California, long a conservative foil, is a likely Trump target with Kamala Harris as rival

Painting San Francisco and California as a dystopian nightmare of homelessness and crime and using Kate Steinle’s killing as a rallying cry to “build that wall,” helped propel Trump to the presidency in 2016. But will it work now, against Harris?

Two weeks after Donald Trump announced his first run for the presidency in 2015, a summer tragedy on a San Francisco pier provided an opportunity for him to bash California’s liberal policies: a pretty blonde woman named Kate Steinle was shot and killed by an undocumented immigrant.

Ever since, the GOP has assailed the Golden State and its Democratic leaders over sanctuary cities, immigration and border control, crime, drugs and homelessness. Now, nine years later, the attacks on California will surely grow in the final months of the presidential campaign as Trump and his allies tie his newly emerged rival, Vice President Kamala Harris,  who served as San Francisco district attorney and state Attorney General, to all that they perceive to be wrong here.

“There will clearly be an attempt to paint her with the broad brush of every ill, real and perceived, of California,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego.

Indeed, California’s own state Republican Party chairwoman, Jessica Millan Patterson, lobbed one of the first volleys Sunday, sending out a statement within hours of President Biden’s withdrawal from the race. Harris, she said, has “failed the Golden State,” blaming her for Proposition 47, the 2014 initiative that lowered penalties for drug and property crimes and is blamed for scores of nationally-publicized smash-and-grabs.

Harris, attorney general at the time, never took a stand on the issue.

“As California’s top cop, she allowed criminals to thrive, including refusing to stop Prop. 47 that still wreaks havoc on our state today,” Millan Patterson wrote.

Painting San Francisco and California as a dystopian nightmare of homelessness and crime and using Steinle’s killing as a rallying cry to “build that wall” helped propel Trump to the presidency in 2016. But will it work now, against Harris?

“Attacking California is very popular with their base, but is not necessarily very popular with the voters they need to reach,” said Bob Shrum, USC’s director of the Center for the Political Future. “That’s a big mistake on their part.”

In many ways, however, Harris may be the second-best candidate Trump could ask for. Trump held a clear lead in the polls in critical swing states before Biden dropped out on Sunday and he can hold Harris responsible for the high inflation, foreign policy missteps and border crisis that dogged the Biden-Harris administration. For Midwest voters who will decide the race, a moderate swing state governor over a “California liberal” may have been more appealing. (Harris might pick one as her running mate.)

Nonetheless, since her campaign for president started Sunday, Harris has unabashedly leaned into her California bona fides to take on Trump, who was convicted in June of 34 felonies for his efforts to cover up his relationship with a porn star.

The vice president, who started her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, premiered her “prosecutor vs. felon” campaign tactic in her first campaign rally Tuesday.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said at the rally in the battleground state of Wisconsin. “So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type. In this campaign, I promise you, I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week.”

That record as attorney general, she said, includes obtaining a $1.1 billion judgment against defunct Corinthian Colleges for defrauding students. Trump, whose Trump University real estate seminar later would settle fraud claims, even donated to Harris’ campaign.

Harris also pointed out that she prosecuted numerous sexual abuse cases during her San Francisco days — and Trump was found liable by a jury last year of sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996 and awarded her a $5 million judgment.

When the attacks come about San Francisco’s crime — as they did relentlessly about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the pandemic years — Harris can promote her watch in the mid-2000s when property and violent crime across the state were dropping precipitously from the peak in the 1980s and ’90s, federal crime data shows. When crime spiked during the pandemic — with images of smash-and-grabs in San Francisco’s Union Square and the East Bay going viral — Harris was serving in the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C.

Although she was criticized by California liberals as being too tough on crime during her years in the Golden State — she oversaw more than 1,900 marijuana convictions in San Francisco — political analysts say it can work to her advantage now as she appeals to moderate swing voters. As attorney general, she appealed a federal ruling that called California’s death penalty unconstitutional.

At the same time, Trump might have a more difficult time saddling Harris with some of California’s other problems, including homelessness, housing prices and high taxes that have driven an exodus of residents and businesses out of California in recent years.

“Yes, she grew up in California. She was a senator from here. She was attorney general from here, but she’s been in Washington for the last three-plus years, so she doesn’t have to be labeled as just a Californian,” said St. Mary’s political science professor Stephen Woolpert. “She’s not like a governor where you identify her with the state.”

Harris’s campaign is so fresh, however, that the Trump camp is still scrambling to change its target and hone its message. On Monday, Trump called Harris “dumb as a rock,” ratcheting up insults he debuted during his failed campaign for reelection in 2020, when he called her “nasty” and “a monster.”

In the past few days, the internet has been filled with sexist and racist attacks against the 59-year-old candidate who grew up the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met during civil rights protests in Berkeley. Her former relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was 30 years older and had been separated from his wife for a decade, has also been prime fodder.

If that keeps up, “it’s not going to draw in women in force, that’s for certain,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Politics and Women at Rutgers University.

Blaming Harris for the border crisis may be a better tactic. According to a February Pew Research Center poll, 80% of respondents blamed the government for doing a bad job handling the influx of migrants. Because Biden appointed Harris to work with Latin American countries that are key sources of migration, the Trump campaign attacked her this week for a “willful demolition of American borders and laws” that led to millions of immigrants crossing the border and the killings of “countless Americans.”

Harris has an opportunity to attract swing voters, however, as a staunch advocate for abortion rights, which the Pew Research Center also found is favored by 63% of Americans. California’s reputation as an “abortion sanctuary” — ready to aid women who can no longer obtain abortions in their own states after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — can help. Trump has said he wants the abortion issue decided by individual states, some of which are banning the procedure within weeks of conception.

How effective Trump’s attacks will be on Harris — or California — remains to be seen.

“The real question,” said Eric Schickler of UC Berkeley’s  Institute of Government Studies, “is how will that segment of swing voters see it in the end?”