Over the first five months of the campaign to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom, activists only managed to collect 55,000 signatures. But within just two months of Newsom being photographed dining with lobbyists at the exclusive French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley, activists had a million signatures.
The photos of Newsom — he was dining maskless while the surrounding county was under lockdown orders limiting indoor dining — cemented an already growing perception in the state that Newsom has one set of rules for himself and his rich Hollywood and Silicon Valley friends and another set for hard-working Californians.
Newsom’s COVID hypocrisy alone might be enough to justify his removal. But the wretched condition of California makes it imperative.
The images the entire country has seen of thieves ransacking pharmacies with trash bags and brazen daylight carjackings are not just anecdotal. In 2020 alone, car thefts were up 24% and commercial burglaries were up 26%. Unfortunately, the story with violent crime is even worse, with homicides rising by over 30%.
California has long had a homelessness problem, but it has gotten much worse under Newsom. In his first year as governor, California’s homeless population grew by over 10,000, to more than 161,000 total. Despite making up just 12% of the nation’s population, California has over half the nation’s homeless. Once-beautiful cities such as San Francisco have been overrun with tent encampments full of needles and human feces. These squalid eyesores are also death traps. More than twice as many people died from drug overdoses in San Francisco in 2020 as died of COVID.
Each summer also brings skies filled with smoke and water rationing orders. A record 4 million acres burned in 2020, which could actually be surpassed this year. Summers are also the season for rolling blackouts, even though California energy costs have skyrocketed to the point it now has some of the highest electricity prices in the nation.
California is also home to stark income inequality and the nation’s highest poverty rate. The state does mint plenty of millionaires, but the bulk of California’s recent job growth has been in low pay sectors such as hospitality. Over the past decade, a full 80% of the state’s job growth has come from jobs that pay under the median wage.
Faced with higher energy prices, rising crime, and no middle-class jobs, it is not surprising that there has been an exodus of middle-class families from California. Over 6 million people left California during the 2010s, the vast majority of them earning less than $140,000 per family. There are still some rich people moving in, as well as poor migrants from other countries to serve them, but overall, California lost population for the first time in its history in 2020. People are voting with their feet, and the verdict is that California is a failing state.
Every one of the problems mentioned above has been made worse by the far-left policies emanating from Sacramento. California law makes it exceedingly difficult for prosecutors to prosecute property crimes, and progressive district attorneys in California’s largest cities often refuse to prosecute even violent crimes. Instead of pushing people to get treatment by using the leverage of possible punishment, California officials just give addicts fresh needles and an effective license to shoot up wherever they want.
Meanwhile, although California’s population has almost doubled since 1970, the state hasn’t built a single new reservoir since then, making water shortages inevitable. California’s strict environmental laws have also made it impossible to manage California’s forests with prescribed burns, creating a tinder box seemingly designed to produce historically large wildfires. And of course, every summer, when the obvious and predictable occurs, the state’s leaders blame climate change.
California’s efforts to replace nuclear power and natural gas with solar panels are to blame for the state’s high energy prices and rolling blackouts. Meanwhile, the state’s high taxes and punitive regulations have made it impossible for businesses to create middle-class jobs.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris want to use California’s far-left governance as a model for the rest of the nation. But it should be obvious what sort of epic disaster that would be merely from all those Californians voting with their feet. The Golden State’s middle class has been escaping for a decade now, but if California’s disastrous policies are instituted nationally, no one will have anywhere to flee to.
California voters can do better, and they can still save America by rejecting the failing California model. That starts with the recall of Newsom on Sept. 14.
