One thing the nation discovered last month: political winds sometimes travel faster east to west in America than supposedly swift airline traffic (I speak from personal experience, as it recently took me four days to travel three time zones after July’s computer glitch).
Or so we learned after former president Donald Trump and GOP surrogates wasted little time in reminding voters that vice president Kamala Harris, now the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, once held public office in the Golden State.
Trump, in his first campaign rally since officially becoming the Republican presidential nominee, tore into Harris as “one of the worst prosecutors,” who “destroyed San Francisco” (Harris having served as that city and county’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011).
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, in this online interview, referred to Harris as “a San Francisco radical” (after assuming the vice presidency in 2021, Harris sold her condominium in the city’s SoMa district).
Richard Grenell, US ambassador to Germany during the Trump presidency, decried Harris as part of “a revolving door of DEI appointments from the straight white male governor, who hands out appointments to keep different groups happy and at bay. Kamala Harris is a product of this whole system. She’s very far left, unvetted and untested.”
(Note: each California office Harris held during her climb up the political ladder—San Francisco DA, state attorney general, US senator—was the result of winning elections, not gubernatorial largesse)
Or we change to guilt by California association, there will likely be more of it between now and Election Day. Per this CNN report, “A source close to Trump also indicated the campaign and its allies are planning to specifically highlight certain choices she made as San Francisco district attorney in an attempt to portray her as lenient on violent criminals.”
In this vein, the 2024 presidential election mimics the presidential contest of 40 years ago, when the nominating convention for Reagan introduced to Americans’ political lexicon the term “San Francisco Democrats”—a reference both to the site of that year’s Democratic National Convention and to that city’s reputation as a political outlier.
Only, in that election, it was in reference to matters far beyond the San Francisco Bay Area.
Here’s how Jeanne Kirkpatrick, America’s United Nations ambassador at the time, deployed the term pejoratively in her appearance at the 1984 Republican National Convention:
When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich—convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand. . . .
When the Soviet Union walked out of arms controls control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame the Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States. . . .
When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerillas and their Soviet allies, the blame the United States policies of 100 years ago.
Granted, if Trump wanted to affix “San Francisco” to Democratic foreign policy, there’s nothing stopping him or his running mate from coming to Fremont, the San Francisco Bay Area town that’s home to a vibrant Afghan American community, and launching into a foreign-policy tirade over America’s chaotic withdrawal from that nation.
But in 2024, the throwing of “San Francisco Democrats” as a barb likely stays at the water’s edge—and possibly concentrates on two episodes that might not play well for the Democratic ticket in more conservative swing states.
First, there’s the matter of how Harris, as a newly elected district attorney, acted in the aftermath of the murder of Isaac Espinoza, a San Francisco police officer gunned down on the Saturday before 2004’s Easter holiday by a gang member wielding an assault weapon.
Harris could have sought the death penalty, as the murder of a police officer qualified as a “special circumstance.” Instead, she pursued life imprisonment for the killer (here’s her rationale).
That decision put Harris at odds with San Francisco’s local police union, not to mention California’s two US senators, one of whom chastised Harris at Espinoza’s funeral. Also perplexed by Harris’s decision: a newly elected mayor, Gavin Newsom, who told reporters, “I’ve always had a difficult time on the subject . . . It’s not an easy issue, and I’m coming to grips with my own feelings after this senseless death of Isaac Espinoza. It’s made me question my own belief on the death penalty.” (In 2019, a newly elected Governor Newsom would order a halt to the death penalty in California.)
Making matters worse for Harris: she didn’t reach out to the slain officer’s family before holding a press conference to announce her decision not to seek the death penalty—a discourtesy that didn’t sit well with Espinoza’s widow.
Does Isaac Espinoza appear in swing states where “thin blue line” flags fly? Time will tell.
Another California law-and-order topic that could haunt Harris (actually, it’s more a matter of law and “disorder”): her ties to Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that lessened felony thefts to misdemeanors for stolen property valued under $950—that initiative, some argue, triggering shoplifting sprees in California’s cities.
While then-state attorney general Harris did not take a formal position on Prop 47, she did play a role in how the electorate based its decision by authoring this ballot summary suggesting savings in incarceration costs. What she didn’t foresee, as NBC News reported last year: “California’s reforms created a prison-to-homelessness pipeline, as counties were overwhelmed with an influx of returning inmates.”
Oops.
There are yet other California routes for the Trump campaign—one that is not crime-centric: connect Harris to California’s various challenges writ large (high levels of homelessness, unemployment, taxation, and “wokeism”). As the columnist Dan Walters notes in this CalMatters column, “It’s no secret that California, by far the most populous state, is not held in high esteem by those who live elsewhere. In fact, a 2023 study found that California is the fifth most disliked state, behind Illinois, New Jersey, New York and West Virginia.”
And there’s the low road of ridicule, which the vice president’s opponents already seem all too eager to take up. Case in point: this Trump attack assailing the vice president’s legal ken: “You know that? She couldn’t pass her bar. She couldn’t pass her bar exams. . . . Does anyone know that? . . . But she’s gonna be a great president, right? No, she couldn’t pass her bar exams. She couldn’t pass anything. Couldn’t pass everything. She couldn’t pass anything.”
Indeed, Harris failed on her first attempt to pass the bar exam. Then again, so too did a pair of recent California governors, Jerry Brown and Pete Wilson.
In the end, perhaps the Trump campaign will focus more on her four years as America’s vice president rather than her previous decade holding three California-based offices. But at a minimum, California stands to become part of the 2024 conversation as the incubator for Harris’s national ambitions.
Does that mean the road to the White House runs through the Golden State? Of course not—not when the election will be decided by the electoral votes in a half-dozen battleground states.
But it does suggest that California gets at least a cameo role in the narrative, which would be an improvement as other states – Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, George W. Bush’s Texas, Barack Obama’s Illinois – garnered media scrutiny — and California went largely neglected.
The question: Will the rest of America likes what it sees?
