Jay Kaspian Kang writes for The New Yorker Jan. 16, 2025:
But I do wonder whether Californians, especially those in cities with crime rates that spiked during the pandemic, poorly maintained infrastructure, and large homeless populations might be questioning the priorities of the liberals who govern them. In the Bay Area, voters in both Oakland and San Francisco effectively deposed their mayors in last November’s election—Sheng Thao, of Oakland, was recalled in the midst of a bizarre corruption scandal; London Breed, the incumbent mayor of San Francisco, who once seemed primed for a run up the ladder of the Democratic Party, was defeated by Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi’s jeans fortune who has no real political experience. Even in Berkeley, where I live, two long-standing city-council members running for mayor were defeated by an unknown challenger who, as far as I could tell, was a complete unknown to many voters.
It’s difficult to classify or quantify these changes because they will likely not persuade voters in deep-blue districts to leave the Democratic Party. But what seems to be settling in is a general unease about the competence of local and state governance. I live in what Kamala Harris dubbed the East Bay Hills, where the most salient political issue is fire prevention. Most families I know have a go bag packed and can recite their evacuation plan. My house, along with hundreds of others in the neighborhood, was dropped from its fire-insurance policy last year. Most of my neighbors, like many of the people in the Pacific Palisades whose houses burned to the ground, received little to no warning. Nor were there any alternatives to just signing up for the state’s FAIR plan, which, as Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out this week, will come under incredible strain and scrutiny once the claims from Los Angeles start flooding in. It’s reasonable for residents to be skeptical that FAIR will actually pay out, or, at the very least, to expect that the claims process will be so broken, bureaucratic, and ultimately bankrupt that it would almost be easier to skip it.
There is a significant portion of the California electorate who will never vote Republican in a Presidential election, who hold socially progressive cultural beliefs when it comes to racial and gender issues, and who can’t figure out why a place of such wealth and high taxes can’t seem to run anything well on a local level. They carry around their own bag of annoyances about how the state is run. Some grievances, such as homeless encampments in cities, can trigger more strong reactions, while others, such as overzealous equity pushes in public schools, bad roads, high taxes, or property crime, are mostly just accepted as part of the deal if you want to live in the state.
Catastrophic events like the fires in Los Angeles have a way of turning these annoyances into disillusionment. As Trump, Musk, and their army of right-wing online warriors have stepped up the attacks on Bass and Newsom, I’ve been struck by how little resistance they’ve encountered, whether from elected Democrats, media figures, or even liberal posters. There are some obvious reasons why this has happened—Musk owns a social-media company and many of the state’s more politically inclined residents seem to have.
When the fires come for us—and it is a question of when and how much, not if—how many of us will feel the narrative pull to turn all our separate grievances about potholes or schools or petty corruption into one grand story of failing liberal leadership?
