A moderate earthquake off the California Coast last Thursday matched political shaking being felt up and down the “left coast” from British Columbia to the Mexican border.
The far left is losing support. There is no sharp right turn — Democrats dominate the urban vote — but rather a center-left trend. Voters are reacting to street crime, open-air drug markets, homelessness, and woke political correctness.
San Francisco’s mayor-elect Daniel Lurie, who ousted incumbent London Breed last month, best described a new set of priorities. A Levi Strauss heir and philanthropist, Lurie ran on the promise of “a safer and more affordable city.”
As to his own job, said Lurie, it will be to “show how government must deliver on its promises, clean and safe streets for all, tackling our drug and behavioral health crises, and shaping up the corrupt and ineffective bureaucracy.”
Los Angeles voters were, meanwhile, unseating a controversial incumbent. George Gascon was elected LA District Attorney in 2020, riding a reform agenda in wake of the George Floyd murder. On day one of his tenure, Gascon ended cash bail for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. He directed that juveniles no longer be tried as adults, no matter how heinous the crime.
He was ousted by Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor. Hochman had previously run for California Attorney General as a Republican but appeared on the ballot as an independent.
Hochman pledged to take “a hard middle approach” to his prosecutor duties. The voters, he said, are “looking to live in a county where safety is prioritized, laws are followed, those who break them are held accountable, and the process to get there is fair, impartial, ethical, and effective.”
The Trump Administration should not expect support for its roundups and deportations. The political spectrum in major West Coast cities runs from center-left to far-left. When mainline Democrats sought to oust radicals in the home city of the University of California, they defined the choice as “Berkeley vs. Berserkeley.”
Chinese American and Chinese Canadian voters have played a central role in reaction against left excess. Vancouver, B.C., elected its first Chinese-Canadian mayor two years ago. Businessman Ken Sim (creator of Rosemary Rocksalt Bagels), running on a public safety platform, defeated incumbent Mayor Kennedy Stewart. Stewart had supported legalizing possession of small amounts of hard drugs at a time when fentanyl has taken thousands of lives.
Three members of the San Francisco School Board were recalled by voters in 2022. They had angered the Chinese American community. The board had instituted a lottery admission system at prestigious Lowell High School rather than using grades and test scores.
The school directors also incurred voter wrath by a politically motivated renaming of 44 schools. Schools named for Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Muir, and Paul Revere were renamed. In reaction, the San Francisco Chronicle editorialized that school directors “largely quit the education business and rebranded themselves as amateur historians.” The school board recall gave impetus to a successful recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Bowdin.
Seattle will be a key testing ground of the trend. In 2025. Bruce Harrell thrashed far-left Lorena Gonzalez in his 2021 election, which also saw a Republican convert, Ann Davison, elected city attorney over an opponent known for profane police-baiting tweets. Local Democrats were divided. Ex-governors Locke and Gregoire backed Davison, while King County Democrats embraced her foe.
President-elect Trump took just 13 percent of the city’s vote. But the 2021 and 2023 elections saw reaction against left excess and put priority on public safety. Gone is police-baiting Trotskyite Kshama Sawant. Going is Tammy Morales, who announced her exit by talking of the “toxic work environment” of the recast council. Expect a challenge from the left. The Stranger has already done a boosterish piece on a Davison challenger. Publicola is pouting at colleagues’ treatment of Tammy.
Harrell, Davison, and council president Sara Nelson will face voters next year. We will see if the center holds.
We can only hope that the moderates will prevail in Seattle in 2025. That said, Sara Nelson has been so thin-skinned and brittle that even those of us who may support her legislative priorities are aghast at how undemocratically she has run the City Council. She has allowed individual Council members to put up legislation that has not built a following and then left them hanging out to dry when there is push-back. Going back to the period between the November 2023 election that swept in 5 new members, she had 6 weeks to train those new members. As Post Alley columnist and former Seattle Councilmember Jean Gooden pointed out, Jan Drago had done a fantastic job preparing a group new councilmembers 2 decades prior. Tanya Woo bore the brunt of the Left’s anger at both her appointment (though she lost by fewer than 400 votes) and, especially, Nelson and the Council’s poor performance.
The Far-Left media will continue to do what they always do, boost Far-Left, candidates who lack a connection to the City (see also Alexis Mercedes Rinck, with only 2 years’ work experience) and use often racist, demeaning and borderline slanderous accusations against mainstream candidates.
Worse, the Democratic Party’s legislative districts, which were largely taken over by Bernie Sanders’ and Kshama Sawant supporters will continue to endorse the Far-Left (the 43rd LD Democrats for example, changed their Bylaws to allow endorsement of non-Democrats), even over actual Democrats who have contributed many thousands of dollars to the Party. The LD and County Democratic Party has slid into irrelevancy. We can hope that voters will ignore both, as they did in 2021 and 2023.