Why Harris’ hometown of Oakland kicked out its progressive leaders

Oakland, California, holds a special place in the American progressive pantheon – the birthplace of the Black PanthersHotbed of labor organizing and the tenants’ rights movement, Berkeley’s bigger, edgier neighbor — so what happens in this city has ramifications far beyond the Bay Area.

And what happened here last week was huge. Voters in Oakland remembered their mayor, Sheng Taoand their district attorney, Pamela Price (she represented Alameda County, where Oakland is by far the largest city). Both lost by about 30 percentage points, a staggering margin the city that Vice President Kamala Harris calls home.

Under California law, voters will choose a new mayor and a new district attorney in the upcoming special election (until then, both positions will be held by interim appointees). Everything indicates that they will tack well, just like voters across the country that made Donald Trump the first Republican presidential candidate in twenty years to win the popular vote.

However, Oakland is not in rural Michigan or the suburbs of Philadelphia; these markings should not exist here. And when it comes to the presidential election, Alameda County voted exactly as you’d expect: with Harris receiving 73% of the vote (she underperformed Biden, who achieved 80% in 2020but that’s another story).

Yet the very voters who resolutely rejected Trump also rejected two progressive women of color who would likely have served as bulwarks against Trumpist politics.

What gave? Well, where to start?

With the recent FBI raid on Tao’s house, I guess. She is accused of corruption and could soon make the journey from city hall to federal prison – she wouldn’t be the first American politician to take that path, but people had higher expectations for the first Hmong woman to be elected to a prominent political post in the US

Tao dashed that hope almost immediately. Early in her term, she was has fired Police Chief LeRonne Armstrongreportedly because he wasn’t tough enough on officers accused of misconduct. Hiring a new chief took months, which many said was an inexcusable delay. Then Tao somehow missed the deadline to apply for a $15 million state grant to prevent shoplifting – this at a time when property crime was skyrocketing in Oakland, even as it was beginning to increase in many other major cities.

The recall effort, which began in earnest earlier this year, was led by Brenda Harbin-Forte, a retired black judge, and supported by many other members of Oakland’s robust black community. ‘Look at the holes. Look at homelessness. Look at the jobs. Look at the companies leaving Oakland, and I’m as angry as double ‘HE hockey sticks,'” said the pastor of a Baptist church.

Pamela Price had also made history, as the first Black woman elected as Alameda County’s chief law enforcement officer. She was educated at Yale and Berkeley Law and had headed a local civil rights and employment law firm. And like Tao, she showed that while representation is important, it cannot compensate for competence.

When Price took office in early 2023, concerns about crime were still high, but in a classic misreading of the chamber, she began her term with releasing new, more lenient sentencing guidelinesespecially for juvenile delinquents. To be fair, this had been a campaign promise, but it would have been wiser to address critics’ concerns before heeding supporters’ wishes.

Then came the murder of Jasper Wu, a toddler who was tragically caught in a crossfire between gangs. Oaklanders — especially members of the large Asian American community — were stunned to hear that Price intended to look for “non-carceral forms of responsibility” for the three men accused of the murder. That announcement came in an email “to the Chinese communities” from Price. She seems to have the right level of compassion for a high-ranking post in the Trump administration.

Aware of the growing anger from Asian-American Oaklanders — including small business owners in Chinatown fed up with incessant burglaries — Price decided to hold a ceremony announcing her “Chinese name.” Yes, really. The best that can be said about this event is that it was cancelled.

Oakland is blessed with amazing natural beauty (the bay, the hills), a rich heritage of black culture, top-notch restaurants, an abundance of breweries, and some pretty good pizza for the west coast. But the population has fallen steadily since 2020. And with the departure of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders (to Las Vegas), the NBA’s Golden State Warriors (to San Francisco) and the MLB’s Oakland A’s (also Vegas), the city is without a professional sports team.

You can’t blame Tao and Price for the decisions of greedy franchise owners, but you can blame them for doing nothing to instill confidence in the way Oakland was run. As the recalls gained momentum and one played off the other, they became combative, while a smarter politician would have been conciliatory.

“Until we address the primary predator – white supremacy that creates crime – we will always have secondary predators because their primary needs are not being met,” said Carroll Fife, a local activist who supported the defund the police movement. explained in 2021. Fife’s sentiment was not shared by many of the recall’s supporters, local black elders who had watched their community work its way into the middle class. They had no intention of willfully wasting these profits for the sake of appeasing progressive ideology.

Progressive mayors, lawmakers and prosecutors have suffered similar rebukes — or are facing fatal drops in popular support — in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and other cities. Many of them promised transformative change but became mired in the realities of governing, which have never lent themselves well to ideological rigidity. And cities have suffered.

Americans from what we coastal elites call “flyover country” come to Washington and see an empty downtown, storefronts closed and security guards outside both pharmacies and high-end stores. They see the homeless encampments south of Market Street in San Francisco; they get uncomfortable when someone goes on a rant on a Times Square subway platform. Can you blame them for thinking, “This is what democratic governance looks like?”

Trump did better in the cities this time than in his previous two attempts to win the presidency. He gained ground New York and Washington, where increased support came from the district’s historically black neighborhoods. Alarms should be going off at Democratic Party headquarters. If the Democrats can’t get the cities in order, I have a feeling the Republicans will be happy to do the job for them.