Kamala Harris’s California Record Will Haunt Her

A recent Politico article breathlessly reported on Kamala Harris’s enhanced standing as the newly anointed “favourite daughter” of the Bay Area political cabal, led by Nancy Pelosi, powerful Silicon Valley oligarchs, and progressive Hollywood moguls. But as this group celebrates its most recent political coup against the hapless and outmatched Joe Biden, few are examining what their policy agenda has imposed on my adopted home state. This could spell trouble for Harris in November.

Rather than being able to show real improvements, Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom and their backers specialise in virtue-signalling, particularly on issues of race, gender and climate. Their regulation-heavy approach has forged a neo-feudal state that now has the highest gaps nationally between the rich and the vast majority of inhabitants, who suffer severe housing shortages and the country’s highest levels of poverty. It’s no wonder, then, that four in 10 Californians are considering an exit.

More revealing, at the elite level, has been the emergence of the tech Right in Silicon Valley. Until this year, liberals such as Harris could rely on California’s uniform backing. But many, including people involved in startups, are beginning to switch sides. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who recently compared California to the declining Roman Empire, has joined Elon Musk and David Sacks in endorsing Trump. In fact, Musk has not only backed Trump but also announced he was pulling both X and SpaceX out of the state.

If this trend continues, California’s political climate could start to change. While that may not happen overnight, the Golden State could lose two or three House seats to the GOP. This should be a warning sign to Harris if she intends on implementing a California plan for the rest of America as president.

Members of the California cabal are only dimly aware of changes taking place outside their bubble. Newsom-backers such as economist Chris Thornberg even claim that the loss of SpaceX — arguably the most important exploration company in the world — is only a matter of a few C-suite jobs and “Elon being Elon”. This repeats earlier claims in the progressive media about the unimportance of 3.8 million net domestic migrants leaving since 2000.

The bigger problem, though, will be when the Harris campaign has to defend her efforts, in both California and the Senate, on open borders, race quotas, banning fracking, wiping out parental rights and the use of fossil fuels. If these policies are increasingly unpopular in California, just imagine how they will be received in Texas, Michigan or Wisconsin, or for that matter in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina.

To win in November, the Vice President will have to somehow place distance between the failures of her backers and her campaign. If not, we could see the second coming of Trump — their greatest nightmare and the ironic legacy of the cabal’s politics.

This piece first appeared at UnHerd.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Kamala Harris during her tenure as Attorney General of California Wikimedia in Public Domain.

A Golden State Realignment?

Elon Musk has just announced that he will move the headquarters of both SpaceX and X from California to Texas, citing Governor Gavin Newsom’s signing of a new law banning parental notification by school districts of children’s gender identification changes. “The governor of California just signed a bill causing massive destruction of parental rights and putting children at risk for permanent damage,” Musk wrote on X. “If you’re a normal family living in California, get out before it’s too late,” wrote one commenter. Many state residents seem to be coming to a similar conclusion.

Californians are concerned for many reasons beyond their governor’s latest concession to the far Left. The state faces a deep budget deficit, tepid job growth, and massive net outmigration. Far from being the egalitarian paradise celebrated by Governor Newsom, it has the nation’s highest unemployment and poverty rates while being home to the most billionaires. It recently ranked last among the 50 states in terms of taxpayers’ return on investment.

Residents have lost confidence. Only 40 percent approve of the activities of state legislators. Some 62 percent told pollsters the state was headed in the wrong direction, up from 37 percent in 2020. Four in ten are considering an exit.

Governor Newsom finds himself increasingly unpopular with state voters. But are Californians ready for radical change? Are they even ready for reform?

So far, what should have been a political firestorm has been more like a series of isolated campfires. True, Republicans have rallied modestly from their 2018 nadir, picking up five House seats in the last two rounds of federal elections. But the GOP’s 12-representative total is a paltry fraction of the available 52. The next governor and future legislatures are likely to remain progressive, as three-fifths of Californians plan to vote for Democrats for Congress, and a hefty majority back President Biden’s reelection. As former GOP State Senate leader Jim Brulte once told me, “things have to get a lot worse before they can get better.”

Right now, “there’s some movement politically but not much,” says Shawn Steel, GOP national committeeman for California and husband of Representative Michelle Steel (R-CA). “People are stuck on an ideology and it’s hard to move them.”

One critical factor in California’s progressive dominance, notes Steel, has been changes in migration patterns. In the past, those who flocked to the Golden State brought diverse political views. This led the state to oscillate between progressive and conservative governance. In recent decades, however, population movement has created ideal conditions for one-party rule. Between 2000 and 2023, per census data, California has lost about 3.8 million residents in net domestic migration—a loss roughly the population of Los Angeles. Many of those leaving, according to an analysis of IRS data that I coauthored, are middle-income people in their childbearing years, a Republican-leaning cohort. And as another study showed, conservatives are three times more likely to consider leaving the state than are liberals. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments the GOP’s Steele.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Biden’s California Successors Would Be Terrible for America

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.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Marshall Toplansky is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. He co-founded KPMG’s data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.

Homepage photo: composite of photos of Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Gavin Newsom’s Futile Bid to Trump-Proof California

Never one to miss an opportunity for posturing, California Governor Gavin Newsom recently announced plans to “Trump-proof” the state if the former president wins later this year. Read more

California Is the Homeland of Progressive Anti-Semitism

One 19th century Gentile described California as “the Jews’ earthly paradise”. It is paradise no longer. Reports of attacks on Jewish businesses, homes and institutions are becoming ever more commonplace, while university campuses – hardly considered to be bastions of hate – have allowed acts of flagrant anti-Semitism to go unpunished.

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California’s Broken Diversity Promise

Few states are more ostentatious in their concern for racial equality and minority uplift than California. The Golden State leads the nation in promoting racial reparations, doggedly supports affirmative-action quotas, and pays students to teach educators about implicit bias. From his first day in office, Governor Gavin Newsom has deemed addressing inequality a “moral imperative” in his fight for “a California for all.”

A new report from Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy, to which we both contributed, suggests the state is falling short of these lofty ideals. We and our coauthors demonstrate how California’s Latinos, who account for nearly 40 percent of the state’s population and over half of its residents under age 18, lag significantly behind their peers in rival states like Texas and Florida in terms of incomes, homeownership, and education. California’s policy agenda, with its dual focus on welfare expansion and climate alarmism, has undermined the economic potential of the state’s Latinos—and undercut the governor’s promises.

The problems start at the aggregate level. California has the nation’s highest unemployment rate and slowest pace of job growth, along with a huge structural budget deficit. California creates middle-income jobs—critical for Latinos seeking to climb the income ladder—at among the lowest rates in the country. Over the past decade, the state has lost 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs, and 85 percent of its new positions have been in the lower-paying service sector.

Here the aspirations of both Latino entrepreneurs and workers could be crushed. The Small Business Regulation Index ranks California’s as the worst business climate for small firms, which disproportionately harms Latinos, whose businesses tend to be smaller and less capitalized. California’s recently mandated $20 minimum hourly wage for fast-food workers, for example, may help some individual Latinos, but it could both reduce total employment and threaten the livelihoods of smaller franchisees, many of whom are minorities.

Latino residents also are particularly vulnerable to California’s war on the carbon economy. Hispanics make up well over 90 percent of the state’s agricultural workers, more than 50 percent of its construction workers, and roughly 30 percent of its oil and gas workers—precisely the kinds of jobs that California’s green agenda disfavors.

For Latinos in California, the impact of that agenda shows up most clearly in the logistics industry. As Chapman University Business School professor Marshall Toplansky notes, Hispanics make up roughly 50 percent of California’s transportation workers, the highest percentage of any state. The Golden State’s green mandates, which encourage shipping companies to pursue rapid electrification, will likely send shippers to other ports. Electric trucks, with their huge batteries, can cost over $400,000 per vehicle; they cannot run long hauls without stopping for lengthy charging periods, undermining the economics of a trucking fleet.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Soledad Ursúa is Principal at Orinoco Equities and is a member of the board of directors of the Venice Neighborhood Council in the Los Angeles area. Her undergraduate degree from University of California Santa Barbara was in Global and International Studies and Spanish. She has a master’s in finance from the New School and worked in the New York venture capital industry.

Homepage photo: Omar Lopez, via Unsplash under CC 1.0 License.

Blue States Should Let ESG Die

Life is going from bad to worse for the ESG movement. This weekend, activist investor Bluebell Capital began a new battle to try and force BlackRock into overhauling its commitments to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, marking another step back for the movement.

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Golden Land

In a way unimaginable in Europe, or even the eastern United States, the Golden State has long been, as one nineteenth century Gentile observer put it, “the Jews’ earthly paradise.” California, settled late and distant from the East Coast, had no entrenched WASP power elite, allowing Jews to achieve economic and political pre-eminence unheard of at that time.

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California Deficit Soars to $73 Billion

Incredibly, the Democratic establishment still looks to Gavin Newsom as their answer to Joe Biden. Yet frothy accounts of the California Governor’s record are about as accurate as a Google AI treatment of American history: totally fraudulent.

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Downtown San Francisco is Beyond Redemption

The recent announcement that Ian Jacobs, a scion of the famous Toronto-based Reichmann real estate clan, was coming to buy upwards of $900 million of San Francisco real estate, has offered the beleaguered California city a rare moment of hope. Some suggest that we could see a repeat of New York’s recovery from its nadir in the 1970s, during which the Reichmanns made a fortune gobbling up depressed buildings shortly before the city’s resurgence.

Yet any effort to restore San Francisco’s appeal will need more than an infusion of vulture capital. The city’s problems are essentially demographic and political, and have transformed San Francisco from an icon to a disaster zone, particularly as workers opt for remote work. The city’s office vacancy rate continues to rise, now surpassing 35%, the highest in its history.

To be sure, San Francisco has been losing its middle class for decades, replaced initially by young single people, many of whom are tied to the tech industry. But as early as 2015, the city began losing net domestic migrants as growth shifted to the further exurbs.

Since the pandemic, the city’s population has dropped and its social problems, long festering, have become a running sore. That’s likely why up to 10% of San Francisco’s residents have left the city — far more than in New York. “A lot of people have had it,” Heather Gonzalez, a longtime Democratic activist and mother of two, told me. “We have had neighbours and an elderly grandfather beat up on a bus and my kids have to watch people poop in public on Market Street. This is what we have to go through.”

Yet there is some hope, Gonzalez suggests. She points to the recent recall of ultra progressives including the District Attorney and three school board members. There’s also been a concerted effort by moderate Democrats to root the radical Left’s hold on the party as well as an effort to replace several far-Left members of the Board of Supervisors.

Amid a severe budget deficit, these efforts are critical. The city’s understaffed police department is almost certain to lose the battle for resources with the city’s dominant and fervently Leftist public employee unions. That the city now suffers the second highest violent crime rate in California illustrates just how important this battle is.

These reform efforts finally have some backing now from the tech oligarchs, who in recent years have been indifferent or even supportive of the progressive agenda. This has roiled the Left-wing activists who see any movement backed by the billionaire class as a hostile takeover.

Yet even if the city somehow regains its ballast, Reichman may be looking at the wrong places to invest. Although the office market may recover, the movement of business out of the state continues in a way far more profound than in New York back in the 1970s.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: Ken Lund, via Flickr under CC 2.5 License.