attractions, if voters are gonna wanna go anti crime in other directions.

Because when we talk about things like no cash bail, when we talk about Proposition 47, that was the pendulum swinging away from the 1990s. A lot of pro-punishment initiatives. So let's see if there's another wave of that coming to California or not.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, no, absolutely. I'll just close with this one correction.

The cost of housing a prisoner in California is not $120,000. It's $132,000 to house a prisoner in California. And it was interesting, a number of mainstream media newspapers came out being really quite critical of Newsom and those in the legislature that wanted to suppress this. I'll just read a quick quote from a San Francisco Chronicle column who wrote Governor Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders really, really don't want California voters to approve a November ballot measure to roll back parts of Prop 47, the existing law.

In fact, they're so desperate to prevent the measure from succeeding that they're willing to subvert and twist the very process they claim to revere more than anything else democracy to achieve their aims.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, it's funny, they've tried to drive 36 off the ballot through trying to get them, get the organizers to drop it.

They tried to put in alternate measures on the ballot as well. None of it's worked. And again, you don't see Newsom campaigning against it. So it's gonna go through, and welcome to maybe a new era in California. Stay tuned.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Gentlemen, let's talk about a little bit about the House races in the House of Representative races in California.

Despite California being overwhelmingly democratic, there are about five House seats in California that are considered to be the closest in the country. And are significant factor in shifting the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress. These include seats in Orange County and the Central Valley, some of which are held by Republicans.

In 2020, voters in four of those five districts voted for Joe Biden by a significant margin. The difference this year is that Kamala Harris is a Californian who has held statewide office in the Golden State. Can Democrats ride her coattails to victory and help change the balance of power in the House, as your colleague Douglas Rivers predicted in his YouGov polling bill?

>> Bill Whalen: Well, this is why I mentioned Biden getting 11.1 million votes in 2020. This remarkable turnout in California. The question is how high will Kamala Harris go? Will she crack 60% and beyond? She's pulling about 58 or 59% the last time I looked. This matter is not because of the electoral votes which were given, but it matters because obviously the more Democrats turn out to vote for her, the better the chances in these so-called blue red districts as they call them.

Blue because they voted for Biden, but red because they voted for a Republican member of Congress. There are five of them in California. And really, if the Democrats can sweep those, they're pretty much guaranteed of getting the House. Kamala Harris is not spending any time running in California in these districts, but you know, has popped up in the districts in the past few days, is Gavin Newsom not campaigning.

But Gavin Newsom has been the subject of ads, where you have the National Republican Congressional Committee and local Republican candidates running ads of showing the Democratic candidate side by side with Gavin Newsom saying in effect a vote for this person to vote for Gavin Newsom. And it points out something very interesting that doesn't get picked up much by media in California.

In many polls, Gavin Newsom is underwater in his own state. In other words, he is less popular than he is unpopular among voters right now. So you see Republicans try to tap into that as well. Republicans out here in winning these races have proven pretty good at survivor skills.

They have just looked at the landscape to recognize they can't run as what a national Republican. For example, you have David Valadao who is trying to save his seat in the Central Valley. He voted to impeach Donald Trump over January 6th. And I think that's in part, maybe he believed it in part, but also he looked at his district realize this would be the right thing to do as far as my voters were concerned.

So we'll see if the Republicans hang on, and again we'll see how the turnout machine goes as well. This is kind of the beauty of this presidential election. For all the polling, all the agonizing, all the just over the obsession we have with it. We just simply don't know how many Democrats are to come out.

We don't know how many Republicans are gonna come out. We don't know what the enthusiasm effect, especially here in California. Lee?

>> Lee Ohanian: Newsom was just so much more popular during the 2020 election. I believe that was about his peak approval rating, probably was close to 60% at that time.

People believed he was doing a good job at that time of managing Covid bill. Today, his approval rating I believe is down to 44%. And in those blue red districts, I suspect that the approval rating could be considerably lower. So he, I don't see him as being a particular asset in that regard.

You know an interesting statistic about at the national level between Biden and Harris in 2020, I believe Biden won Hispanic vote by an 80% to 20% margin over Trump in 2020. Polls now show Harris not having 80% approval, 70 or 60% approval among, among Hispanic voters, is about 54%.

So barely a majority. So very large difference between 2020 and 2024 at the presidential stage. And of course, California is a majority-minority state. The median voter is an Hispanic voter. So yeah, she's gonna win the state, but how much that carries over to down market races, I just don't know.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, and this is where the presidential messaging comes into play. If you look at the closing arguments like a legal trial, the Kamala Harris closing argument is Trump is a menace, Trump is a fascist, Trump is bad for the future of America. The Trump closing argument has been much more policy driven in that you see him going after her on your past in terms of supporting sex change operations for prisoners.

You see Trump going after her very hard on the concept of boys playing girls sport. And now you've seen ads lately of Trump talking about economics and kind of raising the question of you better off than you were four years ago. To me, this is very smart advertising, especially when it comes to getting Hispanic voters.

There's an ongoing mystery as to why Trump is doing better among Hispanics, especially given that, his border rhetoric, last weekend's flap over Puerto Ricans and so forth. I have a couple theories. One is obviously the current economy is very tough on working class individuals. It's your dollar doesn't go as far as it does.

Second theory is that Covid still has a bad aftertaste. One party was in favor of very harsh lockdowns. And for Hispanics in California, that lockdown was very tough because, you don't have a laptop job, you're physically affected, plus also your kids out of school. So your life is so complicated.

But I think the third one is maybe cultural drift, if you will. This gets back to what I mentioned about Proposition 8, which was the definition of marriage initiative in California that passed in California statewide because black voters did not like the idea of same-sex marriage. It was a cultural divide, provide for African Americans that the same-sex marriage advocates did not quite understand.

And I think when Donald Trump is out there and he's pushing very hard, especially on the issue of boys playing girls sports and just kind of blurring gender lines and things like that. For Hispanics who are both aspirational but also culturally very conservative in terms of values, I think that has a lot of resonance.

So we'll see if that comes home in this, in this election. Not so again, just more fun when it comes to watching the votes come in.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Lee, let's shift to your recent California on Your Mind Column, in which you discuss the tiny home movement. Small tiny homes are small prefabricated units that provide temporary housing for people who are homeless.

As you explained in March 2023, Governor Newsom pledged that he would help local governments by providing 1,200 of these tiny homes. Quoting Leo Haney in San Jose, one of the four locations chosen for the product will be spending $30 million for. For tiny homes that will add 144 beds to an existing tiny home site in the city consisting of 72 single occupants occupancy units which do not have plumbing, and 36 occupancy units which have a bathroom but no kitchen.

The standard sizes of these units are 70 square and 120 square feet, respectively. This works out to 208,000 per bed and about 278,000 per unit. Lee, when you include the value of the land, you estimate it to be about 254,000 per bed, 338,000 per unit, and 3,900 per square foot in the San Jose tiny homes expansion.

To put these costs in perspective, it's about $485 per square foot for first, California single family home. And it's also much less expensive elsewhere in the country, including estates of the rich and famous. All of this is a way of asking why are the costs of tiny homes not so tiny?

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, Jonathan, this is another example of how I think our policies towards homelessness could be so much more effective and so much more efficient and we could use our dollars so much more wisely. So a tiny home, think of an outdoor storage unit, it's 10 by 7, is relatively inexpensive.

So now take that storage unit and gussied up just a little bit. And when I say just a little bit, it means we're not putting any plumbing, there's not a bathroom, there's not a kitchen. There's 70 square feet of living space. There's enough space for a small bed, a desk, and a chair and a couple of shelves, plumbing is elsewhere.

So it is incomprehensible to me that this would cost about $3,900 per square foot. And put that into context, that's about twice as expensive per square foot, including the three acres or so of land on Jennifer Lopez's new 30,000 square foot Beverly Hills estate. It costs almost as much per square foot as Jeff Bezos $78 million estate on a private island just off of Miami.

So you look at these and you just ask yourself, well, why? Why is it so expensive? So I was able to get the budget for this. I showed it to a developer I know who specializes in building affordable low income housing. And he took, within about five minutes he wrote me back and said, this is insane.

This is completely unacceptable to California voters and this is totally out of control. There is absolutely no way this should cost so much. And we really, this really boils down to the important issue of accountability within state government. We wanna get the homeless off the street. We spent $24 billion to try to do that over the last five years.

And in that period of time, homelessness has risen to 186,000. When Newsom took office, I believe homelessness was about 130,000. So this is a human tragedy. We're managing it terribly, we're burning through money. And you like to think that if you were given $30 million, you could do an awful lot to help homeless people.

And, again, it's hard to look at this budget, and these numbers and just ask yourself, what are we possibly doing here?

>> Bill Whalen: Lee, every time I read your columns, I learned something. And in this column, what I learned was something called a pla, which is not the Chinese People Liberations army, but in California, stands for Project Labor Agreement.

Can you explain what a PLA is and how this is complicating the situation?

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, the PLA is called a Project Labor Agreement. It's essentially a collective bargaining agreement, which effectively means that the developer is gonna be working with union labor. And union labor tends to cost more.

And when working with union labor, you also have to hire people who are experts with collective bargaining agreement compliances. I spoke to another developer who had been involved in a PLA development in Los Angeles, and he told me that, that it raised his costs about 50%. And not just because the fact that the plumbers were $120 an hour instead of $80 an hour, but as well, he had hired these compliance people because you violate a union work rule and then there's penalties involved in that.

He told me that he will never, ever do this again. He'll never work on another PLA type agreement. And virtually, all of these types of construction projects, whether it's for the homeless or affordable housing for low income people who may not be homeless. These involve state and local governments and these always have Project labor agreements.

They drive up costs unnecessarily. And again, when you think about the trade offs involved, those dollars could be spent more wisely and could be doing more to help those who we want to get off the streets.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, so if you're in Sacramento, Lee, and you're cooking up this idea of creating tiny homes across California, you have to know that this is waiting for you if you wanna do this.

It's kinda analogous, it seems to me, if you wanna build housing and you know you're gonna run afoul of CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. So you have to work around it. So why didn't the great minds who came up with this scheme, why didn't they anticipate this problem?

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, yeah, I just don't know if they was even CEQA on their radar screen. CEQA, as we spoke about before, is just a huge, huge problem. And one interesting aspect of this is that this was not a new site. This was adding tiny homes to an existing site in San Jose with tiny homes.

So again, you're bringing in these units, you're sticking them on the ground. And the budget also included over $4 million for design fees on this on an existing site with tiny homes. I have no idea what was gonna be involved with design. I asked the developer, I actually do.

And again, he just laughed and said, this is completely ridiculous. His words were that the taxpayers are being fleeced.

>> Bill Whalen: That is pretty bad. All right, Lee, one thing you talk about in your column is oversight, the question of what the government could do to create oversight in the situation.

What if I could give you a SEP and an orb and let you put oversight of this? What would you do? What would you suggest?

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, California government, both at state and local level, has been so incredibly complex. We have a 300, roughly $300 billion state budget.

We have enormous budgets at the local level in areas such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it's become so opaque that taxpayers really have no idea. They have no idea how their tax dollars are being used. They have no idea that those tax dollars are being burned through at a rate that, hey, you could buy two Jennifer Lopez est at this rate rather than one.

So I suggest in that piece that, we really should have an Office of Taxpayer Advocacy within state and local governments that's independent. And that in a nonpartisan way evaluates the budget, evaluates the efficiency of different departments and different projects. And provides this information to taxpayers so they know how their tax dollars are being used and whether they should complain to their state and local representatives about this.

Because the state legislature has the legislative analyst office, and state government has the auditor's office to provide them with information. There's no one advocating To the stat, the taxpayer, and I think it would be beneficial if there was an office like this, because I read about this stuff every week writing his pieces.

But virtually no taxpayers are gonna be aware of this And they just have. They just have no idea how their tax law is being spent and they deserve to know.

>> Bill Whalen: Lee, every now and then somebody will come by my office and they wanna talk about running for the state Senate, running for the state Assembly.

They ask for advice, and I give it, and I always tell them, go look up a gentleman named William Proxmire. And William Proxmire was a senator from Wisconsin back in the previous century. And William Proxmire came up with a very clever concept, every year he would hand out what he called the Golden Fleece Awards.

And the Golden Fleece Awards were for just kind of the worst and stupid spending of federal government, those wasteful spending of federal money. And I think that has to be introduced to Sacramento in some way, and maybe some disparate Republican will do it. But maybe to the extent you can get this on the voter's radar screen, maybe that's what you start doing and start showing the 600 toilet for the Pentagon and things like that.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, that's a great comparison, I do remember the Proxmire Golden Fleece Awards, yeah, we need one for California.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Gentlemen, let's move back to national politics for a moment. A series of newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, refused to endorse any candidate for the presidency, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump included.

And it was presumed that the Times would endorse Vice President Harris. In the past four races, the Los Angeles Times did endorse Democrats in 2008, and in 2012, it was Barack Obama. In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton, and 2020, it was Joseph Biden. But when you look at the LA Times history, this shouldn't come as a huge surprise between 1976 and 2004, the Times offered no endorsement.

And from 1884, three years after its founding in 1881 to 1972, the Times only endorsed Republicans, ending with Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. Fun fact, the paper endorsed Herbert Hoover, our institution's founder, in both 1928 and 1932. So, gentlemen, why the dust of angering readers and leading to the resignation of the editorial page editor, Marielle Garza, and why do papers have a history of endorsing anyway, Bill.

>> Bill Whalen: That's an awfully good question why they endorse in the first place. They endorse the first place because they seem to think that their opinion matters, and this is a problem with modern journalism. They're moving away from the business of reporting and telling facts to now trying to sway opinion, if you will.

Years ago, I did an oral history project with my former boss, Governor Wilson, just talking about his life and times, and it was great fun because the man was in politics for 30 years. And I asked him at one point, I said, what was your happiest moment in politics?

And he looked at me and kind of half smiled he said, 1994, when I'm running for reelection for governor and the Los Angeles Times endorsed me. And I said, really, and he said, yeah, and then he kinda smiled, he said, because I wore the bastards down. In other words, the Los Angeles Times had just been so relentlessly on him for four years, suggesting he was a failure, that the fact that they had to eat crow and endorse him was kind of a pride of which a badge of honor for him.

But no, he raised a great question as to why these newspapers think they have to endorse in the first place. But I think it ties into something which is just the self-importance of journalists in this day and age. A lot of print reporters that I run into don't seem to realize that they're in a dying industry or an industry that is more and more a dinosaur.

I'll give you a good example, we all have watched the Sopranos probably at some point. And we all remember Tony Soprano in the opening scenes coming down from this driveway to his bathrobe and getting the newspaper at the bottom of the driveway that's the Newark Star Ledger. The New York Start Ledger a couple days ago announced that it's no longer doing a print edition, why?

Cuz people just aren't buying print newspapers anymore, they go online to read or they go find their news in X or TikTok or someplace like that. So, newspapers are struggling for relevancy, that's a straight and simple fact of the matter. But it's a problem in California which ties to what we just talked about and its lack of accountability in government.

Back 30 years ago when I worked in state government, the Los Angeles Times had a big operation in Sacramento just like it had a big bureau in Washington DC. And boy did they cover the waterfront, and boy, did they dig in a state government, and there was one reporter in particular her name was Virginia Ellis, may she rest in peace.

And if you found out that Virginia Ellis was on your case, you just really sweated cuz you knew a bad story was coming your way. The time still does some investigative reporting, so do the other newspapers, but frankly, that's been handed over to publications like Calmetters, which do it now.

Newspapers just don't have much of a presence in the Capitol, those that do have made a calculation, they tend to be very nice toward Governor Newsom because he's the only game in town. Californians just aren't getting the journalism they need, so you kinda look at the endorsement thing, and it's kind of amusing to watch because you have these sort of sanctimonious people having a fit.

But it ties our larger problem, which is the institutional decay of journalism, Lee?

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, I agree completely, it's unclear why newspapers really need to offer an endorsement, particularly now in 2024. They have their opinion pages where they can provide assessments of candidate policies and other aspects of candidates that they wish to opine on.

The Wall Street Journal, I believe, has never offered an endorsement of a political candidate, they write plenty about politics and about economic policies.

>> Bill Whalen: They just wrote one, which is kind of quasi-endorsement of Trump, but it doesn't say, vote for Donald Trump. It just kind of lays out the two candidates, you could kinda deduce that which one they think is better, but you're right, Lee, they do not endorse.

>> Lee Ohanian: They don't formally endorse, right, and the LA Times is, is very much a struggling newspaper. Their readership is way, way down relative to what it was, certainly, relative to the population. They have gone through a string, I believe, of ownerships over the years. They keep searching for what's going to grab readers, they continue to fail on that.

Yeah, you pick it up now, well, it's very thin if you do pick it up. Yeah, it looks like it looks like 90% editorial. So, I couldn't agree more, there's a need for unbiased, fair, factual reporting. And I think if they moved away from story after story after story of criticism of Trump and criticism of Trump and criticism of Trump, I think they probably would be more successful.

>> Bill Whalen: And again, I'd emphasize just information is changing the way it did 20 and 30 years ago. And you just look at this presidential election, Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan's podcast. Donald Trump did not sit down for an editorial board at the New York Times. He doesn't really care about the endorsements I think he got precious few the first time he ran in 2016.

He got more, I think, in 2020, but obviously newspapers overwhelmingly are against him. Trump is recognizing the media landscape, but he went on Joe Rogan, he got 26 million views in 24 hours. Do you know how long it would take to get 26 million views at the Los Angeles Times, in the Washington Post, it just doesn't work that way anymore.

So again, newspapers just have to struggle with the idea that just not relevant, but to become relevant, you raised a very good point, Lee. You're gonna have to stop being just so one-sided in your coverage. And it's a wonderful business model when someone like Donald Trump was in office.

And indeed, if you look at the New York Times, the Washington Post, they did very well in subscriptions and all of that. But when Badman is not in office, you struggle with your business model, so they're gonna have to figure out a different direction. But if you're Washington Post, you say, well, we'll just hire a bunch of conservatives to write and full disclosure, I've written for the post in the past.

That's still not gonna change your daily coverage of the newspaper and what you believe your mission is. And unfortunately, too many of these people believe their mission is not to so much report on things, but as to try to deflate and dispirit and ultimately take out of office Donald Trump.

So, I think newspapers will have to have a come to Jesus with themselves with this election.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, no, as we know, there's really almost religious view within those newspapers about their coverage of Trump, and if you look at the, Street Journal. Many people think it's very one sided.

But Alan Blinder, would be what I would call a very liberal economist, writes, I believe, a monthly column. Jason Furman, who I believe was one of Obama's advisors, rights for them as well. So he's-

>> Bill Whalen: He's the economist who drives Democrats crazy cuz he tends to talk in pretty stark terms about inflation and things like that.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, so they try to be more balanced. And I remember, I don't know Bill, did you see the, the New York Times endorsement page? It looked like, it looked like endorsement for Harris. It looked like just a full page ad someone took out against Trump. Donald Trump will do in, I don't know, 60 font print one, two, three.

All these horrible things Trump was going to do. At this stage of the race, I just don't know who that's gonna convince in any case.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah the final note of this, then we can move on is I don't see this changing anytime soon because you have this mindset in America's leading newspapers.

It's not like they're gonna suddenly decide they wanna be more centrist and more conservative. But secondly, it's also Donald Trump. I have here in my office a little book of cartoons by the late Herb Block. Herb Block was a cartoonist for the Washington Post forever. And he started drawing Richard Nixon going to the 1950s.

And he did something very mean toward then Vice President Nixon. He would always draw Nixon with a beard of five o'clock shadow because he considered Nixon just to be a just dirty, shadowy guy. There's a famous cartoon of Herblock as of Nixon crawling out of the sewer and someone says, here he comes.

In other words, Nixon always takes a low road. When Nixon was elected president in 1969, Herb Block ran a cartoon and it showed a barber shop, then an empty chair and it had a little sign saying all presidents get a clean shave. In other words, I'm gonna try to get along with the President.

I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt. Now, that lasted, I think maybe days or weeks between her block and Nixon, but the point was that at least her block tried to reset the relationship. But guys, I don't see that happening with Trump. And why? Again, it's mutually beneficial.

Newspapers make money off of going after Donald Trump and subscriptions. And Donald Trump does pretty well politically, at least he seems to think so by running around and yelling Fake news. So it seems they're like the mongrels, mongoose and the cult cobra. And so it will continue.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: So where's Gavin, gentlemen?

A word is out that he was in Washington state this week campaigning to vote down initiative on the state's ballot, which, if enacted, would prohibit state agencies from implementing a cap and trade or cap and tax program. Early in the, early in the election cycle, he appeared to be positioning himself as a national figure.

But now he's back to local politics. What's going on with Gavin and how does he position himself post election?

>> Bill Whalen: I think that's as simple as the mighty have fallen. A year ago, we would have talked about Gavin Newsom as maybe the Democratic Party's salvation and let's put him on the ticket in place of Joe Biden and watch him run.

This would have continued into the spring and summer as well, but that is no longer the case. Sending Gavin Newsom into a swing state, a battleground state in America right now is a roll of the dice for the Democratic candidate because you're introducing California and serious progressive politics.

A lot of things Kamala Harris is trying to downplay like fracking and energy, and he just introduces that right into the conversation. So that's problem number one. I mentioned Proposition 36. He's not campaigning for that, he's not running with the House people in California, it seems. So he has to look around and find something.

And so they shopped and they found the initiative in Washington state. I think it's Initiative 2117, actually, if our listeners want to look it up or not. And so this is a problem for him. I'm especially fascinated, Lee, as to where he's going to be on election night, because why governors like to go to victory parties on election night.

So whose victory party is he going to? Is he gonna show up for some Harris function in California? Is he gonna show up At some Democrat? Is he gonna go to maybe Adam Shipp's victory party? I don't know. Or is he just gonna stay home and make pizza for the kids?

But it's again, I think just the story here is just he has had ever since Kamala Harris became the nominee in waiting, he has just had a very rough go of it.

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, I mean, just how quickly all that unraveled. He was seen as Biden's surrogate, not so much her, he was Biden's surrogate.

He took on Desantis in what I thought was a silly debate. He gets into Twitter Fights with Abbott and DeSantis and other red state governors. And now suddenly a few months later he seems to be a guy in an island. I don't know really what his constituency is now.

His approval rating in California is, is 44% which, which strikes me as remarkable because the state only has 24% registered Republicans. How could, how could you be that low? That must be among all governors and, yeah. So where does Gavin go if Harris wins? Does he start in the not too distant future, start looking for a D.C job?

Bill, you've often thought he might want to be in Kerry's old position.

>> Bill Whalen: I have looked at two jobs for him. One is John Kerry's position, which I guess we would call climate czar. Kind of a minister without a portfolio. But basically climate czar goes around the world and talks to other governments and pontificates and give long witted talks and goes to places like Davos and just yammers on about climate change.

I think he'd be very good at that in terms of yammering about climate change. The other job is one that Antonio Vigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles, desperately wanted the second term of Barack Obama and that's to be the Transportation Secretary. But here's what's complicated about that, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris have known each other for 20 years.

They both emerged in San Francisco politics in 2003, him running for mayor, her running for District attorney. I think she's kind of sized him up pretty effectively. And I don't know if I would bring Cabin Newsom into my cabin or not because why can you really control him?

Is he gonna be compliant? Is he gonna be a good soldier, go along with the actor nots? So I think that's part of the drama here with Newsom actually be offered a job in Washington. Now if Donald Trump wins, his path is pretty clear. It seems to me he's going to be one of a lot of governors.

I mean we're talking Westmore in Maryland and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, J.B. Pritzker in Illinois. The list goes on. All Democrats claiming to have the cure for what ails the Democratic Party. And I'm sure he will want to put himself front and center in that conversation.

But by the way, Leon, Jonathan, there's a not inconsiderable matter of what is he gonna do in California for the next years because he's not out of office until January 2027.

>> Lee Ohanian: He has he has an awful long way to go in his second term one that he seems to be not at least in my opinion not particularly interested in.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> Lee Ohanian: And Bill, you know he's not he's I guess he's never been a very presidential guy in terms of trying to be free in and trying to build bridges across groups that that might be at odds with each other. Recently the California is going to implement through the California Air Resources Board a minimum storage requirement within the state to try to prevent price spikes with gasoline.

Which was two days later Phillips Petroleum announced they were going to close their refinery which accounts for 8% of the crude oil that's refined in California. So say hello to higher gasoline prices because of lower supply. And when he signed that bill he demonized the industry which he's been doing for a long time.

In a press statement he said the industry lies to you, they're manipulating you, they're taking advantage of you. And this is in a state where refining capacity has fallen by 35% since the early 1980s, a period in which California added another 13 million people and about another 20 million cars.

So if you wanna think about why California gas prices are so high, he needs to be looking in the mirror and at those beforehand that have made it just so difficult to refine crude oil in the state. I asked a friend who works in the energy industry about what would it take to get a new refinery or new drilling permitted in California.

He just laughed. He said, you might as well try to do it on the moon.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, two things I would note here. One, it's Newsom's style, which he may have to work on if he does wanna go presidential in 2028. If Harris loses, the line forms to the rear.

People are gonna second guess what went wrong. Invariably, someone's going to say the tone of your campaign was not good. You started off trying offer hope, like Barack Obama, lift people up, but then you departed from that down the stretch, and you just attacked Donald Trump. Indeed, if you look at her poll numbers, by the way, this is when things do start to slip for her.

Gavin Newsom is not an aspirational democrat in that regard. And he's also very good at tearing down Donald Trump. So I think he's going to have to work on the positive side of things, number one. But secondly, it's an ongoing question of how you sell California across America.

He did go to Michigan recently, but he was blanketed with other governors. And I noticed he didn't do much in the way of media, which meant they didn't really know market him. So he goes to Michigan. And the Trump campaigns were a very effective campaign in that state, having to believe that Kamala Harris is the enemy of the combustion engine.

Well, no state has been more aggressive. Fewer states have been more aggressive than California when it comes to electric vehicles. So he's gonna have to go to State across America as a Democratic nominee, I'm thinking, and just try to convince votes that California is not doing too much too soon, too fast.

If you look at California, I think that from the outside view, that's the reaction a lot of people get. This is just too much, too fast.

>> Lee Ohanian: They're gonna look at the fact that California has the highest gasoline prices in the country by a substantial amount on a percentage basis, that taxes are among the highest.

California is ranked, as, I believe, the 48th worst in tax climate by the tax foundation, regulatory policies ranked towards the worst. I mean, Newsom will talk about how California is the fifth largest economy and all that is certainly true. That's despite a government that does an awful lot to make running a business in the state very, very expensive.

I think his shtick is gonna wear thin pretty quickly. If Trump loses, then that aspect is gonna be gone from his toolkit and he's gonna have to stand on policy accomplishments. And he will talk a lot about reproductive rights and women's rights and so forth and will be a plus for him in terms of saying he accomplished something along those dimensions.

But when you look at things like cost of living, quality of life, housing costs, homelessness, there's a laundry list that he's not gonna be able to defend.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, well, final note on this. So if Harris does lose, he has December and January of 2025 to figure out what comes next.

And he can give a very thoughtful state of the state address on the conditions of California and offer some ambitious and Herod cautioned him get away from ambitious so much as look for what is feasible. Because I think you'll agree, Lee, if there's a bad MO With Gavin Newsom, it's to offer big ambitious ideas like tiny houses.

But it's always the follow through is just always death. But try to offer some substantive things to do or he can just get completely absorbed in national politics and the choice is his.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, if I was a betting man, I would have been on the ladder. If I was advising him, I would say take a look at California's K through 12.

That's something that people really care about. We spend an awful lot on it. Our K through 12 performs abysmally. And that's despite the fact that this is a big operation. One can make surprisingly significant changes in a small amount of time if you make the right kind of reforms.

So I would say look to education. That's an uplifting message. That's one that all people respond to. It goes across party lines. But Bill, I suspect we're just Going to have a couple more years of a very, very distracted Governor Newsom. And I don't know if the needle will move on any of our important problems.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> Lee Ohanian: During that period.

>> Bill Whalen: But it's all worth noting because if Harris does win, then Newsom would have an opportunity maybe to go to Washington. And you know who likes that idea? Lieutenant Governor Lenny Kounalakis, because then she would become the governor of California and that would make her life considerably easy if she will run for governor in 2026.

So a lot of moving parts still to come.

>> Lee Ohanian: Absolutely, there's a lot of people have thrown their hats in the ring without an obvious favorite people ranging from Kounalakis to Antonio Villaraigosa to what I expect to be Rob Bonta, state Attorney General, and California State School Superintendent Tony Thurmond.

So that would that would be a great outcome for Ms. Kounalakis.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: As always, this has been an hour of timely analysis. Gentlemen, thank you for your time.

>> Bill Whalen: Thanks, guys.

>> Lee Ohanian: Thank you, fellas.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, the Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the free world.

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And Lee Ohanian is also on X, his handle is @Lee_Ohanian. Please visit the hoover website @hoover.org and sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, where you can access the latest scholarship and analysis from our fellows. Also check out California on Your Mind, where Bill Whalen and Lee Ohanian write every week.

Again, this is Jonathan Movroydis sitting in Bill Whalen's chair. This week he'll be back for another episode of Matters of Policy and Politics. Thank you for listening.

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