If there’s a state that could easily elect a trans woman reality star as governor, it would be California. We have certainly elected celebrities before and we have a socially liberal society that would hardly be hostile to a transgender candidate. The problem for Caitlyn Jenner is that in California today, we just don’t elect Republicans to high office.
Mainly this is a grift for out-of-work Trump operatives who think this is oh-so-clever because liberal Californians will all vote for the Republican trans woman because our “woke” cult will expel us if we don’t. They really don’t get it.
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, gay, ex-GOP consultant and Oakland resident did the best analysis of this silly notion:
As The Bulwark’s California correspondent, I wanted to weigh in on the proto-candidacy of Caitlyn Jenner for my state’s governorship, an idea that has been floated aggressively by the political press over last week.
Let me cut to the chase: Any person who supported Donald Trump has failed the entry-level test of political viability for statewide office in California. End of story.
I had some folks push back on this notion on Twitter, citing The Governator’s recall victory in 2003. This might make sense from afar, but doesn’t take into account the changes which have happened in American politics over the last 20 years.
The same demographic changes in the country and the suburban shift towards Democrats that helped the party improve in places like Atlanta are also operative in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and even the Bay Area.
Let me lay out some numbers for you to demonstrate how different of a world we are in today from that of 2003.
In the two presidential races bookending the 2003 recall, George W. Bush lost California by 1.3 million and 1.2 million votes respectively. Not exactly close.
But get this:
Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 5.1 million votes.
For a sense of scale here, the gap between Biden and Trump was greater than the entire raw vote total Bush got in California in 2000.
And it’s not just Trump. Gavin Newsom won his race by 3 million votes and just under 24 percentage points in 2018. Back in 2002 Gray Davis won his race by just 400,000 votes and 5 percentage points.
Not all blue states are the same. California in 2003 may have been one of the nation’s bright-blue bastions, but now it is the deepest of indigos.
Someday the political status quo will be disrupted in the Golden State—politics is always in motion. But if somebody tells you the disrupter is going to be a red-hatted reality-show star (or an obnoxious internet troll turned interim director of national intelligence) well, tell them you’d like some of whatever it is they bought at our local dispensary.
Do we know for a fact that Jenner isn’t going to film this campaign as a reality show? It’s actually a pretty good idea … for TV.