Report: California Democrats Ignore Crime, Homelessness at State Convention

Crime and homelessness are among the top concerns of California voters — but Democrats ignored them at their recent statewide convention, preferring instead to focus on what they called Republican-led attacks on “democracy.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday, in “California Democrats avoid discussing crime and homelessness at state convention”:

California voters are sending a strong message when it comes to crime and homelessness: They’re ticked off and they want more help. Now.

But is the California Democratic Party listening? Or are its members too busy arguing among themselves?

Few top California Democrats at the state party’s virtual convention Saturday mentioned crime or homelessness or acknowledged their impact. Fewer still mentioned rising inflation. Instead, many focused on the ongoing international crisis in democracy — from voting rights in the U.S. to the war in Ukraine.

…

[T]t is questionable from the tone of the weekend’s convention whether Democrats are seeing the gathering storm clouds: 54% of registered California voters feel that the state is moving in the wrong direction while only 36% believe it is headed the right way — down 10 points from just six months ago, according to a Berkeley IGS Poll released last month.

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California revealed that voters in the state believe homelessness (#2, at 13%) and crime (#4, at 7%) are among the top issues in the state (#1 was the coronavirus and #3 was the economy).

Democrats nationwide have tried to argue that Republicans are a threat to democracy, after arguing for nearly four years that the democratic election in 2016 should be overturned because of a false conspiracy theory about Russian “collusion.”

Specifically, Democrats point to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, which participants viewed as an effort to protect democracy; and to voting reforms in Republican-led states, which supporters view as an effort to protect voting from fraud.

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.