Former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) are arguing that a Kamala Harris presidency is going to turn the country into a giant mirror of California without the nice weather.
Ever since Harris jumped into the presidential race after President Joe Biden dropped out, she has been working to create distance from her 2020 presidential campaign policy ideas and even the current administration she is a part of.
From changing her stance on fracking, Medicare for All, mandates on electric vehicles, and now calling for harsher crackdowns on border crossings, Harris is looking to convince that she is a centrist instead of the Green New Deal liberal she ran as in 2019.
However, Trump isn’t letting Harris off the hook for her previous positions, many of which she has only rejected via proxy rather than in affirmative statements herself. Trump has taken to calling her “Comrade Kamala,” an insinuation that she is a communist.
Trump is trying to tie all of the state’s problems, including unaffordable housing, lax laws against violent crimes and drug crimes, and the subsidizing of illegal immigrants, to Harris’s policies — even if she hasn’t been a part of the state’s governing body for the last 3 1/2 years.
“It’s just unbelievable what’s happened to that state [California],” Trump said recently. “They’ve just let it go to hell, and she’s going to do the same thing to the United States.”
The vice president was born and raised in Oakland, California. Harris served as both San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general, and she was then elected senator in 2016.
In San Francisco, Trump and other Republicans are pointing to the lax, “soft on crime” laws, its status as a “sanctuary city,” and the high number of homeless encampments as just a preview for what will come if Harris is elected president.
However, Harris never served in the state legislature or in higher elected offices in San Francisco, where she had influence in creating the policies in California that Trump blames her for.
For instance, Trump has cast Harris as responsible by Proposition 47, which relaxed criminal sentencing for those guilty of property crime and drug crimes. However, many critics say it is responsible for the uptick in smash-and-grab crime and open-air drug markets in San Francisco, leading dozens of stores to flee the city.
“That was her that did that,” Trump said at an event 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.”
However, at the time the measure was on the ballot in 2014, she was attorney general and refused to take a stance on the measure, which upset liberals.
The homeless encampments scattered throughout California have been a huge point of contention for Trump. Just recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) issued an executive order that cities clear their encampments. Trump is tying the proliferation of homeless encampments in San Francisco to Harris.
Just a couple of months ago, Vance referred to Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who never stepped foot in San Francisco until this presidential cycle, as a “San Francisco style liberal.”
Vance and Trump are quick to blast the state as a bastion of liberal politics and ideas gone awry, though they both have ties to the city.
Vance used to live and work in the city as a venture capitalist upon graduating from Yale Law School. And Trump is familiar with Hollywood, where he has a star on the Walk of Fame.
While Trump and Vance are looking to expose the rest of the country, particularly middle America, to the failings of the Golden State, they are continuing to attend fundraising events in the state.
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However, the GOP’s strategy of honing in on California is no different than when Democrats point to policies in deep-red states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas as a way of appealing to moderate and Democratic voters in the rest of the country.
“What both parties are doing is trying to stoke their supporters’ fear of something different and unfamiliar,” Dan Schnur, a Republican California strategist, told the Washington Post. “And it’s an easy geographic shorthand.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-13 13:22:00
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Author : theamericannews
Publish date : 2024-09-14 02:11:35
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