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| Screenshot taken 8:15 am on March 12, 2022 |
Themes I saw in the video:
- Focus on his family, including the candidate's two sons and a daughter. Dahle's wife Megan is the Assembly Member for a district that significantly overlaps with her husband's Senate District. One son introduced Dahle at the announcement of his candidacy for Governor. Another son, Chase, is said to be looking after the farm as Dahle and the rest of the family are away campaigning. The daughter, referred to as Ros or Roz, looks about the age of tween or young teen.
- The campaign announcement took place in Redding, California with a seemingly small crowd present. Redding, the county seat of Shasta County, is the largest city in the region Dahle comes from (far northern California) and probably the largest city in the district he represents. That said, Dahle's district is huge, the largest in land area among state senate districts, and includes the area where I live, a suburb of Sacramento called Fair Oaks.
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| California State Senator Brian Dahle's Office in Gold River, California, a Sacramento suburb |
- A contrast between rural and urban. We see Dahle leaving an urban house--presumably where he and his wife live while in Sacramento--and traveling to his home in Lassen County, where he farms and has a seed company in the tiny town of Bieber. We see several shots of him driving in his pick up truck, including on an interstate--presumably I-5, which would link his homes in Bieber and Sacramento. I couldn't help think how much money he is spending on gas these days--and also how he seemingly could afford to move to an electric vehicle were he so inclined. Dahle also talks about how much more he is motivated to be farming than to be in Sacramento working as a legislator. I wonder if that is a message that works--one he wants to convey when he is running for Governor and will need to be in Sacramento and elsewhere in the state dealing with things other than farming.
- And, of course, Dahle talks about things that aren't going well in California, such as the migration of folks away from the state. Dahle expresses concern about lack of opportunity in the Golden State.
Meanwhile, I thought this was an interesting Tweet from the Capital Public Radio (Sacramento) program director, previously a political reporter for the organization.
Adler, the journalist, seems to be contrasting Dahle with Larry Elder, the top GOP vote getter in the failed gubernatorial recall election last fall.
Postscript: The Los Angeles Times published this story today referring to Dahle and another (an independent) who is challenging him as "little known." Here's the paragraph about the two men challenging Newsom:
The field of candidates currently challenging Newsom includes Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle, a conservative, seasoned politician from Northern California, and independent candidate Michael Shellenberger, a longtime activist on energy and homelessness issues. Dahle has never run for statewide office and Shellenberger, who supported Newsom’s recall, ran for governor in 2018 as a Democrat and was backed by less than 1% of California voters.
1 comment:
I think the Dahle campaign will be interesting, if not quixotic, and will highlight many of the anxieties that Californians are feeling about the state regarding future opportunities and economic mobility, the impact of climate change (most notably increasing incident and severity of wildfire), the states high cost of living (particularly energy and housing), and demographic change (which is often leveraged by making it a code for race, ethnicity and immigrations status).
What will be interesting will be whether or not Senator Dahle can run a campaign that puts rational long term solutions to some of these problems on the table, for both urban and rural Californians, while avoiding the populist dog whistles that have been rising in his district, most notable in the far north of the state.
As a ruralist, resident of his district, and a person working on rural economic and community building efforts, it is not as though rural California has responded to these challenges any more effectively than urban California has, and if one looks at the data on social mobility, rural California continues to fall behind urban California.
There are likely a number of reasons for declining rural social mobility that are rooted in Sacramento and the power of urban legislators to direct investments to their urban constituencies. But it would be disingenuous to contend that declining social mobility is solely a function of that power and investment imbalance.
We often discount the importance of the power of local government to lead in improving these conditions, and rural conservative leadership eschews using these powers due to an ideological opposition to using government as an agent of change.
Looking across Mr. Dahle's district there are numerous examples of rural local governments that are digging in and developing strategies to overcome some of the barriers to improving rural social mobility, including increasing rural broadband deployment, improving access to affordable and achievable housing, protecting communities from wildfire, improving workforce education and training systems and linking participants to rural jobs, and increasing investment in rural businesses.
There are two paths Senator Dahle could take, especially considering the near certainty he can't win the Governorship in a state with such an imbalance in party identification. He could look into rural California and lift up examples of positive change and demonstrate how these efforts could be models for similar solutions in urban regions, and use his campaign to open this sorely needed dialogue in California. Or he could point to the perceived ills of urban California like crime, homelessness, over regulation, high costs, and a supposed cultural divide between the urban and rural, and get the 25% of the vote motivated by rural grievance.
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