Erik Chalhoub here. Last week, I attended Mic’d Up at the Press Club, where Dr. Susan Swick of Ohana Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health spoke about mental fitness, an appropriate topic given the talk was two days after the election.
She mentioned that a major source of uncertainty had now lifted from the nation—we now know who will be the next president of the United States, after months, even years, of worried speculation from all sides.
Granted, now there’s a different cause of uncertainty gripping the nation. Will the president-elect make good on his promises during the campaign?
For the next couple of months until inauguration, pundits will come up with theories as to why the presidential election turned out the way it did. On Nov. 8, a panel discussion at CSU Monterey Bay for the State of the Region, a day-long event organized by the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership, attempted to paint a picture of what led to the results.
Kristin Olsen-Cate, a former California State Assembly Minority Leader, said she felt Vice President Kamala Harris was put into a tough position when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race so late.
“Most of what she talked about was anti-Trump this, anti-Trump that,” she said. “I think it backfired. Many average Americans felt like they were being treated as bad people. Trump spoke to those people in a way that resonated with them.”
Olsen-Cate, noting that she is no longer registered as a Republican, said Trump spoke about “bread and butter issues,” namely cost of living. Because of that, Santa Cruz County Supervisor Zach Friend, who moderated the discussion that also included Tom White of Majority Advisors, said it was an uphill battle for the Democrats upon reflection.
“The anger on the bread and butter issues was so strong, I’m not convinced any Democrat would’ve won this presidency,” he said.
White said had Biden stayed in the race, he would have expected California to lose a handful of Assembly seats, as the turnout and enthusiasm among the state’s Democrat voters would have been “exceptionally low.”
“Vice President Harris did as great a job as she could in a very short timeframe,” he said. “The Harris campaign was a plane taking off as they were still loading luggage. You can’t do that.”
It’s been a week since the election, and at least locally, things are looking much less uncertain.
The next results for Monterey County are scheduled to be released tomorrow, Nov. 13, and it appears most races (but not all) are set with large margins—school bond measures are mostly sailing toward approval, while a Pacific Grove City Council seat flipped as more votes were counted and the District 3 Monterey City Council race remains too close to call with just 12 votes separating the candidates.
As is tradition at the Weekly, we call as many candidates as we can on the morning of Election Day to ask them a series of questions about their campaigns and what they plan on doing to unwind.
There’s also one oddball question, as a way to add some needed lighthearted humor in these times—if you ever wanted to know which candidate believes in ghosts, now you can find out.