‘This is still a city and still a state that is on a reckless progressive course,’ Hoover fellow Bill Whalen told NR.
In the days before Tuesday’s primary elections in California, news outlets across the political spectrum began predicting potentially earth-shaking results.
Voters were poised to oust Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s progressive district attorney. In Los Angeles, former Republican Rick Caruso was expected to make a strong showing for mayor.
At CNN, analyst Ronald Brownstein wrote that “an earthquake is building” in California. On Fox, Kayleigh McEnany said California was “on the precipice of the biggest political earthquake since what we saw in Virginia.” On Tuesday, Politico’s Playbook continued with the theme: “California braces for possible political earthquake.”
In the end, Boudin was easily ousted from office, with about 60 percent support for his removal, and Caruso received the most votes in the mayor’s contest, sending him to a November runoff against Representative Karen Bass, a more stereotypical Democrat.
Boudin’s recall came four months after San Franciscans overwhelmingly voted to recall three left-wing school board members who were accused of prioritizing social justice issues and identity politics over things like reopening schools and managing the district’s budget.
But was it an earthquake? More like a tremor, said Bill Whalen, a distinguished policy fellow at the Hoover Institution in California, and one-time speech writer for former governor Pete Wilson. Conservatives, he said, shouldn’t “get overly excited about what happened.”
“This is still a city and still a state that is on a reckless progressive course. And these small recall elections don’t solve that,” said Whalen, noting that California governor Gavin Newsom easily survived his own recall last year and crushed his opponents in Tuesday’s primary. “If there really was an earthquake going on in San Francisco, the recall effort wouldn’t just be limited to education officials and the district attorney. You would be recalling members of the Board of Supervisors left and right, because they’re the font of idiocy in San Francisco.”
Richie Greenberg, a political independent and San Francisco community activist who helped to lead the Boudin recall, was hesitant to lean too far into the idea that the successful Boudin and school board recalls are evidence of a significant political shift in the notoriously progressive city. Both recalls targeted officials whose incompetence was “egregious” and “very evident,” he said.
“As far as, is this going to, or has this shown that there is a fundamental shift in the politics of San Francisco, I think it’s too premature to say that,” Greenberg said.
Kit Lam, a San Francisco resident who collected thousands of signatures in support of both recalls, said he’s seen some evidence of a political shift in San Francisco toward the center left. But, he said, “San Francisco is always a progressive city.” He, too, said incompetence was the main factor for recalling both Boudin and the three school board members.
“Voters are seeing the government, local government, elected officials, are not delivering results,” Lam said. “Public safety and education, not too much to ask for. It’s like basic stuff.”
Whalen noted that Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer, spent $40 million on advertising and switched his political affiliation to Democrat in order to be viable in L.A.
Boudin, he said, was elected with only a plurality of votes in 2019, and without the backing of that state’s most prominent Democrats, who almost all endorsed his leading tough-on-crime opponent, Suzy Loftus. Boudin’s most prominent backer: Bernie Sanders.
“That,” Whalen said, “is not a leg to stand on in an election.”
Whalen said that San Francisco voters “got mugged by the reality of what happens when you elect people who don’t do the job they’re elected to do. When people serve on the board of education who spend more time engaging in renaming schools than opening schools. This is what comes when you elect somebody as your city’s prosecutor, and he runs on the pledge that he’s not going to prosecute cases. Low and behold, bad things happen.”
After his defeat on Tuesday, Boudin, a former public defender who campaigned on “decarceration,” ending cash bail, and pursuing “restorative justice,” remained defiant. “We have already won because we are part of a national movement that recognizes we can never incarcerate our way out of poverty,” he told his supporters.
Whalen said it appears that Boudin still doesn’t understand why voters rejected him.
“He still believes it’s a Republican conspiracy,” Whalen said. “He still thinks he was elected to engage in a revolution. He doesn’t understand the quality-of-life issues that drove people to the polls here.”
Whalen said it’s unclear of Boudin’s recall will help build momentum for a similar effort to recall George Gascon, the progressive prosecutor in Los Angeles. The recall organizers say they’ve collected about 500,000 signatures so far, but still need another 67,000 in less than a month.
San Francisco mayor London Breed will be tasked with naming Boudin’s replacement. A proposition on Tuesday’s ballot that would have made Breed’s appointed replacement ineligible to run for the office in 2023 failed.
Prominent names that have been floated so far include: Nancy Tung, a long-time tough-on-crime prosecutor who placed third in the race in 2019; Brooke Jenkins, one of the dozens of attorneys who left the District Attorney’s Office after Boudin was elected and a prominent recall advocate; and Catherine Stefani, the city’s former county clerk and a moderate on the Board of Supervisors.
Whoever Breed selects, Greenberg said he expects the new district attorney will bring needed change to the city that has been overrun by quality-of-life crimes, and that has become an epicenter of shoplifting and organized retail theft.
“It will be a slow change,” Greenberg said, “but it is going to make a huge difference.”
For the time being, California will remain “a one-party state that has a ceaseless appetite for just progressive overkill and big government solutions,” Whalen said. Conservatives will have little leverage to stop it, he said.
While Republicans will continue to be a minority in California, Whalen pointed to some other recent developments that show conservative ideas can still win in the state. In November 2020, when Californians overwhelming voted for Joe Biden for president, they also rejected a long-sought Democratic effort to repeal the state’s affirmative action ban. On the same ballot, voters also rejected a measure to hike property taxes on large businesses.
“California voters still have some conservative instincts at the end of the day,” Whalen said. “They saw racial quotas and they saw higher taxes, and they said, ‘No thank you’ to both.”