The looming red wave: How a crowded Democratic field might hand California’s governorship to a Republican

California gubernatorial candidate debate Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in San Francisco.Photo Credit: Laure Andrillon/AP

When I was little, my parents always voted blue. When the ballot offered one Democrat versus one Republican, it was an easy pick between the two. I always viewed California as an impenetrable fortress of blue politics. With our heavily populated progressive cities, it seemed practically impossible for a Republican to win a gubernatorial election. As the June 2 primary approaches, however, an overcrowded field of Democrats vying for the office is threatening to turn that assumption completely upside down.

According to recent polling by UC Berkeley IGS Poll (sponsored by The Los Angeles Times), conservative commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco are leading the gubernatorial race as of March 18. Hilton captures roughly 17% of the vote, while Bianco is close behind at 16%, leaving prominent Democrats like Eric Swalwell and Katie Porter trailing them in the low teens. You can follow the latest polling updates on The New York Times. Because California utilizes a top-two primary system where candidates are listed on the same ballot regardless of party, the sheer abundance of Democratic candidates is severely fracturing the liberal vote.

The California Democratic Party is actively panicking about the very real possibility of a general election without a single Democrat on the ballot. On March 3, party chair Rusty Hicks issued an open letter pleading with unviable candidates to assess their paths to victory and suspend their campaigns:

If in the unlikely event a Democrat failed to proceed to the General Election for Governor, there could be the potential for depressed Democratic turnout in California in November. The result would present a real risk to winning the congressional seats required and imperil Democrats' chances to retake the House.

Despite these dire warnings, all eight Democratic hopefuls have stubbornly refused to step aside. Meanwhile, the conservative surge is being heavily fueled by voters in California’s rural and inland regions, who are expressing deep dissatisfaction with the state’s current trajectory. A recent survey from the Public Policy Institute of California revealed that 54% of Californians believe the state is headed in the wrong direction. Their views are driven largely by anxiety over the cost of living and inflation.

Candidates like Bianco are successfully capitalizing on this widespread frustration. Polling data shows the Republican sheriff is absolutely dominating the race in rural, historically red areas like the Inland Empire and the North Coast/Sierras. While Democratic candidates fight each other for urban votes in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Republican candidates are unifying the rural base.

Despite needing to split the conservative vote evenly to advance to the general election, Republican candidates Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco are not cooperating and are instead aggressively attacking one another to consolidate their base. Both candidates are utilizing similar platform strategies centered on heavy deregulation, reversing prison closures, boosting oil production, and slashing taxes.

A critical element of both their campaign strategies is courting voters in California's rural, agricultural, and inland regions where conservative momentum is currently the strongest. For instance, both men recently campaigned directly to these demographics by participating in a gubernatorial forum at Fresno State hosted by Western Growers. Bianco, the current Riverside County Sheriff, has been particularly successful at rallying these rural and inland voters by leaning heavily into his outsider status and harshly criticizing the environmental regulations that many inland residents blame for the high cost of living.

While the media fixates on the fractured Democratic field, they are completely ignoring the socialist candidates running in this election, including Ramsey Robinson of the Peace and Freedom Party and Butch Ware. It is frustrating that candidates who are actually running on working-class platforms receive absolutely no press coverage and are shut out of major platforms, like the highly criticized (and ultimately canceled) gubernatorial debate co-sponsored by USC and the Los Angeles TV station KABC.

Comparison to the last Governor Race

2019 California Governor Election Results. Credit: The New York Times

While outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom practically coasted through his past elections, the 2026 primary is shaping up to be an entirely different beast. In his 2018 race, Newsom secured a landslide victory against Republican John Cox, winning by a massive 24 percentage points (the worst defeat for a GOP gubernatorial candidate in California since 1950). Newsom enjoyed such, unified party backing that his races were defined by inevitability, a stark contrast to the absolute chaos and uncertainty of this year's crowded primary. Today, the Democratic field is severely fractured among eight established candidates who stubbornly refuse to drop out, creating a messy, unpredictable contest heavily focused on intra-party squabbling. Unlike Newsom's clear march to the governor position, this current division is threatening to split the liberal vote so thinly that two Republicans could actually advance from the top-two primary, potentially shutting Democrats out of the November general election entirely.

My Final Thoughts 

It is wild to think that in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one, we might see two Republicans facing off for governor this November. This situation highlights a massive disconnect between urban liberals and the rural conservatives who are successfully mobilizing behind their preferred candidates. If the Democratic party cannot figure out how to consolidate their base and appeal to the varying wants and needs of all Californians, they will only have themselves to blame for handing over the governor's office.

The fast and the curious-ly large urban pickup

Acura Integra, Outside of Yosemite, Spring 2025

I have more than a passing interest in classic cars, particularly those of the Japanese domestic market (See some “JDMs” here). I inherited this interest from my father, who has raised me in an exclusively Honda/Acura household. His affinity for Acura began in the 1980s when he lived and worked in Osaka, where he purchased a Honda Quint (now known as a first generation Acura Integra).

My father’s Integra was an original model three door coupe, with a four-cylinder engine that displaced 1.6L of standard 87 octane and produced about 91 horsepower at a base weight of 2,000 pounds. In the thin, often crowded streets of Osaka - and most of Japan, for that matter-  that compact size and its modest horsepower were more than sufficient for his needs. This design philosophy can be found in many JDM cars, with the informal gentleman’s agreement capping original JDM output at around 276 horsepower at the wheel.

Acura watch given to salesperson
for making quota, circa 1990s

Today, I also drive an Integra. It is ostensibly of the same lineage as the original production. (Read more about the fifth generation Integra here). However, despite the fact that my Integra is classified as a “subcompact,” it weighs 1,200 pounds more than the original JDM Integra, typically cruising around 3,200 pounds. Despite this (in my mind unnecessary and deeply upsetting) size update for modern tastes in cars, it remains one of the smallest vehicles on asphalt, with American markets now dominated by SUVs and pickup trucks.

As anyone who drives on country roads in America can attest, one of the common classes of vehicle on the road today is a full-size pickup; think the F-150, the Ram 1500, or the Chevrolet Silverado 1500. Read more about driving in rural spaces on this blog here. ]. Looking closer at the 2024 F-150 as an example, the standard powertrain is a 325Hp 2.7L V6, with the typical model weighing in around 5,500 pounds. That is by no means the top of the scale. Many non-commercial super pickups can go upwards of 7,000 pounds. (For example, read about the F-250.)

In many rural contexts, these vehicles serve legitimate irreplaceable needs. Pickups are necessary for anyone who has to haul in day-to-day life, whether from hunting. (Read more about hunting to eat on the blog here) or work, and their standard four wheel differential transmission is more suited for off road travel than a forward wheel drive or a rear wheel drive. However, these justifications simply do not apply to urban environments. Urban roads are well developed; urban spaces do not typically require hauling of loads in daily life.

Cultural factors help explain the popularity of these monster trucks in situations where their practicality is in question. Much has been said about the cultural ethos associating rural practices with country, blue collar work and conservative politics. Read more on this association. As mentioned, you can’t listen to a modern country playlist without hitting three allusions to a truck. Trucks are one of the most popular vehicle types, owing I believe some amount of success with this association.

That said, I have a serious interest in limiting these vehicles to urban environments. If vehicle choice was purely aesthetic, then I’d let it rest there, with the only discomfort being visual. However, this choice of vehicle is not harmless in an urban environment.

Larger vehicles increase the survival rate of their own occupants while increasing the mortality for others from a collision (A study about increasing vehicle sizes and lethality here). Increased fuel consumption, wear on roads, and congestion are negative externalities that are put onto the public. With every pound that a car carries, its wear on asphalt becomes exponentially greater).

Today, addressing pickups and other automobiles through regulation has regrettably become a culture war problem. Current contentions surrounding car emissions and sizing are much the same as the rural/urban divide elsewhere: idealistic urban elites are intruding on the necessities of rural life. Read more about rural contentions on emissions standards and the adoption of electric vehicles here and here. 

To address this issue in a less controversial way, I propose to localize vehicle regulation. Municipal policymakers should have greater authority to regulate vehicles purchased and used within counties, rather than this power being solely vested in the state and federal systems and resulting in deeply unpopular legislation between rural and urban areas. (One such example involving taxing larger vehicles at the state level here). As such, localized vehicle standards would no longer place unnecessary burdens on rural communities. At the same time, vehicle emission standards should remain federal and state, as air remains shared amongst both rural and urban areas and across state lines.

This increased municipal power could come in many forms. The simplest would be a increased municipal tax of some sort on the purchase and registration of larger vehicles in urban areas. The easiest way to implement this would be an excise "sin tax" on vehicles of a certain size that are deemed unnecessary outside of work purposes. Alternatively, or in addition, bylaws that regulate the usage of vehicles over a certain size in some areas such as parking lots and school zones would serve to decrease congestion and potential safety risks.

My final proposal is to allow the local importation of JDM vehicles that are not marketed in the United States. As these vehicles are often smaller, their fuel consumption and negative externalities are correspondingly smaller. Read about “Kei trucks,” a JDM only smaller pickup, here. Subsidies could also be incorporated into prices for subcompact automobiles and their drivers, preferably those who drive Hondas or Acuras.

By making these vehicle regulations local, cities can better manage their own safety, infrastructure, and environmental concerns without deepening the cultural divide that often accompanies broad, uniform mandates between the rural and urban. I am happy to report that I have no conflicts of interest in any of these proposals.

Acura Integra, Yosemite, Spring 2025

The burden of the "American Dream" on rural communities

Photo Credit - Chelsea Peng 2025 "The end of the American Dream and why it’s OK"

On March 14, the House Committee on Small Business held a hearing called “Empowering Rural America Through Investment in Innovation.” Subcommittee Chairman Jake Ellzey, a Republican representing Texas's 6th Congressional District (a mix of Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and rural counties like Navarro and Cherokee), told the room that “as the demand for AI accelerates, America’s digital infrastructure is rapidly expanding into rural communities.” He promised that for every data center job created, seven more would follow in the surrounding community.

I have spent this semester writing about technology arriving in rural America. The promise is always the same: innovation, jobs, progress. The pattern is also the same: the benefits flow out, and the costs remain.

Three posts, one pattern

In my first post, I wrote about a $25 billion AI data center planned for Tonopah, Arizona, population a few hundred. Backed by a billionaire venture capitalist and a Trump mega-donor, the project would consume as much electricity as a million homes and drain aquifers that residents depend on for drinking water. The tech consumers served by the facility live in cities. The residents of Tonopah got noise, light pollution, and a fight they lacked the political power to win.

In my second post, I stepped back from tech to look at the framing. I had caught myself thinking that rural investment came at urban expense. That zero-sum instinct turned out to be the wrong lens. The federal government spends $850 billion a year on defense and asked $1.8 billion for the Legal Services Corporation. The scarcity pitting rural against urban is a policy choice, not a fact of nature. Rural and urban working people have lost ground to the same forces and share the same interest in functional public services.

In my third post, I wrote about robotic strawberry harvesters arriving in Salinas Valley. Immigration enforcement had squeezed the farm labor supply. The federal government’s response was to lower guest worker wages, and then automation filled the gap. The robots cost $300,000 each, priced for corporate farms. Small growers and the farmworker communities who built Salinas for generations got nothing.

Each story has different characters and geography. But the structure is identical: federal policy creates or worsens a rural problem, and capital arrives promising solutions. The benefits accrue to investors/urban consumers and the people who already live there absorb the costs.

Photo Credit - Will Robinson 2020 "Is the American dream dead?"

The packaging

This pattern persists because it is wrapped in a story that Americans have been told their whole lives: that progress rewards hard work, that innovation lifts all boats, that the people who struggle simply need to adapt. This is the "American Dream," and I have come to believe it is one of the deepest sources of political paralysis in this country.

I said something like this in class a few weeks ago. I told Professor Pruitt and my fellow students that the American Dream is this country’s “original sin.” She pushed back, fairly, and pointed out that there are things about this country that are more original and more sinful. She’s right. Slavery, land theft, and genocide are the material foundations. But the American Dream is the legitimating story that makes those foundations look earned. It converts structural advantage into personal merit and structural disadvantage into personal failure.

I know this because I lived it. I grew up male, Mormon, white, healthy, and financially comfortable. My family believed fiercely in individual agency. I followed the rules and concluded that people whose lives were less "successful" than mine were in that position because of their own bad choices. It took college and a lot of unlearning to see that my “good choices” were only available because the structure was built for me.

The same logic operates at the community level. When a rural hospital closes after Medicaid cuts, residents blame the hospital, not the lawmakers who voted for the bill. When a farmer in Colorado threatens to mechanize rather than pay overtime, the framing is that labor protections killed the farm, not that the farm’s business model depended on paying workers less than the legal standard in every other industry. The American Dream teaches people to punch down and look away from the hand above them.

What would it look like to say no?

There are signs of resistance. At least 25 data center projects were cancelled across the United States in 2025 after community opposition, four times the number in 2024. Rural school voucher programs have been blocked by rural Republicans who understand that their public schools are the backbone of their communities. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew 10,000 people to Greeley, Colorado, a conservative town in Weld County, on a message of class solidarity across the rural-urban divide.

None of these are sufficient. But they share a feature that the American Dream framework lacks: they start from the premise that rural communities have the right to decide what happens to their land, their labor, and their resources. That premise is incompatible with a system that treats rural space as a site of extraction and rural people as obstacles to progress.

Congressman Ellzey’s hearing (referenced at the beginning of this post) promised rural America seven jobs for every data center. Nobody on the panel asked how many jobs, aquifers, and night skies those same communities would lose. Until that question gets equal time, the American Dream will keep doing what it has always done: blaming the most vulnerable among us for their poverty and lack of resources, while lionizing the most powerful people in this country as they get increasingly wealthy. 

Rural morality and the left

Western Norway

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2016)

Internationalism, the idea that people and states should organize across borders, is a popular organizing principle on the political left. It takes two related forms. Liberal internationalism promotes rule of law, open markets, and free trade as a path to peace through multilateral governance. Socialist internationalism emphasizes solidarity among workers across nations, rather than competition between them. Both tend to replace an emphasis on local community with an abstract political identity that isn’t rooted in any particular place. 

International governance creates a layer of authority that communities cannot meaningfully influence. The resulting cosmopolitan governing class (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “globalists”) are socially and geographically distant from communities affected by their policy. Meanwhile, international economic integration guts local economic prospects so that multinational firms can thrive. After China's accession to the World Trade Organization, imports of Chinese furniture surged, leading firms that once anchored the manufacturing economy of High Point to shut local factories and source production abroad

This process spreads similar models of education and culture, eroding distinct regional identities and traditions. In the name of internationalism, many have advocated for cultivating cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.” Within this frame, local or regional culture is something to be overcome, not preserved. Is rural culture something that needs to be overcome in pursuit of a more equal society? 

French philosopher Jean-Claude Michèa offers a critique of liberalism that bears directly on this question. Until recently his work was unavailable in English. Michael Behrent, a History Professor at Appalachian State University, published a collection of his works titled Toward a Conservative Left. Don’t let the title put you off. What the title evokes is the way in which Michèa combines a critique of capitalism with a suspicion of "progress". Michèa says little about American politics in his work, but his analysis maps uncomfortably well onto the contemporary Democratic Party, which has become a party of urban educated professionals. 

Michèa’s personal background is relevant too. Born in Paris in 1950, he was raised in public housing by parents who were both members of the French Communist Party. The Party was central to his childhood. It employed his parents, with his dad working as sports reporter for the Party newspaper. It was a community of working-class people who looked out for one another. Today, Michea lives on a farm in southwest France. 

At the center of Michèa’s work is Orwell’s concept of “common decency,” developed in the 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier.  For Orwell, common decency is the moral intuition observable in tight-knit communities built around face-to-face interaction. In his 1939 essay on Dickens, Orwell argues that Dickens owed his popularity to a rare ability to give comic, memorable expression to the native decency of the common man. It is the instinct “that makes a jury award excessive damages when a rich man’s car runs over a poor man.” 

Michèa takes this concept further,  giving it anthropological character. Working people, because of their way of earning a living and social status, tend to exhibit a form of solidarity and spontaneous ethics. Working people rely on one another out of necessity. It is a set of habits that arise through family life, neighborhood association, and shared work. Common decency requires social relations through which people experience themselves as dependent on and responsible for one another. Capitalism, Michèa argues, is breaking down this social fabric. As the market relentlessly expands into every area of life, relationships once governed by reciprocity become self-interested transactions. 

This maps directly with the concept of high density of acquaintanceship associated with rural communities. In a small agricultural community, a neighbor’s failed harvest is visible. Decency is not an abstract value, but a material reality that rural people navigate on a daily basis.  Michèa argues that modern society has removed people from the social relations that foster this common decency. 

Here is where Michèa’s argument becomes uncomfortable. He contends that economic liberalism, meaning the spreading of free markets, free trade, and global integration of markets-- are not in tension with cultural liberalism . He believes these two liberalisms actually operate in concert. He writes, “a right-wing economy cannot function in a lasting way without a left-wing culture.” It is well documented that economic liberalism has devastated rural communities by financializing land, offshoring manufacturing, and consolidating agricultural markets. 

Cultural liberalism, for Michèa, works in parallel. It elevates individual autonomy and the right to choose one’s lifestyle over inherited social norms or traditions. Institutions that once anchored rural life: stable family, religious practice, the local community, have all been delegitimized over time in the name of individual emancipation. Rural communities are left with a social and moral vacuum at a time when economic liberalism has taken away their material foundations. For Michèa this is not a coincidence, capitalism prefers autonomous individuals without a sense of rootedness to a place and an inherited way of life. The tech worker who relocates for opportunity is a more compatible economic subject than the farmer who will not leave because his family has worked the same land for three generations. 

While Michèa’s argument is not without its blind spots, he invites the left to take working class culture seriously. To be clear, I don’t believe the left should abandon a commitment to individual freedom. However, a politics aimed toward a more just society cannot organize against rural morality. To me, this is what is intended by the provocative title. The social fabric that allows for the cultivation of common decency is worth conserving.

Waterlogged boundaries, the case for bioregionalism, and its unfortunate demise

Fording a river, Grouse mountain, British Columbia, Summer 2021

If you’ve ever been in the Pacific Northwest, you've seen the local “uniform.” Amongst the water-resistant (nothing is waterproof!) Carhartt pants, flat-billed trucker hats, and colourful spectrum of flannels, there is a waterproof jacket in the armoury. This jacket must have a hood so that you do not need an umbrella, a sin that only a tourist would make.

A bad idea, Squamish mountain, British Columbia, Spring 2022

The jacket is necessary because in the wet winter months, any person caught on the scenic trails of Squamish (known for the Chief, one of the largest granite domes in the world) would think that Noah’s flood was upon him, that the sun would never reappear, and that rain has so consumed reality that any imagination of the world can only find a cloudy mist covering a canopy of pine trees. In short, the water cycle of the PNW calls for the jacket.

In contrast, in a place like the Central Valley, deciding how to dress requires taking into account the overhead sun and the dust. Therein lies the non-ironic donning of cowboy hats and boots respectively (A recent blog post about western apparel is here). Continue further east on the Interstate 70 past the plains and the Mississippi river and you will find the habit of tucking long sleeve shirts into pants, which are then tucked into socks, a necessity in the tick laden bushes of Appalachia. (A study from Nebraska Medicine about the migration of tick populations west).

Each of these clothing outfits make sense in the place where they are adopted. Sartorial culture reflects the ecosystem hydrological and biological of the region where people live. This understanding is one key tenet of bioregionalism. Bioregionalism (defined by one non-profit here) is a philosophy which holds that political systems should reflect naturally definable, local regions rather than artificial political boundaries. (Read more about this philosophy as taught by a Bay Area theatre here). Bioregions are drawn by the natural lines drawn by watershed boundaries, topography, as well as the socio-cultural human histories of the area.

10% water capacity, Lake Hensley, California, 2025

Bioregionalists seek several core goals: including matching political boundaries with the aforementioned bioregions; prioritizing the usage of local resources and materials; and building regional sustainability and supply chains rather than global ones. This local focus benefits the making of policy that is suited to local ecological needs, rather than the difficulty of federal or state systems that cannot possibly take account of all local conditions and ecosystems. (Read more about federal funding to rural water systems here)

Current political divisions force rural and urban communities into statewide policy frameworks that, through competing interests and compromise, can poorly fit all. Agricultural water use in arid basins is legislated alongside, and often in, coastal zones where the flow of rivers can power 98% of electrical grids (read more about BC Hydro here). Or consider the current issue of the banning of or restriction of gasoline vehicles being impractical in rural regions that remain dependent on generators and gasoline vehicles (read more here).

Currently, the rural-urban divide is often framed within a structural power antagonism, where cosmopolitan elites- with vastly greater urban resources- intrude on traditional rural communities. The physical distance between these two groups sharpens these perceived differences. These urban elites live far from rural denizens, often in ecosystems that are vastly different. Consider the common epithet, “coastal elite.” (Read more about water disagreements between the rural and the urban here and here).

As the reasoning goes, how could someone in the Bay understand the water struggles of the Central Valley? A bioregionalist approach would instead link governance between metropolitan and rural communities wherever and whenever they are linked by watersheds and water cycles requiring literal downstream cooperation.

Of course, bioregionalism is not without flaws. Even from this brief inventory of bioregions, readers will see issues with assuming histories and shared interests in fluid boundaries that are anachronistic, ambiguous, and would be contentious and complex to draw. Land-based identity idealizes lives that are pre-urbanization, occasionally even pre-industrialization, and is often isolationist and exclusionary of any political change as a result.

In a globalized economy, high technology requires supply chains that cannot be localized efficiently, or at all. Anything that would require national coordination (national defense, macroeconomic policy, large scale infrastructure projects) would be difficult if not impossible under bioregional governance. Of course, there is also the potential of extreme inequality between natural resource-rich and natural resource-poor regions. Without national redistribution and the needs of national and global economy, spatial inequality would be all but guaranteed.

I finish with a point about Cascadia, the former bioregionalist movement stronghold within the PNW that spanned from Juneau, Alaska to San Francisco. Prior to the 47th American president, most money spent within Cascadia, (defined here, as in my heart, as Oregon, Washington, British Columbia), remained within Cascadia. Now with rising tensions between the United States and Canada, this seemingly unbreakable cross-border relationship is strained by the Canadians' general boycott of American goods (read more). Alas, the Cascadian identity, nascent if it ever truly existed, has yielded to national lines for now.

Superbloom, California, 2017

The robots are coming to the Salad Bowl

Pro-immigrant demonstrators in Omaha, Nebraska. Photo Credit: NBC News

In June 2025, President Trump paused immigration raids on agricultural workplaces after Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned that farmers were growing uneasy about the crackdown. As this blog noted at the time, the pause was short-lived. By October, the Labor Department’s own filing in the Federal Register admitted the crackdown risked “supply shock-induced food shortages.”

Then the federal government made matters worse by lowering wages. A new H-2A  rule (the program sets a federal minimum pay rate for employers hiring foreign agricultural workers) cut the pay rate for guest farmworkers across the country. In California, the rate for unskilled workers dropped from $19.97 to $13.45 per hour, and the United Farm Workers sued. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually.

This is the context in which agricultural automation is arriving in rural California. The question is who does it serve and who does it displace?

The Salad Bowl goes synthetic

Salinas Valley, California (the “Salad Bowl of the World”) produces the majority of the nation’s lettuce, broccoli, and strawberries. Located in Monterey County, Salinas Valley is over 60% Hispanic or Latino, and the local economy depends on agricultural labor.

In 2025, a nonprofit called the Reservoir opened Reservoir Farms, the first on-farm robotics incubator in California, on 40 acres in Salinas. Backed by companies like John Deere and Driscoll’s (the berry company), the incubator provides startups with fabrication shops, pre-planted test fields, and access to commercial growers. It has since expanded to Sonoma County for vineyard automation.

A “vineyard robot” at work. Photo credit: Cornell Agritech

The startups coming to Salinas Valley build machines designed to do what farm workers currently do by hand. Israeli startup DailyRobotics is deploying robotic strawberry harvesters in California starting April 2026, claiming it works at two to three times the speed of human pickers.

One analysis estimated that strawberry automation alone could eliminate nearly 30,000 farmworker positions in California. The machines, which cost around $300,000 each, are priced for large-scale operations and out of reach for small family growers.

Fast advances in robotics means automated strawberry picking. Photo Credit: DailyRobotics

A manufactured crisis

The labor shortage driving this transition is real, but it is not natural. Over 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, according to the USDA and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has removed workers from the labor pool while cutting wages for the legal guest workers who remain. In Minnesota, for example, H-2A visa numbers dropped 12% in the first half of 2025.

A prior post on this blog documented this pattern through the 2008 Postville, Iowa raid: 389 arrests in a town of 2,500, the departure of another 1,000 immigrants, the loss of 7% of the county’s workforce, and the bankruptcy of the local factory. The void was eventually filled by a new immigrant workforce from Palau.

The pattern holds internationally. Another post on this blog examined Italy’s “Agro-Mafia,” where restrictive immigration policy has not reduced agricultural dependence on migrant labor but has driven it underground into exploitative networks where workers earn as little as 3 to 4 euros an hour. Punitive enforcement produces either exploitation or automation, depending on who has capital.

Who benefits?

Reservoir Farms says the right things about workforce transition. Its CEO has stated that “automation should augment the workforce, not replace it,” and the Reservoir has partnered with Hartnell College on retraining programs. But as one community organizer in Salinas noted: “We support training, but we also know not every displaced worker will become a robot mechanic.”

Farmworkers harvest strawberries at Lewis Taylor Farms in Georgia. Photo Credit: Lance Cheung

The farmworker communities that have sustained Salinas Valley for generations face a displacement that is social and cultural. Lisa R. Pruitt and Marta R. Vanegas have written about “urbanormativity,” which is the tendency for legal and policy frameworks to render rural populations invisible. Farmworkers in Salinas are doubly invisible: rural and immigrant, performing labor the nation depends on but does not want to see.

This echoes what I wrote about in a previous post on AI data centers in rural Arizona. In both cases, Silicon Valley capital arrives in rural spaces to solve what might be seen as urban problems. Data centers serve urban tech consumers, and harvesting robots serve urban grocery consumers. The costs (labor displacement and strained local resources) fall on the rural communities that host the infrastructure.

The choice ahead

Agricultural automation is probably inevitable. Some of these technologies could genuinely improve conditions for farmworkers. But the federal government that paused immigration raids in June, reversed course days later, cut guest worker wages in October, and admitted to “supply shock-induced food shortages” in a Federal Register filing has offered farmworker communities in places like Salinas no reason to believe help is on the way.

The robots are coming to the Salad Bowl. The question is whether anyone in Washington has thought about what happens to the people already there.

Taxation by theft: policing for profit in rural America

(c) Lisa Pruitt (2024)

As you cross the California-Nevada state line, you slow to exactly the speed limit from the California-15mph-above. Or at least I would encourage you to. Growing up near the state line, you get warned before nearly every trip east of the hazards of driving with a California plate. Expect to be pulled over, expect a ticket for a violation that may normally be a warning, and try to not look like a big-city liberal. 

While somewhat of a lighthearted joke among Californians, concerns about getting pulled over for going 5mph over the speed limit in rural Nevada reflect a real set of perverse incentives facing rural law enforcement. Often facing severe budget constraints, rural law enforcement may choose to act as a “reverse Robin Hood,” funding their agencies with assets seized from citizens. While excessive speeding tickets are perhaps the most prominent method of doing so, another source of funding comes from the process of civil asset forfeiture.

Excessive ticketing in rural America

As the tax base that generally supports law enforcement in rural areas has declined, small towns have increasingly come to view traffic tickets as an important revenue stream. To pick an extreme example, Georgetown, LA, a town with fewer than 500 residents, derived 92% of their income from traffic tickets. Georgetown is just one of many small towns that have made national headlines for their intensive ticket-writing efforts. 

A 2019 study by Governing identified a concentration of communities where fines exceeded 10% of general fund revenue, largely in rural parts of the South. In contrast, fines and forfeitures accounted for just 2% of general revenues among the 50 biggest U.S. cities. The study notes that high fine revenue is common in high-poverty rural areas throughout the country, especially in states with low property tax rates. See the below map published as part of their study for reference:

Credit: Governing.com (2019)

While residents of these areas suffer from higher fines, models indicate that police officers are more likely to issue tickets to drivers who are not from their community, especially when the driver would need to travel a long way from their residence to contest the citation. 

Another factor that may affect ticketing is state-to-state variation in the amount of fine revenue that a locality can keep, because many states impose a cap on the proportion of a municipal budget that may be derived from fines or mandating that such funds be appropriated to public schools.

An introduction to civil asset forfeiture 

In 2016, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the tour manager for a touring Burmese Christian musical act, Eh Wah, had $53,000 cash that they had raised for charity seized during a routine traffic stop. Eh Wah was interrogated for hours and then released without being charged with a crime, and also without his $53,000. By utilizing civil asset forfeiture, the Muskogee County Sheriff needed no arrest, just an entry noting that the Sheriff had taken “[p]ossession of drug proceeds.”

Civil asset forfeiture grants law enforcement officers the ability to seize property when they believe that property to be used in or derived from unlawful activity. Forfeiture proceedings are actions against an item of property itself, not an individual, leading to amusing casenames like the seminal US v. Forty-three Gallons of Whiskey, or the more recent US v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins.

Civil asset forfeiture proceedings starkly contrast with criminal proceedings. Notably, the owner of the seized property bears the burden of proving that their property was not used in or derived from unlawful activity. There is no right to an attorney unless a primary residence is being seized, and it is difficult to recover attorneys’ fees. Perhaps most shockingly, the innocence of the owner of property may not be a defense to an action against a seized item when it was used in the commission of a crime. This may apply to vehicles or real property used in the commission of a crime.

Though asset forfeiture has been used in admiralty law for most of U.S. history, it only became frequently used on land in the 1980s. In 1984, Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act (CCCA), which expanded the circumstances in which agencies could seize property and allowed local law enforcement agencies to cede credit for a seizure to a federal agency in a process known as an “adoptive seizure.” 

Before the CCCA was passed, many states had caps or limitations on seizure similar to those described earlier related to traffic fines. Adoptive seizures allow federal agencies to receive the proceeds of a seizure and then return up to 80% of those proceeds to the local agency through equitable sharing agreements, thus allowing local law enforcement to effectively bypass state limitations on retaining seized assets.

The circumstances under which adoptive seizure may be used were limited by then-Attorney General Eric Holder, but these limitations were rolled back under Jeff Sessions, Trump's first AG. Merrick Garland did not attempt to reinstate these reforms during his tenure as AG and in fact called for the expansion of forfeiture regarding cryptocurrency. This should be somewhat unsurprising as, then Senator, Joe Biden introduced the forfeiture provisions of the CCCA in 1983 and persuaded Democrats to support them. Trump has continued his support of civil asset forfeiture in his current term, advocating for the seizure of private drones monitoring ICE or Border Patrol activity. 

Many states have reformed their forfeiture procedures recently, with 17 states requiring that the government bear the burden of proof; 16 requiring criminal conviction for forfeiture; and 4 abolishing civil forfeiture entirely. A series of decisions in states where equitable sharing agreements are explicitly prohibited by statute are a promising sign of progress on the issue of state law circumvention, but it is worth noting that the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on these statutes. 

Forfeiture in rural America

The interaction between civil asset forfeiture and rural America is complex and somewhat obfuscated by lack of focus on rural areas in some scholarship, and the lack of governmental transparency surrounding forfeiture. Gross forfeiture is largest in urban areas, and it disproportionately affects racial minorities. 

While the victims of asset forfeiture are often urban, rural police departments appear more dependent on forfeiture funds than urban ones. Studies of data from the Texas AG’s office indicate higher per capita forfeiture proceeds in rural areas. Additionally, forfeiture is focused near active highways. While data analysis on the subject is scarce, some scholars believe that part of this dynamic is driven by the tendency of rural police departments to seize the property of people travelling by highway through the area, not locals. 

Welcome to Tenaha Credit: Texasescapes.com (2001)

One rural community on the Texas-Louisiana border, Tenaha, provides a striking example of this dynamic. The town sits on a heavily traveled highway between Houston and Louisiana and from 2006 to 2008 the town of roughly 1000 collected over $3 million in assets from motorists through asset forfeiture. David Guillory, an attorney who filed a federal lawsuit related to these seizures noted that of the 40 motorists he managed to contact, all but one was black. 

How to get away from policing for profit

Forfeiture and traffic fine abuse are symptoms of the same dual influences, declining tax bases and a history of racist policing. We have solutions available for the first issue, but they seem to often be impeded by politics influenced by the second. 

Allowing departments to retain all revenue from their seizures is one of the most clearly perverse incentives that I can imagine; yet states like Florida and Texas maintain such practices and seem unlikely to change them. Federal policy has deteriorated under Republicans in particular, but the Democrats have hardly been models of reform. While there is some pushback from conservatives on asset forfeiture, this sentiment seems inconsequential in light of Trump’s full throated support for the policy. 

Similarly, measures to cap or redirect traffic fine revenue are extremely effective at curbing abusive ticketing, but they are simply unpalatable to many conservative politicians. There is a strong correlation between low property taxes and high traffic citation revenue, and some politicians are quite happy to ticket out of state drivers rather than tax local homeowners.

Policing for profit is a problem that is entirely solvable. We simply need the political appetite.