Sen. Kamala Harris has won every election she ever ran in, and her party is winning as well.
In California in 2016, Hillary Clinton beat President Trump by four million votes and a two-to-one ratio. All by itself, that gave her the popular vote in the whole of the country, without which she would have lost by some one million votes.
Since 1992, Democrats have carried California in every presidential election, often by landslides, and in almost all the state offices: The last time California elected a Republican senator was 1982 (Pete Wilson) and it elected its last Republican governor, film star and Kennedy in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 2006.
The two Democratic women who came to the Senate in 1992, “The Year of the Woman,” would stay there for decades, reelected by landslides and setting new records for their vote totals. Barbara Boxer retired in 2016 after 24 years in office, and Dianne Feinstein, who set a record in 2012 for the most votes ever received in a Senate election, was reelected at age 85 in 2018 for a fifth term in office.
In the 24 years that Feinstein and Boxer served in the Senate, the California Republican Party, which once elected two presidents (Nixon and Reagan) by the largest landslides in history, dwindled away to a state of debility so extreme it could barely be said to exist.
This was the setting that Harris first saw when she started running for office. She ran and won as San Francisco district attorney (a non-partisan office) in 2003. Four years later, she won reelection unopposed. She won as attorney general of California three years after that, beating her Republican rival by less than one percentage point. But when she ran for reelection in 2014, she won by 15 points.
Two years later, in 2016, Harris ran for the Senate. Under California’s new jungle primary system, she ran against another Democrat, Loretta Sanchez — like herself, non-white and a woman. So completely had the state GOP faded out of the picture that the leading Republican in the primary failed even to get 8% of the vote.
All in all, it cannot be said that the lack of an opposition to check Harris has served her well.
In the presidential contest thus far, her main response has been to loudly endorse whatever silly thing Beto O’Rourke thinks up, only to back out in confusion when it doesn’t play well.
It might turn out that having actual opposition matters. It sharpens politicians’ abilities.
And having actual ideological opposition probably matters, too. California’s fringe politics don’t seem to be impressing the rest of the country, nor the centrist voters who tend to decide elections.
If only someone had warned Harris.
