President Biden’s struggles since a disastrous June debate performance, including a ham-handed crisis response that ultimately led to his decision not to seek reelection, seems proof of the Shakespearean adage “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
Speaking of monarchies, the “should he stay or should he go” narrative surrounding the Biden candidacy over the past few weeks did manage to expose a rift in California’s Democratic ruling class—the Golden State’s political sovereigns, if you will.
On the one hand, there’s Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden’s expressed choice as his successor at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket. While the vice president and her aides didn’t attempt any acts of political regicide while Biden mulled his fate, it’s worth noting that Harris supporters were at one point mapping out what a post-Biden campaign would resemble—no easy feat given questions of staffing and possibly a different November strategy. (Presumably, Harris, America’s first minority vice president, would look to get to 270 electoral votes by mobilizing Black voters in southern states such as Georgia and North Carolina, as opposed to Biden’s prioritization of voters in states the likes of Wisconsin and Michigan).
But while Harris now stands as the Democrats’ heiress not-so-apparent (how Biden’s convention delegates will vote once the president “releases” them is anyone’s guess), she has not been the monarch’s biggest cheerleader. That honor goes to California governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom traveled to Atlanta to work the “spin room” at the aforementioned presidential debate, not only standing by Biden but later releasing a statement that made it clear he wasn’t in the chorus of second-guessers. “Folks, Listen. I am old-fashioned, but on the substance Joe Biden won the debate last night. That is what matters to me,” read the governor’s statement. “All this other talk . . . it’s helpful and unnecessary. We aren’t going to turn our backs because of one performance. What kind of party does that?”
The answer: a party that includes congressman Adam Schiff, who’s looking to become California’s junior US senator come November.
Like Newsom, Schiff is a California-based Democratic prince, albeit one not shy about engaging in acts of political regicide—Schiff being the lead prosecutor in former president Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.
But unlike Newsom, Schiff was so bold as to call for his party’s king to end his reign—doing so right as the dump-Biden movement seemed to be losing steam. (“Our nation is at a crossroads,” Schiff said in a statement. “A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”)
Why would the aspiring Senate candidate engage in an act of political heresy (heresy, at least, in the eyes of California’s aspirational governor)? Look no further than yet another member of the Golden State’s Democratic royal court—former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
If news reports are true, Pelosi in recent weeks (a) huddled with former president Barack Obama over how to get Biden off the ticket; (b) told her fellow House Democrats that Biden could be coaxed into stepping down; and (c) though denying any involvement, apparently did nothing to stop Schiff from rekindling the “Joe-Must-Go” dumpster fire. (“Nancy is all over this. She doesn’t miss,” an anonymous “White House source” told reporters. “Schiff wouldn’t move without her approval.”)
And, to add to the Golden State royal intrigue, Pelosi reportedly (d) told colleagues that she favors an “open” nomination process in the event of a search for a new presidential nominee, which would seem an affront to her fellow Californian Harris and the notion of a seamless ascent to the Democratic throne —a idea seconded by one of Pelosi’s confidantes in California’s congressional delegation. “I don’t think we can do a coronation,” California congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said in a television interview. “Kind of a mini-primary, maybe a vetting hosted by former presidents, including Obama and Clinton, would be helpful.”
(Pelosi has since endorsed Harris, claiming via a released statement that her “enthusiastic support . . . is official, personal and political.”)
Lofgren’s willingness to go along with Pelosi is understandable—the two have served together in the House for nearly three decades. Moreover, she would seem an unlikely candidate for getting “primaried” by Harris loyalists in a future election—Lofgren having received more than three times as many votes as the combined total of the three other Democratic candidates in the California 18th Congressional District’s March primary.
Schiff, is in fact, is the more interesting study in testing political winds for one simple reason: career arc.
Let’s assume Schiff wins his Senate race against Republican Steve Garvey (as of July 22, the RealClearPolitics poll average shows Schiff up by 23 points). The last GOP candidate to win a California US Senate race? That would be Pete Wilson, who did so twice in the 1980s).
It’s what Schiff does should he return to Washington—and a different chamber of Congress—that intrigues.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s a very different Washington in 2025: Trump returns to the Oval Office after four years in exile, along with a Senate now in Republican hands (in this year’s cycle, it’s the fate of Democratic incumbents in a handful of red and battleground states—Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—that will help decide matters). Perhaps Schiff could be productive on the Senate’s minority side, though it’s difficult to imagine a measure bearing his name to receive Trump’s sign-off.
A different path for Schiff—the same route taken by the last member of the California Democratic royal court to transition to the Senate: focus less on policy and more on political ambition by sidling up to the party’s big donors.
Seven years ago at this time, Kamala Harris journeyed to the Hamptons, New York State’s summertime playground for uber-wealthy progressives, to meet with some of Hillary Clinton’s largest donors—Clinton having lost the presidential race the previous November while Harris was elevated from state attorney general to freshman US senator.
Not that Harris was looking to establish ties between, say, tony Southampton and a not-so-chichi South San Francisco. Per an unnamed “Democratic insider” at that time: “Kamala is the big Democratic star right now, at a time when they badly need a star. She’s coming to the Hamptons to meet key people as she takes a national stage, and expands her influence and ambitions.”
Indeed, Harris announced her presidential candidacy on Martin Luther King Day 2019 (three months before Biden did the same), only to drop out of the race exactly two months before the Iowa presidential caucuses—in all, a presidential campaign that barely lasted 10 months, as opposed to a 2024 run that would span a little more than 10 weeks from the end to the national convention to Election Day.
This is not a prediction that Schiff would run for president in 2028, should this year’s race go Trump’s way. But he could position himself as a player in his party’s future via his ability to raise prodigious sums of money (courtesy of his ties to Pelosi’s fundraising network)—money that Schiff could add to a super PAC (in political jargon, an “independent expenditure–only political action committee”) to ostensibly help fellow Democrats while raising his national profile. (By doing so, Schiff would be taking a page out of the Newsom playbook.)
Could Schiff somehow leapfrog past his fellow Californians Harris and Newsom in terms of ascendancy to the Democratic throne? Stranger things have happened. But for now, it would seem, it’s good to be a California Democratic political prince—especially one backed by the Speaker Queen.
