Conservative radio host Larry Elder told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday evening that he would welcome the prospect of President Joe Biden campaigning for incumbent Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in the recall election.
Biden issued a message of support for Newsom earlier this month.
Vice President Kamala Harris, a former U.S. Senator from the state, will campaign with Newsom in the San Francisco Bay Area on Friday.
(Newsom has reciprocated the support by telling reporters that he is “incredibly proud” of Biden, even after the Afghanistan disaster began to unfold.)
Elder spoke exclusively to Breitbart News after an event addressing hundreds of supporters in Woodland Hills, CA:
I’ll believe it when I see Joe Biden come here. I’m not sure he’s going to. I understand he’s supposedly going to come here to campaign on behalf of Gavin Newsom. His popularity now is in the low forties — I think I saw 41%. Most Americans don’t even believe he’s home — that somebody else is in charge. So it’s going to backfire. But let him bring it in. Let him have him come in, and try to defend Gavin Newsom’s record on crime, and on homelessness, and on the outrageous cost of living, and on the way he ignored science and shut down the state to the point where a third of small businesses are gone forever. Let Joe Biden make that case for him. I want him to come here. Let him do it. And out of all the major political figures in America, Gavin Newsom’s one of the few who’s praised the way he handled the Afghan crisis. And it has been a disaster after a disaster, one of the worst foreign policy mistakes America has ever made. So if Joe Biden wants to come here and lend his presence to California, I welcome that opportunity. But I don’t believe he’s going to do it.
Elder also said the same about Kamala Harris, noting she had boasted about her support for Biden’s Afghanistan policy. “It’s a debacle. It’s a debacle on the border — she was supposed to be in charge of the borders, too,” he noted.
He said that there was a “good chance” voters angry at Biden’s mismanagement of the Afghanistan withdrawal would turn out to vote against Gov. Newsom as a statement of disapproval against the administration. And he also commented on the strong support among Latino voters for Newsom’s recall, noting it was “primarily because of school choice” and the rise in crime.
“Hispanics are tired of being taken for a ride,” Elder said. “They want choice … and they’re aware the teachers’ union are the biggest impediment to that. … Hispanics are rethinking their allegiance to the Democratic Party, and I think blacks are, too.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.