Given his penchant for attacking California’s climate policies — and for characterizing the state more broadly as a lawless hellfire of tent camps and shuttered businesses — there was a real possibility that former President Donald Trump would attempt to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to his dystopian vision of California in Tuesday night’s debate.
Trump named the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, New York, Seattle and Minneapolis, and even took a swipe at Germany’s climate policies, claiming that Berlin regretted its decision to switch to renewable energy. However, he did not mention California once.
California’s environmental regulations, which Republicans currently blame for high gas prices in the state’s elections and which Trump and other Republican leaders have tried to crack down on for everything from power outages to water shortages to farmers, remain under the radar nationally.
There are a few reasons for this.
It could also be that there is a lot to talk about and Trump was unprepared to address it last night, or that he was successfully diverted from the path.
“Harris has successfully gotten Trump to deviate from his prepared positions on the issues most favorable to him,” said Brennon Mendez, an environmental law and policy fellow at UCLA Law School.
There’s also the fact that Trump has softened a bit on electric vehicles, at least rhetorically, now that he has Tesla CEO Elon Musk firmly in his corner as one of his biggest supporters.
But another reason could be that the attack on California — and specifically its auto emissions rules, which Trump has tried to revoke the state’s authority to implement and has criticized as a model for President Joe Biden’s national “gasoline car ban” (which doesn’t exist, by the way) — no longer applies at the national level.
“With EVs, there are more demagogues on the Republican side of the aisle. But I mean, he’s got Elon Musk as a big campaign sponsor now. And you know, it just might not catch on,” said Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.
Trump also steered clear of California’s higher-than-national gas prices, which the oil industry continually blames on California’s environmental regulations, while Gov. Gavin Newsom points to excessive prices at the pump.
The Western States Petroleum Association has threatened to make Newsom’s proposal to require oil refineries to maintain reserve fuel supplies when they go offline to prevent price increases “part of the national conversation.” And a new line of attack opened Tuesday, with Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a fellow Democrat, joining forces with Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo to warn that the proposal could create “economic instability.”
But it could be harder to tie, say, California gas prices to Harris, a former state attorney general, than to, say, Newsom.
“Her time in California was a while ago, and she was never governor,” Elkind said. “She didn’t really set climate policy in the state. She enforced it. She sued polluters, but she wasn’t involved in pushing specific [state] legislation.”
To defend herself against the climate-related blows Trump did deliver, Harris didn’t flaunt her hard-to-oil prosecutor past or sound like a California Democrat. She nodded to the home insurance crisis and promoted the creation of hundreds of thousands of new clean-energy jobs under the Inflation Reduction Act.
But she also doubled down on her support for fossil fuel extraction, noting that she was “the deciding vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened up new concessions for fracking.” She almost seemed to celebrate having “increased domestic gas production to historic levels.”
That could show how much of an outlier California is in the national conversation about oil. A statewide ban on fracking goes into effect next month. And as oil production in the state declines, leaders like current Attorney General Rob Bonta and Newsom have railed against the oil industry for “plundering” consumers.
At the national level it’s a different audience.
“The presidential race is basically over in about 44 states,” Elkind said. “I think she’s trying to appeal to the more conservative voters of Pennsylvania, people whose jobs depend on the fossil fuel industry.”
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