Oakland, California has a special place in the American progressive pantheon—the birthplace of Black panthershotbed of labor organizing and the tenants’ rights movement, Berkeley’s bigger, edgier neighbor — so what’s happening in this city has ramifications far beyond the Bay Area.

And what happened here last week was huge. Oakland voters recalled their mayor, Sheng Taoand their district attorney, Pamela Price (she represented Alameda County, where Oakland is by far the largest city). Both lost by about 30 percentage points, a staggering margin for the city Vice President Kamala Harris calls home.

Under California law, voters will elect a new mayor and new DA in the upcoming special election (until then, both positions will be filled by interim appointees). All indications are that they will turn right, just like voters across the country which made Donald Trump the first presidential candidate of the Republic of Moldova to win the popular vote in two decades.

However, Oakland is not rural Michigan or exurban Philadelphia – these markers should not exist here. And when it comes to the presidential election, Alameda County voted exactly as you’d expect, Harris getting 73% of the vote (she underperformed Biden, which achieved 80% in 2020but that’s another story).

However, the very voters who rejected Trump also rejected two black progressive women who would likely have served as a bulwark against Trumpist politics.

What did he give? Well, where do I start?

With the recent FBI raid on Tao’s house, I think. It is accused of corruption and could soon be making the trip from City Hall to the federal penitentiary — she wouldn’t be the first American politician to go that route, but people had higher hopes for the first Hmong woman to be elected to an important political post in the USA

Tao dashed those hopes almost immediately. At the beginning of her term, she fired Police Chief LeRonne Armstrongapparently he wasn’t tough enough on cops accused of misconduct. Hiring a new boss took months, in what many considered an inexcusable delay. Then Tao somehow missed the deadline to apply for a $15 million state grant to combat retail theft — this at a time when property crime was on the rise in Oakland, even as it was beginning to rise in many other large cities.

The recall effort, which began in earnest earlier this year, was led by Brenda Harbin-Forte, a black retired judge, and supported by many other members of Oakland’s strong black community. “Look at the pits. Look at the homeless. Look at jobs. Look at the businesses leaving Oakland and I’m mad as double ‘HE hockey sticks,'” said the pastor of a Baptist church.

Pamela Price also made history as the first black woman to be elected chief police officer in Alameda County. Educated at Yale and Berkeley Law, she ran a local civil rights and employment law firm. And like Tao, she showed that while representation matters, it cannot compensate for competence.

Concerns about crime were still high when Price took office in early 2023, but in a classic misreading of the chamber, she began her term by issuing new, more lenient sentencing guidelinesespecially for juvenile offenders. In all fairness, this had been a campaign promise, but the smarter move would have been to assuage the concerns of critics before acting on the wishes of supporters.

Then came the killing of Jasper Wu, a child tragically caught in the crossfire of a gang. Oaklanders—especially members of its large Asian American community—were stunned to learn this Price was intent on seeking “non-custodial forms of accountability” for the three men accused of murder. The announcement came in an email “to Chinese communities” from Price. She seems to have the right level of compassion for a senior position in the Trump administration.

Aware of the growing anger among Oakland’s Asian-American residents — including Chinatown small business owners fed up with incessant break-ins — Price decided to hold a ceremony to announce her “Chinese name.” Yes, indeed. The best thing that can be said about this event is that was cancelled.

Oakland is blessed with stunning natural beauty (the hollow, the hills), a rich heritage of black culture, top-notch restaurants, a plethora of breweries, and some pretty decent pizza for the West Coast. But its population has steadily declined since 2020. And with the departure of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders (in Las Vegas), the NBA’s Golden State Warriors (in San Francisco), and the MLB’s Oakland A’s (also in Vegas), the city is without a professional sports team.

You can’t blame Tao and Price for the decisions of greedy franchise owners, but you can blame them for doing nothing to instill confidence in the way Oakland has been governed. As the recalls piled up, one playing off the other, they became combative, where a smarter politician would have been conciliatory.

“Until we address the primary predator — white supremacy that creates crime — we will always have secondary predators because their primary needs have not been met,” Carroll Fife, a local activist who has supported the “defund the police” movement. explained in 2021. Fife’s sentiment was not shared by many of the withdrawal supporters, who were local black elders who had watched their community struggle toward the middle class. They were not going to willfully squander those gains for the sake of aligning with progressive ideology.

Progressive mayors, legislators and prosecutors have suffered similar rebukes — or are facing fatal drops in popular support — in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and other cities. Many of them promised transformative change, only to become entangled in the realities of governance, which never sat well with ideological rigidity. And cities have suffered as a result.

Americans from what we coastal elites call “pass-through country” go to Washington and see an empty downtown, shuttered storefronts, and security guards outside both chain drug stores and high-end stores. They see the homeless encampments south of Market Street in San Francisco; they grow restless as someone riots and raves on a subway platform in Times Square. You can blame them for thinking: “This what does democratic governance look like?”

trump card did better in cities this time than in the previous two presidential runs. It gained ground in new york and Washington, where support increased they came from historically black sections of the district. Alarm bells should be going off in Democratic Party headquarters. If the Democrats can’t fix the cities, I have a feeling the Republicans will gladly do the job for them.