More worrisome still, even the tech industry is losing jobs in California. Data shows that the state has seen its share of the nation’s advanced-industry jobs stagnate while lower-tax states benefit from the exodus. Particularly devastating is the recent loss of SpaceX to Texas, meaning California — the home of Silicon Valley and Big Tech — will play a diminished role in the future of space exploration.

Despite Kamala Harris’s attempt to be the tribune of “people of colour” or a representative of the working class, her climate zealotry has disproportionately impacted ethnic-minority workers. Latino workers are overrepresented in these industries nationwide but in California they account for more than half of all transport sector workers, as well as manufacturing and construction workers. At the huge Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, regulations seeking to terminate gas-powered trucks endanger the jobs of the primarily Latino workers as the port faces strong competition from places such as Houston in Texas, Tampa in Florida and Norfolk in Virginia, which impose no such regulations.

Green policies implemented by the VP have pushed California’s energy prices well above the national average, spreading “energy poverty” to many communities, particularly in the less affluent interior. With the recent departure of oil giant Chevron, California — once a rival to Texas as an oil capital — now has no major energy firms located there. Essentially, the economy of places like inland Bakersfield have been sacrificed to fulfil the climate agenda of Harris’s base in the progressive coastal locales.

California did not see an industrial boom under Harris, but instead a worrying bust. Many hardware-oriented companies — Occidental Petroleum, Jacobs Engineering, Parsons, Bechtel, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and McKesson —  have simply packed up and left for other states. In 2020, California had only one-seventh as many company-initiated capital projects as the leading state, Texas.

It is likely that Harris’s future economy — should she win in November — will follow the Biden route, favouring government employment as the key growth sector. “Kamalafornia” is simply ahead in this new game of gnomes. Since 2022, all the jobs created in the state were in government or supported by the public sector while private employment actually dropped. Now, with the state suffering deep budget shortfalls, even state employment is beginning to drop.

It seems hardly a stretch to insist that Harris, a product of the Bay Area political machine, will repeat as president what has happened in California. Since 2008 the state has created five times as many low-wage jobs as high-wage jobs, which is just one reason for the current drive to force higher wages for fast-food workers. Harris is trying to sell a future of “joy” in an “opportunity economy”. If she has convinced voters in Middle America that they want to be like California, the VP and her political team will have pulled off one hell of a feat.

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Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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