Given his willingness to go after California’s climate policies — and to characterize the state more broadly as a lawless hellscape of tent camps and shuttered retail stores — there was a real possibility that former President Donald Trump would try to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to the dystopia. vision of California in Tuesday night’s debate.
But while Trump name-checked Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, New York, Seattle and Minneapolis, and even followed up on Germany’s climate policy, claiming Berlin regretted its decision to switch to renewable energy, he didn’t bring up California once.
California’s environmental rules — which Republicans currently blame for high gas prices in state races and which Trump and other GOP leaders have tried to push back on everything from power outages to water cuts to farmers — fly below the radar nationally. .
There are a couple of reasons for that.
It could just be that there’s a lot to cover, and Trump was either preparing to intervene last night — or was successfully led out of the way.
“Harris successfully cajoled Trump into throwing him out of his prepared conversations on the issues most favorable to him,” said Brennon Mendez, an environmental law and policy scholar at the UCLA School of Law.
There’s also the fact that Trump is 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 may be that attacking California — and particularly its auto emissions regulations, which Trump has tried to overturn the state’s authority to enforce and has scorned as a model for President Joe Biden’s national “gasoline car ban” (which, on record, doesn’t exist) — isn’t landing anymore to the national level.
“With electric cars, there are more demagogues on the Republican side of the aisle. But I mean, Elon Musk is now a big sponsor of his campaign. And you know, it just might not resonate,” said Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at the Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment.
Trump also avoided California’s higher-than-national gas prices, which the oil industry consistently points to California’s environmental regulations, while Gov. Gavin Newsom points to a pump price increase.
The Western States Petroleum Association has threatened to make Newsom’s proposal to require oil refineries to maintain backup fuel supplies when they go offline to avoid price spikes “part of the national conversation.” And a new line of attack opened Tuesday when Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a fellow Democrat, joined forces with Republican Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo to warn the proposal could cause “economic instability.”
But it might be harder to connect the price of California gas to Harris, the former state attorney general, than to, say, Newsom.
“His time in California was a little while ago, and he was never governor,” Elkind said. “He didn’t really set the state’s climate policy. He forced them into power. He sued the polluters, but otherwise he wasn’t involved in driving certain ones [state] legislation.”
In defending Trump’s climate-related jabs, Harris didn’t tout his past as a tough oil prosecutor or sound like a California Democrat. He 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 he also doubled down on support for fossil fuel extraction, noting that he was a “vote on the deflationary bill that opened up new leases to fracking.” He seemed almost to be celebrating “increasing domestic gas production to historic levels.”
It might show how much of an outlier California is in the national debate over oil. The national crushing ban comes into effect next month. And as the state’s oil production shrinks, leaders like current Attorney General Rob Bonta and Newsom attack the oil industry for “peaking” consumers.
Nationally, it’s a different audience.
“The presidential race is basically over in probably about 44 states,” Elkind said. “I think he’s trying to win over those more conservative voters in Pennsylvania, the people whose jobs depend on the fossil fuel industry.”
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