The unexpected winner of Tuesday's debate
Given his penchant for going after California climate policy — and for characterizing the state more broadly as a lawless hellscape rife with tent encampments and shuttered retail stores — there was a real possibility former President Donald Trump might try to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to his dystopian vision of California in Tuesday night’s debate.
But while Trump name-checked Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, New York, Seattle and Minneapolis, and even went after Germany’s climate policy, claiming Berlin regretted its decision to transition to renewable energy, he didn’t bring up California once.
California’s environmental rules — which Republicans are currently blaming for high gas prices in in-state races, and which Trump and other GOP leaders have tried to go after for everything from blackouts to water cuts to farmers — are flying below the radar at the national level.
There are a couple of reasons why.
One may just be that there’s a lot to cover, and Trump was either unprepared to get into it last night — or was successfully led off the path.
“Harris successfully baited Trump to throw him off of his prepared talking points on the issues most favorable to him,” said Brennon Mendez, an environmental law and policy fellow at UCLA’s School of Law.
There’s also the fact that Trump is going a little softer on electric vehicles, at least rhetorically, now that he has Tesla CEO Elon Musk firmly in his corner as one of his biggest supporters.
But another reason might be that attacking California — and in particular its car emissions rules, which Trump has tried to revoke the state’s authority to implement and has disparaged as a model for President Joe Biden’s national “ban on gasoline cars” (which, for the record, does not exist) — doesn’t land anymore on the national level.
“With EVs, there are more demagogues on the Republican side of the aisle. But, I mean, he’s got Elon Musk as a big sponsor of his campaign now. And you know, it just may not resonate,” said Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.
Trump also steered clear of California’s higher-than-national gas prices, which the oil industry perennially pins on California’s environmental regulations, while Gov. Gavin Newsom points to price-gouging at the pump.
The Western States Petroleum Association has been threatening to make Newsom’s proposal to require oil refineries to maintain backup fuel supplies when they go offline in order to avoid price spikes “part of the national discussion.” And a new line of attack opened up Tuesday with Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a fellow Democrat, joining forces with Republican Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo to warn the proposal could cause “economic instability.”
But it could be harder to link something like California gas prices to Harris, a former state attorney general, than, say, Newsom.
“Her time in California, it was a while ago, and she was never governor,” said Elkind. “She didn’t really set the climate policies in the state. She enforced them. She did sue polluters, but she wasn’t otherwise involved in pushing specific [state] legislation.”
In defending herself against the climate-related blows that Trump did land, Harris didn’t tout her tough-on-oil prosecutor past or sound much like a California Democrat. She nodded to the home insurance crisis and promoted the creation of hundreds of thousands of new clean energy manufacturing jobs under the Inflation Reduction Act.
But she also doubled down on support for fossil fuel extraction, noting she was “the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.” She seemed to almost celebrate having “increased domestic gas production to historic levels.”
That might show just how much an outlier California is when it comes to the national conversation around oil. A state ban on fracking goes into effect next month. And as in-state oil output shrinks, leaders like current Attorney General Rob Bonta and Newsom rail against the oil industry for “fleecing” consumers.
Nationally, it’s a different audience.
“The presidential race is basically over in probably about 44 states,” said Elkind. “I think she is trying to win over those more conservative Pennsylvania voters, people whose jobs depend on the fossil fuel industry.”
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