Flojaune Cofer, who ran for mayor of Sacramento, has finally conceded defeat, a month after election day, leading many to wonder why the candidate who’d been favored to win, didn’t.
The answer is simple: Cofer’s politics were just a rehashed version of the same old racial grievances and soft-on-crime policies that prompted voters in Oakland and Alameda County to recall Sheng Thao and Pamela Price.
Perhaps Cofer’s dumbest unforced error was her call for homeless people to be provided with “sanctioned camping” spots in public parks. At a time when the public is clamoring for crackdowns on illegal encampments, especially in public parks, this view struck Sacramentans as far too radical, even for a liberal city. Cofer also called for money to be transferred from the Sacramento Police Department to violence prevention programs.
This “defund the police” stance, too, didn’t sit well with voters. The election’s final results show Cofer losing by the barest margin to fellow Democrat Kevin McCarty, who promised to increase the number of cops. Cofer’s politics were virtually the same as Pamela Price’s. And, like Price, Cofer called her critics “racist and sexist,” apparently referring to the facts that Cofer is a Black woman. She accused McCarty of “play[ing] on people’s natural fears of a darker-skinned Black person” who “weaponized your assumption of whiteness against the contrast of my Blackness.”
Good grief, when will these people learn? Playing the race card is increasingly offensive to all voters. It’s also increasingly futile. People know that it doesn’t matter what skin color a politician has, nor do they care what gender she is. What matters is her policies. Flojaune Cofer’s policies were wrong, stupid and dangerous, and Sacramentans rightly determined she was not the right person to lead them for the next four years.
It’s wonderful that yet another progressive politician has been rejected by the electorate. But it’s concerning that the vote was so close. Flojaune Cofer should have gone down in a landslide. Instead, she lost a nail-biter, showing that lots of voters still consider themselves progressive no matter how discredited that philosophy is. This proves that we must continue our educational efforts to convince voters that far-left progressivism or wokeism is a path to nowhere. We must preserve the best of what progressives have accomplished—women’s rights, gay rights, protecting the environment, and so on—while utterly rejecting the extremes that, one way or another, always boil down to racial grievance.
Have a wonderful weekend! Back on Monday.
Steve Heimoff