July 2, 2024 - 4:00pm

Two Californians, Governor Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris, are widely seen as the most likely successors to doddering President Joe Biden. But, as things stand, one has to wonder if the rest of America really yearns to become a greater California.

Embracing “the California model” may have worked when Ronald Reagan rode on his white horse, or even when Jerry Brown projected a future shaped by technology and space exploration. But with the current crop of leaders in charge, the model is a sure loser.

The facts are grim. Newsom and Harris may like to claim California’s preeminence as the hotbed of new ideas, racial justice, and economic progress, but that has little to do with reality. California suffers from the highest poverty rates in the US, tepid job growth and some of the country’s highest rates of unemployment. Once the supreme beacon for talented people from around the country and the world, it is coming to terms with its new problem of massive net emigration, an exodus that has increased sharply since 2019 — the year Newsom became governor — and was made worse by the pandemic. The state has, however, attracted one group: it now has 30% of the nation’s homeless population.

When it comes to education, California was once an admired leader. The state primary school system is now ranked consistently among the worst in the country. Despite being the “home” of social justice, the results are particularly poor for minority students. For example, Californian Hispanics, who make up roughly 40% of the overall population, do far worse when it comes to educational attainment than their Latino counterparts in Right-leaning states such as Texas and Florida. This has a huge impact on potential earnings in later life.

California is also a great example of how not to rebuild America’s shoddy infrastructure. The rebuilding of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has seen costs rise from an estimated $250 million in 1995 to $6.5 billion in September 2013. Or take the California high-speed rail line, which Newsom has refused to abandon despite costs that have escalated from $33 billion in 2008 to as much as $100 billion today.

How about climate policy, which has dominated the agenda under Newsom? It’s had negligible impact on warming but has done a fair job of undermining the prospects of the state’s largely Latino working class. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro area ranks in the US top 10 in terms of well-paying, blue-collar jobs. But four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego — sit among the bottom 10.

These are the facts that naturally haunt either of these candidates. Newsom and Harris may be able to fool the star-struck reporters of the mainstream media into waxing about the state’s current status, but Californians know better. In one recent opinion survey, some 57% said the state was headed in the wrong direction, up from 37% in 2020. Four in 10 are considering an exit.

To make things worse, the two California claimants come from San Francisco, a once magnificent city that is now the poster child for urban dysfunction. Newsom was mayor and Harris the district attorney. Here, Newsom promised to wipe out homelessness, which has become worse, and Harris promised to take on crime, another striking failure. The state now suffers its highest crime rate in a decade.

Lack of achievement and incompetence is one thing. But these two figures have awful political personas to boot. A candidate of the gentry, Newsom is already increasingly unpopular in California, and it’s hard to believe he would be a good sell almost anywhere east of the Sierra. Harris is simply an awful politician, with little in her favour other than her mixed-minority racial origin. Neither candidate polls better, and they even sometimes poll worse than the great dodderer.

Harris and Newsom both have the advantage of not being senile. But their California pedigree is certainly no asset. If you want to look to the future, it’s hard to see why you would choose people who have taken arguably the most blessed corner of North America and turned it into a national disgrace.


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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