It’s a little too early to pop the corks on the Champagne to celebrate the recalls of Sheng Thao and Pamela Price. But you might want to put a few bottles on ice and get them nice and cold, because it sure looks like they’re both going down in flames.
Everybody, it turns out, wants them out, except for a handful of diehard wacko wokes. First to support one or both Recalls was Eric Swalwell and all the police unions in Alameda County, and then Libby Schaaf and Nancy O’Malley jumped onboard. Now it’s the San Francisco Chronicle urging a YES vote on the Price Recall. It used to be said that when Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War, it was all over. Well, the same thing now can be said about the Chron, heretofore one of most woke rags in the Bay Area. When Price lost the Chronicle, her doom was sealed.
The most definitive poll so far, reported by East Bay Insiders, shows “Mayor Sheng Thao’s unpopularity at shocking[ly] high levels,” while “Fifty-six percent of Oakland voters support the Price recall.” Meanwhile, Fife is in a statistical tie with her opponent, Warren Logan, in the Council race for District 3, and—stunningly—Nikki Bas trails her opponent, John Bauters, in the Supervisorial race by 16 points (44% to 28%).
If this doesn’t suggest a landslide in November for moderates, and an historic repudiation of radical wokeness that will have national implications, then I don’t know what does.
One can always be wrong. We have no idea who’s going to win the presidential election, so it’s pointless to make predictions. Still, as someone who’s closely watched local politics for a very long time, I can tell you that the fabled “tipping point”—that unicorn everyone’s been waiting for—seems finally to have arrived. It took a lot of crime, death and economic loss to achieve it, but it’s here, aided by the fact that Thao, Price and Bas are horrible candidates. They all come across in the media as unstable, angry, ideological, paranoid, unlikeable, nasty and incompetent—and in Fife’s case you can take that statement and square it. There’s no misogyny in saying this. If all four were men, and White men at that, it would still be true: voters would be sick of them.
I’m already thinking of what I’ll write about after the election. The Coalition will still strongly support the Oakland Police Department and will lobby for an absolute, permanent end to encampments, including every illegal tent in Oakland. But we’ll tackle other issues. Here are a few I’m considering:
- Getting rid of ranked choice voting
- Completely overhauling our system of parcel taxes
- Investigating the unions, and particularly their role in paying for “progressive” candidates with such disastrous results for the city
If there are other things you think I should focus on, please let me know.
Have a wonderful, safe weekend!
Steve Heimoff