Why do California voters keep blaming a president for price tags set in Sacramento? That’s the question at the heart of a new American Thinker essay by Monica Showalter, who recounts a chance Sunday-morning encounter on a San Diego sidewalk with two young women who told her, unprompted, exactly what they hated about President Trump.
The list, as Showalter describes it, was familiar: gas prices, housing prices, the cost of living, affordability. The two — one with long blue braids, the other blonde and curly-haired, both in their early twenties — also cited the war with Iran and Trump’s ICE raids, which they described as the kidnapping of innocent people, including children. Showalter writes that she told them she shared their concern about Venezuela policy and about reports of cronyism benefiting Trump allies. The exchange, she says, briefly made the three of them feel like allies.
Then the conversation turned. One of the women said that while she disliked Trump, she liked Governor Gavin Newsom. Showalter pushed back, arguing that Newsom’s policies are why California is so expensive — noting that Arizona drivers pay roughly four dollars a gallon while Californians pay closer to six. The woman, she writes, paused.
What struck Showalter was not the pause itself but what it revealed: neither voter attributed any of the state’s high costs to state government. Instead, they credited state officials who blame Trump, treating that shared antipathy as a form of friendship. That dynamic, she argues, explains why California Democrats pin every problem on the former president and brand any Republican idea as “Trump” or “Trump-endorsed.” She points to Nithya Raman’smayor’s race against Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles and to Marni von Wilpert’s congressional challenge to longtime San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, contending that both Democrats lean on Trump associations even though Desmond and Pratt have no meaningful connection to him.
The Policy Ledger Behind the Price Tags
Showalter then pivots from anecdote to policy, cataloguing what she calls the real sources of California’s high cost of living — all of them state-level, none of them federal. Her first target is gasoline. She cites reporting that California produces its own gas, ships it to Arizona, and watches it sell there for two dollars a gallon less than at home. The culprit, in her telling, is Sacramento’s regulatory regime rather than anything out of Washington.
Electricity gets the same treatment. Quoting the California Post, she notes the state has among the highest retail electricity rates in the country — second only to Hawaii — despite being the fourth-largest electricity producer in the nation. The cause, the cited commentary argues, is a policy framework that elevates renewables over fossil fuels rather than pursuing an “all of the above” mix that would keep prices down and the grid reliable. Since California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard began in 2002 with a target of 20 percent renewable energy by 2017, Showalter writes, the goals have only grown more aggressive — and the ratepayers have absorbed the bill.
Farm labor is the third leg of her argument. Under a recently signed state law, farmworkers covered by the federal H-2A guest worker program will see minimum pay rise to $19.75 an hour next year, with the same standard applying to domestic workers in comparable jobs. Farmers warn that consumers will pay more at the grocery store as a result. Showalter insists this is not general inflation of the kind the Trump administration is fighting through monetary and fiscal policy — it is a direct consequence of state wage mandates, and reversing the policy would reverse the price.
She calls the farm measure particularly damaging. In her account, more farms will shut down or relocate to Texas and Mexico, following the departure of large operations like the Del Monte peach canneries, the abandonment of crops in the fields and the closure of wineries. She speculates that the shift will accelerate automation, invite cartel control of Mexican produce as that supply chain grows more valuable, and intensify labor unrest as jobs shrink and workers face competition or immigration enforcement. Because California’s agricultural output is so large, she warns, the ripple effects may be felt nationwide.
The unifying thread, Showalter writes, is that none of these costs trace back to Trump. They trace back to the Democrats who run California — officials who, in her phrasing, don’t even have a money-printing press to blame for inflation but manage to raise prices anyway.
What the Column Gets at — and What It Leaves Open
The essay is less a piece of reporting than a piece of persuasion, and it wears that label openly. Its evidence is a single morning’s conversation, a pair of social media and newspaper items, and the author’s own inference about Democratic messaging strategy. The leap from two voters on a sidewalk to a statewide theory of political behavior is a large one, and Showalter does not pretend otherwise — she presents the encounter as illustrative rather than scientific.
Still, the underlying policy claims are checkable and worth taking seriously as arguments. California’s electricity rates are indeed among the highest in the nation, and the state’s gasoline market operates under unique regulatory and tax conditions that separate it from neighbors like Arizona. The farmworker wage law is real and its price effects are exactly the kind of question economists debate. Whether those costs are best understood as the fruit of Democratic governance or as the product of geography, market structure and national trends is precisely the dispute the column is trying to force.
What Showalter wants, she writes, is another chance to make her case directly — to show the two women that a vote for Steve Hilton would lower their living costs and put homeownership within reach. Her worry is that the anti-Trump sentiment they’ve absorbed makes that pitch nearly impossible to deliver.
That is the missing link she keeps circling: voters who feel the squeeze of high prices and vote for the party that, in her view, manufactured it. Whether that diagnosis is right or wrong, the column’s core observation — that California’s cost-of-living crisis is largely a state policy story, not a federal one — is one that voters in both parties may eventually have to confront.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/california-s-low-information-voters-and-the-missing-link-in-their-conclusions/