Not everyone is fooled, however — and thankfully so. Let’s not forget that Harris squandered $1.3 billion on her failed presidential bid and is still in debt, continuing a longstanding tradition of poor management that includes the disaster of her failed 2020 campaign. “I think this disqualifies her forever,” mega-donor John Morgan complained this week.

The Guardian might believe that Harris could easily win the governorship, or simply build her national presence for a return engagement. Yet even in California she is not widely popular. She underperformed Biden in 2020 by two million votes, and this year lost the heavily Latino Inland Empire to Trump, marking a significant drop-off.

Should she run in her home state, Harris’s candidacy will be seen widely as a consolidation of Gavin Newsom’s agenda. She owes her career to the Bay Area ruling clique and, as California’s attorney general, backed policies on environment and housing which proved disastrous for most middle- and working-class people. This was confirmed in a study by the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s climate agenda. Her policies hurt those earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

Inevitably, Harris will copy the current Governor in turning the state into a centre of resistance to Trump’s policies. On energy, she will continue what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls the new era of “Green Jim Crow”, which raises prices of goods and shrinks blue-collar pay. Such policies have turned the Golden State into one of the country’s most unequal: California has the largest population of billionaires, but also 30% of the country’s homeless, the highest percentage living in poverty, and the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle-income earners. If this were to become an election issue, as it should be, Harris would be vulnerable.

Of course, she may not have an easy time being nominated. Several candidates, notably Attorney General Rob Bonta, will run on an anti-Trump manifesto. Then there are potential Asian, Hispanic and black entries to challenge the identity vote, while Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis has oodles of dollars from her land developer father.

Yet if Harris can clinch the nomination, she will most likely win the election. Californians continue to elect Democrats, even while recalling Left-wing prosecutors and overturning the judicial reforms which Harris embraced as attorney general. The lack of a functioning Republican Party also works in her favour.

With Harris at the top of the ticket, the supremacy of climate catastrophism and identity politics over the party’s former emphasis on working- and middle-class economics will continue. A Harris governorship would make Californians pay through the nose, just so the Democrats can thumb theirs at Trump.

---

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.

joelkotkin

---