Shortly before Nov. 5 election, The Los Angeles Times predicted Californians would turn out to vote for native daughter Kamala Harris in record numbers. My state’s most reputable paper speculated that we would deliver a Harris tsunami because voting here is “easy.” In the context of California and the vice president, perhaps “loose” is a better word—my mother, for instance, received two mail-in ballots.

Regardless, if Harris, the child of two foreign exchange students who partially grew up in Canada, can be considered a “native daughter,” the distinction is meaningless. In a place as large, rootless, and heterogenous as today’s California, it’s unclear how the fact of being born and raised here can offer anyone additional electoral advantages.

Thus, what we saw on Election Night in California, far from the predicted “easy” or “loose” blue wave, was a forceful pushback towards law and order resulting in a double-digit shift to the right. The Obama-era Golden State, some Democratic observers now worry, seems as distant as a lost weekend in Sonoma.

When Harris was elected vice president in 2020, I wrote about how in San Francisco Bay Area where she was born the former prosecutor is considered a distant figure. Earlier that year, she had dropped out of the presidential race even before the California primary because she could see that she was sure to lose it. A billion-dollar campaign hasn’t done much to change that perception in the Golden State—so a distant figure she remains.

The ballots are still being counted, of course. We’ll be lucky if it’s done before our turkeys are on Thanksgiving. But it’s plenty clear that the passions of the electorate were not with Kamala.

The most pressing concern around here is crime. We got tired of having to ring for help at the drug store because the laundry detergent is inside of a locked glass cabinet. We were weary of then having to observe a open-air sidewalk pharmacy after having purchased said detergent in a way that makes us feel like the suspected criminal. This has been the sad reality of our lives here for over a decade and, in San Francisco, it became practically intolerable during the COVID closures when office workers went remote, scared residents retreated, and only the homeless roamed the city. It was a real-life dystopian novel, too obvious to ignore.

It took a few years for ordinary citizens to educate themselves about the root causes of this catastrophe but educate themselves they did. A few soft-on-crime measures promoted by the woke left stood out. Proposition 47, passed by California voters in 2014, had drastically reduced criminal penalties to the extent that social media is buzzing with the videos of organized retail theft where perpetrators confidently stroll out of establishments so long as they take less than $950 of merchandise. The cause of this sophisticated sort of criminal ring California’s vote in that proposition to make such act a mere misdemeanor. Two years later, Proposition 57 then allowed for the early release of criminal offenders, many of them violent.

Soon a grass roots group made up of business owners, law enforcement officers, and anti-drug activists drew up and put on the ballot Proposition 36. The measure was written to roll back Proposition 47, making the third theft and third fentanyl arrest a felony and mandating rehab for drug addicts. In other words, it would make crime illegal again.

Proposition 36 looks to be approved by landslide in every California county. Based on the current returns, over 70 percent of the electorate voted for it, making it the most popular item on the ballot. This showing far exceeds the totals for Propositions 47 and 57 which were deceptively passed at margins of 59.61 percent and 64.46 percent respectively. It was a deliberate and stunning rebuke.

California’s discontent with criminality wasn’t limited to state-level wins—voters also surged to speak out against lawlessness in local races. The movement that started in 2022 with the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin continued. Boudin was the most infamous “Soros D.A.” in the nation, the son of Weather Underground terrorists who won a ranked choice special election in 2020, declaring himself to be a part of the nationwide movement to subvert criminal law.

This time, neighboring Alameda County recalled its own Soros D.A., Pamela Price. The flamboyant Oaklander was elected in 2022, after San Francisco had already terminated its experiment with a social justice prosecution, but while wokeism was still riding high. Now the gritty East Bay towns have had enough and removed Price with what looks like 64.8 percent of the vote, well above the 53 percent total that put her in office two years ago.

Down in Los Angeles County, former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Nathan Hochman ousted the Soros D.A. George Gascón. Hochman earned 61 percent of the vote while Gascón was elected with 54.5 percent in the November 2020 COVID election that swept numerous progressives into office. We can observe the voters’ ire reaching heights their previous gullibility couldn’t touch.

Together with the D.A.s, Californians threw out dysfunctional mayors. San Francisco’s London Breed, who presided over the city spiral into a COVID dystopia from which it never recovered, conceded reelection to the Levi Strauss heir and venture capitalist Daniel Lurie. Nearly two thirds of voters approved the recall of Oakland’s Sheng Thao under whose leadership the city bled out its police force and is now verging on bankruptcy. Thao is currently under FBI investigation.  

The voters turned the page not only on crime, but also on several other stock progressive issues. They soundly rejected a rent control proposal, “affordable housing” funding, a minimum wage initiative, and approved regulation of NGO spending.

Why was the California electorate gullible enough to get itself into this position? It’s a good question. In Obama’s second term, which saw the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement, a certain California attorney general described Propositions 47 and 57 in cheery terms in the state voter guide, deceiving her constituents.

That attorney general’s name was Kamala Harris, and she went on to serve as a California senator and then as vice president of the United States. So last week’s election was a rejection, not only of her political promotion but also of her political past.

Unfortunately, not many Californians understand the connection. We don’t generally associate Harris with the misfortunes that befell us, so we ended up giving her our 54 electoral votes. Still, the native daughter underperformed in this deep blue state compared to every Democratic presidential nominee since Barack Obama. The latest tally has Kamala Harris winning California by almost 20 points when four years ago Joe Biden lead Trump by nearly 30. It looks like Trump flipped 10 counties and improved his standing in the ones that remained blue.

Nevertheless, the urge to vote for Harris is still disappointing for Californians who understand what she has done to the Golden State. She didn’t merely create the problems we are trying to solve today; she even refused to take a position on Proposition 36 so as not to anger the California political machine that opposed it. San Francisco writer and activist Richie Greenberg observed that the members of the anti-crime coalition of which he is a part successfully enacted local changes but could not bring themselves to change their ossified voting patterns in the federal election:

Yet with this all-important presidential race nearing its final weeks, these same advocates [of local and state reform], our coalition of angry activist voters, has quickly run to … Kamala Harris.

They should know better, but voting Democrat in the presidential election is a tradition around here. Too many Californians build their identities around progressivism and it’s hard to let go even when the results of the ideology are a failure when examined up close, on local and state levels. That said, the down ballot races show that the era of Obama and BLM is over—and that, at least, is a start.