California has dodged a bullet. Kamala Harris has announced she will not be a candidate for governor in 2026, when current Governor Gavin Newsom is term-limited out of office.
Whichever doofus they end up electing will be better than Harris. The next gov may not be better than Newsom, however. The CA voters can, and likely will, do worse than he.
The last decent governor CA had was Republican Pete Wilson, and the last really good one was Democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. Wilson finished his second term in 1999 and Pat Brown was defeated by Reagan in 1966.
CA has ‘coasted’ on infrastructure Brown built ever since, eventually outgrowing it. Wishing to do no harm to any living thing, however trivial, CA has been over-regulated to the point of near-gridlock ever since.
If you conclude from the above that politics in CA are a mess, you are being kind. They are something worse than a mere mess, I view them as aspirational Utopianism unguided by common sense.
