Trump campaign blasts Tim Walz as ‘West Coast wannabe’
Former president Donald Trump wasted no time blasting his opponent’s new running mate Tuesday, attacking Gov. Tim Walz as “West Coast wannabe” who’s “obsessed with spreading Caliornia’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide.”
“Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign press secretary, in a statement emailed to the media. “While Walz pretends to support Americans in the Heartland, when the cameras are off, he believes that rural America is ‘mostly cows and rocks’.”
It was an early attempt to define the new Democratic candidate for vice president — one that relies on the time-tested GOP strategy of bashing California.
California has been a favorite Trump target for years, and though Walz has no significant political connection to the state, the campaign was clearly ready with a message tying him to its liberal policies on criminal justice and climate change.
“From proposing his own carbon-free agenda, to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide,” Leavitt said.
“If Walz won’t tell voters the truth, we will: just like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare.”
California bashing
Republicans have been attacking Harris is from California, a state where the GOP insists anything goes, crime is out of control and undocumented immigrants and homeless people are everywhere.
“Republicans are attempting to portray Kamala Harris as a cackling far-left elitist from deep-blue California with its supposedly failed policies on immigration, homelessness, business retention, crime, and more.,” said Kambiz Akhavan, executive director of the Dornsife Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California.
“That is a right-wing stereotype of top California leaders that is being aggressively promoted. Whether America believes the stereotype has a lot to do with what media they consume and who their friends are,” he said.
The state has been “more progressive on issues that you can distort,” said Steve Phillips, a San Francisco author and lawyer and Harris supporter.
On environmental issues, for instance, Republicans like to talk about how the government is going to ban gas stoves (it’s not but wants to make them more energy-efficient) or plastic straws (Harris does support banning them).
And then there’s immigration.
“If she becomes president, Kamala Harris will make the invasion (of undocumented immigrants) exponentially worse, and just like she did with San Francisco, just like she did with the border, our whole country will be permanently destroyed,” former President Donald Trump told reporters last week.
Harris had nothing specifically to do with undocumented immigrants in San Francisco, but is enduring all sorts of California-bashing. It may have an impact.
A California Democratic first?
Harris is trying to become the first California Democrat to ever win the White House. Three Republicans–Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan–have won the White House.
Harris has a California winning streak. She won a tight race for attorney general in 2010, but easily won a second term in 2014 and a U.S. Senate seat in 2016. California is a heavily Democratic state that last elected a Republican statewide in 2006.
Republicans see California as a contrast to their cultural conservative message, their eagerness to Make America Great Again.
California “is not a great state anymore…the world is being dumped into California. Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients,” Trump told the state Republican convention last year.
Even among California Republicans, the image of Democrat-created chaos is a political weapon..
“We’ve had a front-row seat to Harris’s soft-on-crime policies for two decades,” California GOP Chair Jessica Millan Patterson wrote in an op-ed recently for the Washington Examiner.
Rep. Kevin Kiley,, R-Roseville, posted a lengthy tweet detailing what he said was Harris’ crime record.
“California’s crime crisis has three main causes: 1) Rogue Prosecutors, 2) Reckless Laws, 3) Attacks on Police. Kamala Harris has been at the center of all three,” he said.
This story was originally published August 6, 2024 at 10:31 AM.
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