CommentsRECALL POLITICS - California gubernatorial candidate Caitlyn Jenner is back into the swing of her campaign after spending weeks filming a reality show in Australia, and it appears she’s desperately trying to make up for lost time.
Jenner spent the last two days making vanity political stops and separating herself from her competitors in the recall election for the top spot in Sacramento that is now 30 days away. She also attacked members of the media and current Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) online for much of the day.
Jenner first spent that time deriding people experiencing homelessness in Venice Beach on August 12, mocking the “dilapidated campers” there.
She then accused journalists of being “pro-Gavin” for reporting on her. Politico California senior writer Carla Marinucci simply noted in a tweet at a press conference that Jenner’s note pad read, “why running? Hope.”
Jenner lashed out, accusing her of “the PR arm” of Gov. Newsom.
She then visited California’s southern border area with Mexico and touted her promise to strengthen border security as governor.
“I commend everyone at border control and I would like them to know me as governor. I would support them one hundred percent,” Jenner said at a press conference on the stop.
She claimed that, in addition to seeing people experiencing homelessness, seeing people cross the American-Mexican border spurred Jenner to run for Governor.
“I was laying in bed and I was watching what was happening at the border — people dying, drowning and kids in cages,” she told media gathered in Otay Mesa with her, “It was bad policies and bad outcomes.”
Jenner pledged to “fund” the “completion” of the border wall, at least in California, if she was to become governor.
“We don’t have a state, we do not have a country unless we have a secure border, Bottom line. That’s it,” Jenner stated.
On the visit, and after, Jenner sent several tweets attacking Newsom, calling him different names and promising to unseat the “pathetic failure.”
Her promise to complete the wall did not go over well with many people that seemed to hope to support her.
Jenner also did a 180 on a tweet she sent on August 11.
At the time, when “Inside California Politics” revealed that Jenner was the only candidate in the recall election yet to respond to their request to be in a debate, she tweeted to them that she didn’t want to participate because “All recall candidates are on the same team. Gavin is the only opponent.”
However, at her stop at the California southern border, Jenner made a point to separate herself from Larry Elder, a candidate further to the right of her but currently leading in some polling for the recall election, if it were to succeed.
“Unlike Elder, I have no secrets,” she said. “I did a book titled ‘Secrets of My Life,’ a few years ago, I told every secret and I don’t have a single secret left in my life.”
Jenner suggested that Elder has “secrets” of some kind while she does not. She said she “wonders” about him “right now because she knows him” from “being a conservative, very conservative radio host. I don’t know anything beyond that.”
“I think for California, what they’re looking for is a person who’s more center right, and that is me,” Jenner claimed.
SFGate did not get any response to requests for comment from Jenner’s campaign.
A likely factor in Jenner’s sudden change in her comradery with her recall competitors is the publishing of the Los Angeles Times‘ editorial board’s endorsement in the recall election. The paper with several million subscribers explicitly said that a recall “would doom the state to months of political and bureaucratic dysfunction and economic uncertainty.”
They don’t endorse that course of action, asking California voters to vote ‘no’ on Question 1, just as the Sacramento Bee concluded in a prior editorial.
If enough people vote ‘yes’ on Question 1 and the recall effort succeeds anyway, the Times gave their tentative endorsement to Kevin Faulconer out of the seven recall candidates. They deem him a “moderate Republican” because he is the “least bad option in a recall field that ranges from the merely bad to the utterly catastrophic.”
The Times deems Jenner “a clueless lightweight, who demonstrates little knowledge of how the state works or the scope of, and limitations on, the governor’s powers. It wouldn’t do the LGBTQ community any favors to have her fail spectacularly as leader of the state.”
The editorial board noted that they were able to evaluate all candidates with in-person meetings — with the exception of Jenner.
The lack of endorsements for Jenner so far isn’t surprising, but her apparent uninterest in appealing to a large group of voters and promoting her campaign in two of California’s most influential publications may come back to haunt her.
That does not bolster Jenner’s position as the “center-right” candidate, especially as she has already consistently polled in the single digits since announcing her campaign in April.
As of last week, she was tied for fifth place among GOP contenders with three percent support.
Juwan J. Holmes is the Associate Editor of LGBTQ Nation. The bisexual writer and multipotentialite from Brooklyn, New York previously served as the Weekend Editor from October 2019 to January 2021. He has also written for Bustle, Xtra Magazine, The Independent, and more. He is the Curator of the PRISM Collaborative and Editorial Revolutionary-in-Charge of the Renaissance Project.
