News Analysis: If Democrats want to win back the American people, does California need to stand down?
- As a bastion of liberal ideas, California plays an outsize role in Democrats’ culture wars with the GOP.
- Republicans successfully used California policies in the 2024 election to scare voters in other parts of America.
- Democrats may need to refocus their messaging, talking less about identity politics and more about “bread-and-butter” issues.
After voters across the nation chose President-elect Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom cautioned against buying into the first wave of hot takes and “punditry” about what went wrong for Democrats.
“I think this will reveal itself, and I think we have a responsibility to interrogate ourselves. I’m not naive about that, and that includes all of us, individually,” Newsom said in a video address. “We have to look into the mirror and really reflect on what happened more broadly.”
Some Democrats say California politics are part of the problem.
The party’s loss to a candidate they often liken to a fascist dictator “says something is broken with the vanguard of Democratic policies and Democratic messaging that starts in places like California,” said Mike Gatto, a former Democratic state Assembly member.
“We don’t want to ever get into a position where we’re not sticking up for the least among us. But at the same time, we also have to focus on things that the majority of voters care about and those things are affordability and the perception that some of the more extremes of the left wing of the Democratic party have gone too far.”
The GOP tried to cast Harris, a Californian, as epitomizing a West Coast liberalism that the party portrays as more focused on identity politics than on the bread-and-butter issues that mattered most to American voters: their ability to pay rent and buy groceries.
Many factors contributed to Trump beating Harris, the first Black female presidential nominee of a major political party, in a chaotic election season that included assassination attempts and a candidate switch that left the vice president with 107 days to win over the public.
As a bastion of liberal ideas, the Golden State and Newsom himself also play an outsize role in the “culture war” debate over ideology in America, driven in part today by the governor’s relentless campaign against Trumpism.
Newsom has denounced GOP leaders, alleging they want to reverse the nation’s progress, as he campaigned for President Biden, Harris and other Democrats around the country. California, he likes to say, is where the future happens first.
The governor touted the state’s “first in the nation” study on providing reparations for the descendants of African Americans who were enslaved in the United States, an issue that polled so poorly in California and on the national level that the governor and legislative Democrats distanced themselves from the call to deliver remedies in an election year. Democrats boast about the state’s aggressive fight against climate change that includes a ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars starting in 2035, but haven’t solved the state’s highest-in-the-nation gas prices.
With a Republican-controlled Senate, possibly the House as well, and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, he now has the opportunity to shift public policy significantly to the right.
California also has some of the tightest gun control laws in the country. On the campaign trail, Harris repeatedly mentioned that she owns a firearm in an attempt to distinguish her support for gun control from the unsubstantiated claim from the right that she and Democrats want to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
A law Newsom signed this year to ban school districts from requiring that teachers inform parents when a student wants to be identified as a different gender inflamed conservatives and led Elon Musk to pledge to move SpaceX from California to Texas.
The Democratic platform in 2024 became synonymous with abortion access, climate change and LGBTQ+ rights, top issues in the modern Golden State zeitgeist. But that played out in an America concerned about jobs, affordable housing and inflation.
Republicans made the image of homeless encampments in San Francisco and Los Angeles and stories about people leaving the state for Texas because of crime and housing costs part of their standard talking points, said David Kochel, a veteran Iowa GOP strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush.
Kochel pointed to an ad Trump ran focusing on Harris’ support in the 2019 Democratic primary for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for inmates. The ad featured Harris talking about her past efforts to provide access to care for transitioning inmates in California prisons.
Harris countered that her position was consistent with Trump administration policy at the time.
The ad, frequently aired during college and NFL games, alleged that Harris supports transgender women competing “against our girls in their sports.” Trump said he would ban transgender women from women’s athletics.
“Kamala is for they/them,” the ad said. “President Trump is for you.”
Sam Garrett, a Democratic strategist who was previously the managing director of Equality California, a group that advocates for LGBTQ+ rights, rejected the notion that his party must decide whether to focus on social issues or economic fears, arguing it could do both.
“It’s the second half of that ad — that Donald Trump is for you — that’s what voters are reacting to,” Garrett said. “That’s what Democrats need to do a better job of explaining — we’re for you. It’s not mutually exclusive making sure everyone, including trans kids, has access to healthcare.”
He added that economic issues such as housing affordability affect broad swaths of voters, including members of the LGBTQ community.
“We need to grow the tent, not shrink it,” Garrett said.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House could undermine access to gender-affirming care in California, advocates and others say, despite vows by lawmakers to protect it.
However, California’s emphasis on such liberal issues pushes the boundaries for many moderate voters, even those who may be sympathetic to some progressive policies, Kochel said.
Kochel warned that what he called “virtue signaling” from Democrats could have real-world implications for vulnerable communities and lead to a revolt against California-style “hyperprogressive activism.”
“What frustrates me as a Republican who supports LGBTQ rights and who supports marriage equality, things like that ... the backlash is going to catch a lot of people in it that don’t deserve to be targeted,” he said. “So I’m concerned about the state of marriage equality. It feels like it’s because a lot of this stuff [has gone] too far.”
Jennifer Horn, a former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party and now a registered independent who opposes Trump, said there’s no question that the GOP has been very effective at “demonizing California as a dangerously liberal state” to scare other parts of America, whether it’s true or not.
“They have painted California to be so liberal that if we let the rest of the country become like California, the whole operation will collapse,” Horn said.
That’s what happened in Iowa, where GOP politicians essentially ran against California issues, said Jeff Link, an Iowa Democratic strategist who worked for former President Obama’s 2008 campaign and former Vice President Al Gore’s presidential run in 2000.
“I mean that’s all the Iowa legislative Republicans essentially advertised on,” he said, noting the frequency of ads around transgender youth in sports, use of public bathrooms, defunding the police or raising taxes.
But the Democratic Party didn’t just miss the mark with voters in swing states and Republican strongholds. It was too liberal even for many California voters.
The California Democratic Party and Newsom opposed Proposition 36, a statewide ballot measure to increase penalties for repeat theft and drug crimes. Harris declined to take a position. The measure prevailed with 69% voter approval. Voters also disagreed with the state party’s endorsements on four other measures, including a failed initiative that sought to ban involuntary servitude in prisons.
“That was a huge disconnect by the Democratic Party and certainly Gavin Newsom and everyone else running around amplifying [liberal social] positions, which doesn’t do us any good,” said John Shallman, a veteran Democratic consultant based in Los Angeles. “We just again have to be focused on bread-and-butter, kitchen-table, middle-class issues, and get away from identity politics, get away from the notion of fighting these culture wars.”
The defeat of Harris, a preeminent California Democrat who served as the state’s attorney general and U.S. senator, raises the question of how Newsom would fare in a presidential race if he seeks the nomination in 2028.
Immediately after the election, Newsom appeared to pick up the same playbook he used during his first two years in office to elevate himself as a leader of the Democratic resistance to Trump.
Newsom’s preemptive strike signals the return of the hostile relationship between Democratic-controlled California and the Trump administration.
The governor announced a largely symbolic special session to increase funding for the state to fight legal battles to protect women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and climate change against the incoming federal administration two days after the race was called.
Trump responded by highlighting California’s cost of living and accusing “Newscum” of trying to kill the nation’s “beautiful California.”
“They are making it impossible to build a reasonably priced car, the unchecked and unbalanced homeless catastrophe, & the cost of EVERYTHING, in particular groceries, IS OUT OF CONTROL,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Horn and others say California Democrats should continue to stick up for their values. But if the state party sees itself as a leader for the party nationally, then it may need to refocus its messaging.
“The country needs Democrats to defeat MAGA and that means Democrats need to be more honest with themselves about not just the positions that they take, but the disconnect of those positions with the majority of Americans,” Horn said.
At a town hall with Mayor Karen Bass in Los Angeles on Saturday, outgoing U.S. Sen. Laphonza Butler said Democrats are advancing economic policies that speak to Americans’ concerns, but they aren’t resonating.
“What you’re seeing is a growing gap between the reality of everyday people and those who, with good intention, want to work on their behalf,” she said.
Butler, the first lesbian of color in the U.S. Senate, cautioned California leaders against leaning too hard into the culture wars.
“I don’t believe Gov. Newsom was elected to be the governor of the resistance,” Butler said. “I don’t believe Senator-elect [Adam] Schiff was elected to be the senator-elect of the resistance. I hope that the lesson from any of this is a reminder for all of us that we are public servants, that we are here to serve the people who send us, and the governor of California has to be the governor of all of California.”
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