Trump may be loathed in California, but he continues to reshape its politics
President Trump is wildly unpopular in California, but it’s hard to dispute how much his election, and his first year in office, have reshaped California politics.
It starts a game of political musical chairs. If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, few people would be talking up freshman Sen. Kamala Harris as a Democratic candidate for president in 2020. Senior Sen. Dianne Feinstein likely would be enjoying another cakewalk to re-election. Instead, a prominent fellow Democrat, state Sen. Kevin de León of Los Angeles, is challenging her, saying she hasn’t been tough enough on Trump.
Single-payer health care might not be as high on Sacramento’s agenda if the Affordable Care Act weren’t threatened by Trump and the Republican Congress. Without Trump pushing to build a border wall and flip-flopping on what to do about “Dreamers” — those immigrants brought into the country as children — California might not have felt the need to pass a statewide sanctuary law.
If America hadn’t elected a president who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and had 19 women accuse him of inappropriate sexual behavior, there would not have been a Women’s March nor the cultural support for the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements in Hollywood and Sacramento. And perhaps there wouldn’t be a record number of Democrats, including many women, running for Congress here.
All of this has cemented California’s position as the center of Trump resistance. That extends from elected officials in a state dominated by Democrats to new grassroots groups that have sprung up to counter the president and elect Democrats to the U.S. House. Of the 6,000 chapters of the national resistance group Indivisible, 956 groups are in California, according to the organization.
“California is not only the center of the opposition, it’s the battleground of where Trump wants to do a lot of things — like coastal drilling and marijuana” legalization crackdown, said Robert Smith, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University and author of “Polarization and the Presidency: From FDR to Barack Obama.”
“It reminds me of the division between the Southern states and the federal government over civil rights (a half century ago),” Smith said. “It’s just a different set of issues.”
Here are a few areas where the White House and California will continue to clash in Trump’s second year in office:
Health care: Advocates for single-payer health care say Trump’s attempt to cripple Obamacare by eliminating the individual mandate as part of the recently passed tax bill, combined with continued increases in premiums — will intensify the push for a different kind of health care system in California.
Republicans say eliminating the requirement to buy health insurance allows citizens to decide whether they want to purchase coverage while saving the government money it would have paid in subsidies.
But Republicans don’t have much power in California, where state legislators are looking for ways to fill in the gaps created at the federal level. This week, Democratic lawmakers will hold a bill-pitching session in Sacramento to generate ideas. As state Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-Azusa (Los Angeles County), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, told CALMatters last week, “Everything they are doing at the federal level, we are doing the opposite.”
If Clinton had won, “We would have been talking about tweaking Obamacare instead of getting rid of the individual mandate,” said Terri Bimes, assistant research director at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. “Now, it puts the onus of protecting health care on California.”
That has elevated the debate over single-payer into a prime issue in the governor’s race. Two candidates — Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former superintendent of schools Delaine Eastin — are strong supporters of SB562, a single- payer plan before the Legislature, while others are more skeptical if not outright opposed.
National Nurses United, the powerful union behind the state Senate measure, says Trump’s moves against the Affordable Care Act are accelerating the urgency in California to protect those who might lose their health insurance. Plus, those actions likely will affect local elections.
“We have a very strategic plan to be in every single Assembly district talking with voters about this,” said Bonnie Castillo, associate executive director for the California Nurses Association. “This provides an opportunity for California leaders to do a much better job now that (Trump) has gone so low in whittling away health care. This is a time we need to be aggressive and aim high.”