The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 2
This week:
- Gavin Newsom’s 2028 hopes going up in smoke?
- Voters already in rebellion, and now this
- First polls hint at a close Virginia governor’s race
President 2028
As Donald Trump’s second Inauguration Day approaches, life for Democrats keeps getting more difficult. This is because, in deep Blue California, an already-skeptical voting population has suddenly been confronted with a full-blown crisis of confidence in the progressive Democratic model of governance.
Things were already bad before Christmas. In November, Golden State voters gave Kamala Harris, their own hometown presidential candidate, a mere 20-point victory over Donald Trump— a nine-point swing in his favor from 2020, allowing him to carry many counties he had lost in the previous election.
Criminal Justice: More importantly, the voters resoundingly rejected the criminal justice reform legacy of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), passing Proposition 36. They did so by a margin significantly larger than Harris’s margin of victory. This referendum restored felony charges for several crimes that had gotten out of control thanks to Newsom’s reforms, mostly contained within Proposition 47 a decade earlier. The changes had caused so much trouble that, even in some of the most left-wing counties in the state, more than 60 percent voted to reject them.
Also in November, two of the most Democratic jurisdictions in California voted overwhelmingly to oust two of the most important progressive (some would go so far as to say “pro-criminal”) district attorneys that had been supported by billionaire George Soros — Pamela Price was recalled and George Gascon defeated, in both cases by very large margins.
Having already been subjected to growing homelessness and crime problems, repressive and arbitrary COVID restrictions, and the attempted destruction of the state’s gig economy, a stunning number of residents have left the state for freer destinations — Idaho, Nevada, Texas, Florida.
Now, the citizens of Los Angeles are starting to see just how much more damage an ideologically focused uniparty that rarely takes practical matters into consideration can do, even to a beautiful state like California.
L.A. County Fires: If the voter rebellion in California was already bad, it is probably about to get worse.
Sadly, to begin the new year, some of the most exclusive zip codes in Los Angeles County were suddenly subjected to a completely avoidable but devastating urban conflagration. At least some of the fires are already believed to be the result of arson. And the lack of local government preparations only serves to highlight those who made private preparations and were able to save their property.
The fires have unfortunately caused nearly a dozen reported deaths as of this writing, and property damage will likely run into the hundreds of billions.
As always, our focus here is only on the political ramifications, but the human tragedy cannot just be ignored, as it will shape how the local and national public views Newsom and other California politicians, to say nothing of the state’s governance model, which Democrats have ostentatiously touted as a national model.
Newsom, until last week considered a leading candidate for the 2028 Democratic nomination, is in the middle of a governance crisis that many voters on a national basis will view as disqualifying.
Although the death toll is obviously much lower, it is no exaggeration to say that some large and formerly gorgeous neighborhoods in Los Angeles County now look a lot like Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. It would be difficult to point to any incident quite this physically destructive in the U.S. since 9/11, with probably more than $100 billion in damages for the loss of more than 10,000 structures.
Historically, climate change has been California Democrats’ trump card for avoiding accountability for fire-related damage, including blackouts. But of all the wildfires that have struck the state in recent years, there has never been one affecting such dense populations in such developed and wealthy areas.
Even granting, arguendo, that climate change is somehow involved in making these fires worse than they would be otherwise, this only makes things worse for California Democrats. If they really believe in global warming, as they have been preaching for so long, then they knew in advance that events like this were becoming more likely. Therefore, as the people in charge of their one-party state, they had a legal and moral obligation to prepare for such eventualities — which they most certainly did not do. So is it that they don’t really believe, or that they lack the competence to prepare?
It makes things substantially worse that Newsom, in a local news interview, was caught making false claims about how all the local reservoirs had been filled with water when the fires occurred. In fact, a key reservoir serving the Pacific Palisades neighborhood had been empty for nearly a year for maintenance that was apparently never even started. When Newsom’s interviewer unexpectedly knew this and pointed it out, Newsom suddenly shifted to an argument in the alternative, inconsistent with the one he had just made, and promised an investigation of local officials for their role in this disaster. This was, essentially, an admission that he had not been truthful with his original answer.
A second admission came in Newsom’s quick decision to issue orders overriding the normal permiting processes for those seeking to rebuild in the affected communities. The normal permitting process in California is so badly broken that many of the homeowners could face years of legal battles just trying to rebuild, and untold millions of expenses to rebuild in compliance with new ideological environmental regulations. This would not go unnoticed, if only because we are talking about very well-to-do people, like Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins, John Goodman, James Woods, and Paris Hilton.
To his credit, Newsom has usually been on the right side of development and homebuilding battles in California against leftist NIMBY-ism. However, it is telling that only now, when the state’s super-rich and famous are the victims, has he finally decided that state and local building restrictions afflicting all Californians at all times can at last be bent to accommodate the victims.
Indeed, this is reminiscent of Newsom’s abrupt clean-up of San Francisco’s homeless problem just ahead of the arrival of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. As with that incident, this is proof that many of California’s problems have always been solvable — it’s just that Democrats’ policy agenda was never designed to solve any of them.
Third, it is important to note that, thanks to the state’s leftist price-controls on insurers, many of those who lost property in the fires had recently lost their private home insurance policies and gone on a much more expensive state program. This is because insurers, unable to raise rates to account for the very real risk of fire, have been withdrawing from the state and ending insurance contracts with homeowners after years or even decades. Many customers were and many more will be forced onto the much more expensive public insurance program.
It is obviously of secondary concern, but how many more will now leave California, reducing its population, its number of House seats, and its political influence next decade?
Governor 2025
Virginia: Early polling shows that this year’s governor’s race will be a close one. Likely Democratic nominee and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger narrowly leads in surveys by Emerson College (42 to 41 percent) and Mason-Dixon (47 to 43 percent) over Lt. Gov. Winsom Earle-Sears (R). Earle-Sears, however, narrowly leads U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott (D) 46 to 44 percent. Scott, a long-entrenched House incumbent representing the Norfolk area, has also expressed interest in running.
