Could a Californian Be the Next President?
The state and its politicians are on the rise—if they can only convince the rest of the country to come along.
By DAVID SIDERS March 10, 2018
SAN DIEGO—The California Democratic Party’s most recent, weekend-long binge on self-satisfaction unfolded here late last month under the slogan “California: The Big Blue Beacon of Hope,” with a party chairman who promised that “folks across the country are looking to California to show the nation how it can be done.” Hoarse and hypercaffeinated, several thousand activists and party officials were packed inside a cavernous convention center overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and they roared when the leader of the state Senate, Kevin de León, told them, “It’s time to move our nation’s capital to California.” They cheered again when Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom suggested that the cosmos already had. “For the world’s sake,” Newsom said, “the sun now rises in the West. We are America’s coming attraction.”
On issues from immigration to taxes, climate change to gun control, California has established itself as a pole of the Democratic resistance to President Donald Trump—most recently with the Justice Department’s lawsuit against California over its protections for undocumented immigrants. But the rhetoric from the state party’s annual convention reflected something more: As the midterm elections and the run-up to the 2020 presidential contest draw closer, California Democrats are beginning to test the national salability of a state—and its brand of Left Coast, Best Coast politics—long viewed in many parts of the country as off the wall. (“We’re always seen as fruits and nuts,” is how former Governor Gray Davis put it to me.)
Of course, Californians aren’t new to the national stage. The state sent Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon to the White House; Governor Pete Wilson briefly competed for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996; and Jerry Brown, the current governor, ran for president himself three times. But that was more than 25 years ago. Now, for the first time in a generation, the increasingly liberal state is likely to put forward at least one, and possibly more, credible Democratic presidential candidates in 2020. The state’s decision to hold an earlier primary election that year is also expected to shift the presidential nominating process more heavily to the West. And so, a raft of California Democrats have been making regular pilgrimages to other early primary states to tout the work they’re doing.
The reception has not always been kind. Democrats across the country may point to California as a model on greenhouse gas emission standards, gun control and protections for low-wage workers and undocumented immigrants. But that doesn’t mean the average American is particularly fond of California. A 2012 poll by Public Policy Polling found that Americans viewed California more negatively than any other state, with particular loathing from Republicans. Last week, California was dragged through the mud again when U.S. News & World Report ranked California dead last in quality of life and a subpar 32nd overall in its report on the nation’s “best states.” And it doesn’t help that, in the age of Trump, America’s coasts have taken a beating from the president and his supporters for being out of touch.
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/10/could-a-californian-be-the-next-president-217241
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