By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, April 08, 2026
Yes, yes, polls can be wrong, and the California state
“jungle primary” won’t be held until June 2. There are 61 (!) candidates on the
ballot to be the next governor of California.
In the jungle primary, the top two finishers, regardless
of party, end up competing in the general election. For a while, it looked conceivable that the top two
finishers would be two Republicans, former Fox News personality Steve Hilton
and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. If, by some miracle, Hilton and
Bianco finished in the top two spots, the next governor would be a Republican,
even though 44 percent of the state’s voters are registered as Democrats and
only 25 percent are registered as Republicans.
Then President Trump endorsed Hilton, which makes it less likely
that Bianco will retain enough support to remain in second place.
Right now, the Democrat who appears most likely to finish in the top two is Eric Swalwell . . . which means
that there’s a good chance that Swalwell will be the next governor of
California.
Right now, I suspect that about a third of you are
groaning in recognition and dread of Swalwell, a third are jogging your
memories and asking, “Wait, that guy?,” and a third are not recalling the
congressman at all.
Congressman Eric Swalwell is a
giant waste of space. He is a trying-too-hard, gun-confiscation promoting, nuclear-strike-on-Americans endorsing, Biden-death speculating, white-man-who’s-running-to-increase-diversity congressman
who was in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary for about ten minutes. He
consistently polled at zero in surveys. He broke his promise to not run for Congress again. There
are, er, noisy concerns about his role in uncontrolled methane
emissions.
And now Axios is reporting
that a Chinese national named Fang Fang or Christine Fang, a suspected Chinese
spy, worked as a fundraiser for him and interacted with him until she left the
country in 2015.
The best thing you can say about Swalwell is that after the FBI
gave him a “defensive briefing,” he “immediately cut off all ties to Fang.”
At this point, we don’t know if Swalwell had any reason to think Fang was a
spy.
Apparently, Fang used sex as a
tool to get closer to certain politicians. The Axios article did not say
whether Swalwell and Fang ever did the horizontal mambo, and Swalwell refuses
to say. Keep in mind, people generally do not withhold exculpatory information.
It is not against the law for a
congressman to have sex with a Chinese spy if he doesn’t know she’s a foreign
agent. But it sure as heck makes Swalwell look foolish and vulnerable to
blackmail.
Still, you could see what a woman like Fang might see in
Swalwell that would make him attractive to her, namely access to classified
information. Swalwell is now denying accusations of inappropriate sexual relationships with
his congressional interns.
You may have noticed that the state of California has a
long list of severe and often worsening problems. National Review’s Radio Free California podcast discusses them every episode.
In just the past year or so, I’ve written about California’s dire long-term financial picture, worst-in-the-nation cost of living and affordability crises, the state’s
dead-last in-migration rate for six consecutive years, its bottom-five rankings
among all 50 states in affordability, growth, employment, energy
infrastructure, air and water quality, fiscal stability, state tax
competitiveness, quality of life for retirees, car-accident rate, drunk
driving, road quality, gas prices, grocery bills, inflation, cost of regulatory
compliance requirements, labor costs, housing market costs, and electricity
costs. (And it’s in the bottom ten in public safety.)
By just about every measurement you can think of,
California is dramatically underperforming and getting worse, particularly when
you consider that the state has some advantages that every other state would
envy, such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, two of the country’s biggest ports,
some of the world’s best farmland, near-ideal weather, major naval bases, etc.
Eric Swalwell is 45 years old. He was elected to
Congress at age 31, in a heavily Democratic district, after beating
then-81-year-old Pete Stark, a 20-term incumbent. He ranks among the lightest
of lightweights, a frequent guest on MSNBC/MSNOW, a man who seven years ago was
dense enough to believe that Americans wanted him to be their next president,
without the slightest micron of evidence. (He never polled above 1 percent in any national or state survey.)
This is not the man that an electorate should send to the
governor’s mansion when the state’s circumstances are dire. Maybe Swalwell
could function well enough as a caretaker governor if things in the state were
already running smoothly. The Golden State is facing Godzilla problems and is
on course to elect a Bambi Democrat.
His campaign website touts him as “the fiercest face of
the Democratic resistance,” but the problems of California have very little
to do with Republicans or Donald Trump. The state’s problems are primarily a
result of the state’s policies, which were passed by the heavily Democratic
state legislature and signed into law by Gavin Newsom. Getting California on
the right track would be a Herculean task for any elected leader, and Swalwell is
no Hercules.
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