SAN FRANCISCO — A third character could play a major role in Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s presidential debate tonight — the state of California.
As he tests lines of attack against his new opponent, Trump has leaned on GOP caricatures of Harris’ deep-blue home state as a lawless dystopia rife with tent encampments and shuttered retail stores — the result of failed Democratic policies. A President Harris would bring that hellscape to the rest of the nation, he argues.
Contentious proposals passed by the Democratic-supermajority statehouse have already created fodder for the Trump campaign, including a bill Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed last week to help undocumented immigrants purchase homes.
Tony Strickland, Orange County chair for the Trump campaign, said he has encouraged the campaign to tie Harris to California's liberal policies and deep-seated affordability problems. He said he expects Trump will continue hammering that theme at the debate.
“Sometimes, people don’t realize how bad it is. San Francisco used to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” said Strickland, a Republican city councilmember in affluent coastal Huntington Beach. “Take it from me, the last thing people want in Middle America is what we have in California.”
But don’t expect Harris to rally to California’s defense. She’s more likely to defend her own record as a prosecutor who locked up rapists and cartel members before turning the tables on Trump, who she said she expects to lie repeatedly on the debate stage.
Harris’ team is focused on touting her record in the White House, where the Biden administration passed the largest infrastructure bill in generations, helped the nation recover from the pandemic and put her at the tip of the spear on defending abortion rights after they were struck down by the Supreme Court. But her campaign is sensitive about the state of the economy, and while she’s stuck close to Biden personally, her larger goal is to present herself as the candidate of the future, and Trump a figure of the past — including telegraphing how she plans to lead the country independent of the current administration.
California Rep. Robert Garcia , a national co-chair of the Harris-Walz campaign and her longtime friend, said the GOP’s effort to tie Harris to progressive California policies, especially those she wasn’t involved in, suggests the Trump camp is still struggling to find its footing.
“They have not been able to do so, moving from one bizarre attack to another,” Garcia said. “Everyone knows the vice president is from California. People are going to focus on her record as vice president.”
Republicans have long used California’s ultra-liberal reputation to negatively frame prominent leaders from the state, such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as out-of-touch elites from the “Left Coast.” Harris’ resume has made that framing more difficult given that career in California was dominated by her work as attorney general, though she did tack left when she was in the Senate and ran for president in 2019.
Brian Brokaw, a Sacramento-based former Harris adviser, said while Trump allies want to blame the vice president for policies that emerged years after she left office in California, he doubts that “phony” attack resonates beyond the Republican base already in Trump’s corner.
“She’s not running for president of California, she’s running for president of these United States,” Brokaw said. “The comrade Kamala B.S. just doesn’t have anything behind it.”
Here are a few of the areas where Trump is likely to attack.
Theft and justice reform: Prop 47’s ghost
Trump and Republicans in California have consistently sought to cast Harris as soft on crime by anchoring her to the bitter fight over Proposition 47, a decade-old ballot measure that relaxed tough sentencing laws from the 1990s.
Critics say the measure has caused a surge in smash-and-grab thefts and fueled the state’s fentanyl epidemic because offenders don’t fear they will be arrested or face prison time.
Harris had no role in crafting or promoting the measure. She didn’t take a stance on Prop 47 when it was on the ballot during her tenure as attorney general in 2014, which infuriated progressives. She argued she needed to be neutral because her office wrote the ballot summary for it.
That hasn’t stopped Trump from blaming her for the initiative’s perceived consequences: “That was her that did that,” he said last month at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “I didn’t know this, but you’re allowed to rob a store as long as it’s not more than $950.”
Harris hasn’t taken a stance on a contentious November ballot initiative to roll back parts of Prop 47 that has won the support of some prominent Democratic mayors as well as Republicans.
Immigration: Sanctuary city DA
The GOP has framed Harris as ultra-liberal on immigration, citing her time as district attorney in the sanctuary city of San Francisco, as well as state lawmakers’ more recent pro-immigrant policies.
Trump last week called for banning undocumented immigrants from receiving home loans — a position he took days after legislators in Sacramento approved a proposal to help undocumented immigrants purchase homes. Newsom vetoed the measure on Friday, blunting the issue ahead of the debate.
Still, Republicans have pointed to Harris’ defense of city sanctuary policies limiting police cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The GOP has also pointed to her more liberal stance on immigration during her last presidential campaign, when she agreed during a debate that migrants crossing the U.S. border should not be subject to criminal penalties.
“They’re trying to turn her into a new person that she’s not,” said Strickland, the Orange Country Trump campaign chair.
Harris’ allies have stressed that her support for tougher border enforcement isn’t new. As attorney general, she embraced a crackdown on transnational gangs and expanded a task force designed to share intelligence on cross-border criminals.
“She’s not ideological, and I think that’s actually one of her greatest strengths,” Brokaw, her former adviser, added.
Homelessness: San Francisco liability
Homelessness is perhaps one of Trump’s favorite anti-California targets. He has repeatedly described the demise of the state, and has called San Francisco “slum like.”
Trump argued this summer that Newsom’s executive order directing cities to clear more encampments was a ploy to help Harris win the election. (Newsom’s order actually came after a Supreme Court ruling allowed cities to enforce encampment bans, and cities including San Francisco have since taken a harder line.)
“She destroyed California,” Trump said at a press conference in August. “San Francisco was a great city 15 years ago. Now, it’s almost considered unlivable.”
Democrats were quick to turn the attack line against Trump, noting that Harris and Newsom were the city’s district attorney and mayor 15 years ago.
A debate on homelessness could give Harris an opening to tout one of her proposals to make housing more affordable: speeding up construction.
Harris has embraced policies promoted by the Yes in My Back Yard (or YIMBY) movement, which started in San Francisco and blames local regulations and resistance to development for the state’s housing affordability crisis.
She has vowed to spur the construction of 3 million new homes by helping to ease such local planning restrictions. “In many places, it's too difficult to build, and it's driving prices up,” she said at a recent rally in North Carolina.
Christopher Cadelago contributed to this report.
Local News
