John Phillips on the Political Earthquake Brewing in California

BUCK: We have John Phillips with us now. He’s a Los Angeles-based radio host, columnist at the OC Register. You often see him on Fox News and he’s got some thoughts for us on this. Thanks for being with us.

PHILLIPS: Hey, thanks for having me.

BUCK: So, John, Boudin. Is he going to be out? What’s going on here? What was the momentum, or how did the momentum get created that led up to the recall in the first place of San Francisco’s district attorney?

PHILLIPS: I’ll say this, Chesa Boudin did one thing that I never thought an individual would be able to do, which is to see the Raiders leave the Bay Area and have the crime rate go up. But that’s what he managed to do. If you ever get bored, look at the local news in San Francisco. It looks like the latest edition of The Purge. It’s crime running rampant all over the place — violent crime, property crime. You name it.

Criminals know they can get away with whatever it is they want to do. So, even in liberal San Francisco, they were able to get all the required signatures to put this thing on the ballot. And the way these recalls work typically, here in California, is if you want to beat it, you beat it in the signature-gathering stage, because, if it makes the ballot, the framing is you did something wrong and is your offense wrong enough to get kicked out of office?

I believe he was absolutely toast the minute this thing qualified for the ballot. They’re voting today, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. In just a couple of weeks, this guy is not going to be the prosecutor in San Francisco. He’s going to be parking cars by the Doubletree by the airport.

CLAY: Well, that’s going to be fun to see, by the way. There’s a couple other races I’m intrigued to see in California. The L.A. mayor, you’ve got a former Republican who flipped three years ago to be a Democrat. He’s a billionaire. There are analogies there being drawn there with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and what happened in New York City.

You also have… I know we had the Governor Newsom recall and he managed to overcome Larry Elder. But can you talk a little bit about the way that the California voting works? I understand that there’s an independent who still identifies as a Democrat who was making a real run there, and maybe that Gavin Newsom cake walk to re-election will not end up being quite what was anticipated. Can you break down both of those big races for us?

PHILLIPS: Well, let’s start with the L.A. mayor’s race. So you have a Democratic congresswoman, Karen Bass, who was a long-time congresswoman, was on the short list to be vice president for Joe Biden. And after he did all the vetting and the research, he determined that she was less qualified than Kamala. So that tells you everything you need to know about her.

CLAY: That ain’t good.

PHILLIPS: Then you have Rick Caruso, who is the Republican turned Democrat who you mentioned. Whenever you see a politician do that, you don’t know, because sometimes when someone switches their party affiliation, they’re a recent convert. They can be some of the most partisan Democrats if they go from R to D. What he did was really a strategic move.

He changed his party affiliation, but he didn’t change any of his politics at all. He is essentially running on two issues, crime and homelessness, and up until the most recent poll — which I would throw in the trash can because the LA Times assumed that 60-some-odd percent of the people would turn out. So far we have 14% turnout on Election Day — that he would end up coming in second and Karen Bass would be finishing first.

I fully expect Rick Caruso to finish first. And let me tell you, just beyond the partisan and political aspects of this, LA needs Rick Caruso to be in that office to avoid going off the cliff. The city, I’m from here, I’m a fourth-generation Angelino know, I love it out here. It’s completely unrecognizable. It looks like a zombie apocalypse movie.

CLAY: We’re hearing that from a ton of L.A. people, John. Sorry to cut you off, but if he got over 50%, Caruso, of the vote it’s over. He’s mayor and he could be sworn in really soon. Is there any possibility based on what you’re hearing that this thing could be decided in terms of L.A. mayor and that Caruso could win it today?

PHILLIPS: There’s a chance. There’s certainly a chance. I fully expect him to finish first. Whether or not it’s over 50, I don’t know. That is very hard to do because there’s still other candidates on the ballot. He would really have to crush the entire field for that to happen.

CLAY: And the governor’s race, I mentioned, do we feel like Newsom might actually get a challenge?

PHILLIPS: At this point, no. He has almost universal name ID. He has all the money in the race. The other candidates haven’t been able to raise any money. And Michael Shellenberger, who is the author of San Fransicko, who you mentioned, really doesn’t have the resources to get his name out there, which in California is very, very, very expensive to do. He’s doing a lot of earned media. He was just on Bill Maher this last week. But that’s not enough. You’ve got to buy radio. You’ve got to buy television.

BUCK: Speaking to John Phillips, L.A.-based radio host, columnist at the OC Register. John, are you coming across more…? Often in talk radio, in general we’re talking to a lot of people who are right of center, share a lot of our politics, obviously. But just as somebody who lives in the State of California, we have big audiences across that state here in syndication.

Are you coming across more and more Democrats who recognize, essentially, that the Chesa Boudin recall is just a symptom of a broader realization or it’s just evidence of a broader realization that this “super soft on crime, don’t prosecute people, let them steal stuff” idea is really bad irrespective of politics? Are people seeing the light from the Democrat side?

PHILLIPS: Yeah, because you may have your ideology, you may have your partisan affiliation, but no one wants to get stabbed. When you have just complete chaos going on all around you and you can’t take the bus, you can’t take the subway, you can’t use the libraries, you can’t use the parks. The beaches have been taken over by crime and homeless.

You pretty much have to stay inside your house, and people don’t live here or move here for that kind of lifestyle, you move here because you want to enjoy all those things. And I’ll say this: If and when the California Republican Party ever comes back here on the West Coast, it will happen because Democrats have done everything they possibly can to alienate blue-collar Hispanics.

Every time you get into an Uber, every time you talk to a bartender, every time you go to a diner, you talk to blue-collar Hispanics who may not be ready to vote Republican, but they’re absolutely furious with Boudin. They’re furious with Gascon. They’re furious with Garcetti, and with Newsom.

CLAY: This is a really interesting situation because all this you just discussed is basically internecine warfare in the Democrat Party. To your point, the Republicans still haven’t risen up as a valid opposition. What would have to happen? You said if they ever rise up again. What would it take for a Republican to win again in a major electoral vote anywhere in a popular place in California, right?

And I know you can maybe say, “Well, when you flip and you’re basically running as a Democrat but you’re running on Republican platforms, that’s a Bloombergan-esque move.” But do you think there’s a future where Republicans are a viable option in California, or are all those people who are leaving — who are overwhelmingly Republican voters — just basically flipping out the lights and saying, “California is going to be a left-wing cesspool for as far as we can imagine.”

PHILLIPS: Well, I’m not Pollyanna and think that it’s going to happen tomorrow. However, when it does happen, it’s going to happen the same way you’re seeing shifting voting patterns in places like Texas and Florida, where the Latino vote is moving from safely in the Democratic column to the Republican Party. And the other thing I would add is that elections are popularity contests.

You don’t like to think of them that way, but that’s exactly what they are. You have to get more votes than the other person. And you have to pick your candidates the same way you cast a movie. And we have a lot of people who can read the script, but we don’t have a lot of people who can draw at the box office.

Even though he went bad, and he turned out not to be a good idea, the Arnold Schwarzenegger sort of candidate is definitely the way to go. And to find someone who certainly has conservative ideas but who has likability, who has the ability to raise money, who is well known by the public, that’s the type of candidate that you need to win an election. I was wishing that Elon Musk would run here when he was here, but he moved to Texas.

BUCK: John Phillips, thanks so much for being with us. Appreciate it.

PHILLIPS: Thanks for having me.