California’s most glaring issues have little to do with Trump

Rough&Tumble is an aggregator scouring California newspapers, websites and other media to produce a daily digest of political news and analysis that reveals, at a glance, which political issues are currently preoccupying the state’s political class.

Broadcast journalist Jack Kavanagh created the website as an outgrowth of the tip sheet he circulated among his colleagues at KOVR, a Sacramento television station.

Monday’s edition typified recent versions, being utterly dominated by conflicts between California’s Democratic figures, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a federal government controlled by President Donald Trump and Republican majorities in Congress.

The specifics include the administration’s immigration sweeps, the potential effects of a government shutdown due to a congressional stalemate, tariffs and, of course, the California redistricting ballot measure, Proposition 50, on the November 4 ballot. It could, if successful, shift five California congressional seats from Republicans to Democrats, countering a pro-Republican gerrymander in Texas in advance of the 2026 midterm elections.

It is, in a sense, just a more intense version of the long-standing transcontinental rivalry over policy issues between the national government in Washington and a state whose leaders often pretend that it is an independent nation.

However, it has taken on the aura of a holy war, something like the existential conflicts that raged in Europe during the Middle Ages, tinged with Newsom’s increasingly obvious hopes of succeeding Trump in 2028.

While resisting Trumpism may play well for Newsom within California and perhaps in other blue states, it also may be indirectly bolstering Trump’s standing in the nation as a whole, since he often portrays California as an example of failed progressive governance.

Trump Derangement Syndrome, as it’s been dubbed, also tends to displace attention to many issues that predate Trump’s era and will have a more profound effect on California’s future than anything Trump is likely to do.

He had nothing to do with California’s high rates of homelessness, poverty, and unemployment, its very high living costs, its shortage of housing, its long-standing water supply conundrum, the shortcomings of its public school system or the multi-billion dollar deficits in its state budget.

While Newsom inherited most of them upon being elected governor in 2018, in the main, California’s unresolved issues have stagnated or worsened in the nearly seven years since. And they are likely to still be there when he leaves in 2027, possibly to pursue the presidency himself.

One of the most troubling is, or should be, an economy that may not be in recession, at least not officially, but has not fully recovered from the sharp downturn that occurred in 2020, when Newsom ordered a shutdown of many businesses to counter the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state has more than a million unemployed workers, its jobless rate of 5.5% continues to be at or near the highest of any state and its job creation has not kept pace with the growth of its labor force.

A recent report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which advises the Legislature on budgetary and economic issues, describes what has been happening: “For the two-month period July and August, the state’s labor force grew by 17k, the number of employed workers fell by 7k, and the number of unemployed workers increased 24k.”

Nothing in California is more fundamentally important than a healthy economy that expands employment opportunities. Over the last five years, California has had an economy that a previous report from the analyst described as “sluggish.”

It provides Trump with ammunition for claiming that California exemplifies what the nation should not emulate.