Let Them Fight

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

This post is in response to Do Californians Really Want Kamala?

By Mark Antonio Wright

 

Oh frabjous day! Calloo, callay! An internecine Democratic battle for the 2026 California governor’s race is shaping up, and — because my timing in such things is becoming proverbially snakebitten — it’s happening exactly when I predicted it likely wouldn’t. In a stroke of serendipity, this morning I chanced to write about Kamala Harris’s prospective return to politics. She has been teasing a potential California gubernatorial run since late November of last year, when she was still licking her wounds from her loss as a replacement candidate for Joe Biden. I concluded that, no matter how much you or I may dislike her, the future was bright for her and thus accordingly dim for the Golden State:

 

With national political trends almost certain to be cutting hard against them, the most Republicans can hope for in California in 2026 is that their threatened House incumbents hold serve because of deep-seated revulsion toward Harris. But a state that gave her 58 percent of the vote in 2024 is not going to reject her as governor, no matter how incompetently she campaigns. If she runs, she wins. The only thing that might stop her is if she improbably manages to draw a Democrat rather than a Republican to run against in November. (This is at least theoretically possible but wildly unlikely, given Harris’s ability to preemptively clear the field of Democratic rivals.)

 

But here’s the thing: However inevitable Harris may be once she gets into the race, she hasn’t done that yet. And “the end of summer” (Harris’s announced decision deadline) sits many long months away at this point. That’s why, mere hours after this piece went to press, we got news that Kamala had not, as it turns out, preemptively cleared the field: Former Democratic Representative Katie Porter has decided to pip the entire field and announce her candidacy to replace Gavin Newsom in office as governor. Porter, for those unaware, is a thoroughly unpleasant “moderate” Democrat from Orange County, an emblematic representative of how that once-bulwark Republican stronghold demographically shifted into Democratic-leaning territory as educated elites shifted left nationwide. She left office in 2024 to run for Dianne Feinstein’s vacant Senate seat, and was unsurprisingly trounced among Democratic voters in California’s open primary by rival Representative Adam Schiff, who now simpers uselessly in the seat with his “Resistance” brand.

 

Harris hasn’t even decided whether she’s getting into the governor’s race or not yet, but now I actively hope she does, if only because I’m desperately eager to see which of my two least favorite politicians will survive the bloodsport to lead America’s most cursed state to doom over the next decade. My opinion remains the same as it was before this announcement: Harris, should she choose to run, is strongly favored. Porter’s early announcement was in fact done as strategic compensation for her otherwise manifest demographic weaknesses in a state whose Democratic voting electorate (i.e. a solid majority of voters statewide) still prizes the hierarchy of “diversity” rejected by the rest of the nation last November. But maybe I’m wrong — let’s find out! Let them fight, and given that 2026 is liable to be an otherwise unpleasant year for Republicans federally, at least hope for some blue-on-blue carnage.