The region has long been a punching bag for Donald Trump and his allies, who blame Democratic leadership for things like smash-and-grab robberies and homelessness.
“If you want to know what America would be like under a President Kamala Harris, go visit her hometown of San Francisco,” Congressman Kevin Kiley — a California Republican whose district covers most of the Sierra Nevada — said on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday. Harris was, in fact, born in Oakland and raised in Berkeley.
‘Time and time again’
For Oakland-based journalist Liam O’Donoghue, the reason why conservative commentators continue to invoke — and attack — the Bay Area is clear: The region is a national symbol for progressive policies, he said.
“Anytime there’s a failure or a problem in the Bay Area, they use that to extrapolate and say, ‘Oh, this is the reason why liberalism is bad,’” said O’Donoghue, who also hosts the Bay Area history podcast East Bay Yesterday. “We’ve seen this time and time and time again.”
Two days before Biden announced he was leaving the race, O’Donoghue urged his East Bay Yesterday audience to “defend the Bay Area” from “a coordinated campaign to besmirch” the region for political ends.
He wasn’t the only one: Oakland-based writer Abraham Woodliff, who runs the popular Bay Area-focused meme account realbayareamemes, warned his Instagram followers that same day that “If Kamala Harris ends up replacing Biden, the media is going to start attacking the Bay Area hard.”
“People should consider the message that they want to spread about the Bay Area,” O’Donaghue told KQED. “When they’re talking to their relatives or arguing with their uncles on Facebook, be ready to have your examples of why you love the Bay and what you want to share about it.”
So, given the renewed focus that Republican campaign messaging — and Democratic too — will have on the Bay Area over the next 100 days until Election Day, we’ve brought together just some of the claims already heard from both sides to explore their accuracy.
We’ll keep updating this story with new claims — with fact-checks — as they’re made, and if you’ve seen a claim about our region that you’d like us to clarify, you can submit it below.
Immigration and sanctuary cities
Ever since his first 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has blamed immigrants lacking permanent legal status for almost every societal ill in the United States. “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land,” he said in his speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last week.
In a memo released on Monday, the Trump campaign linked Harris directly with the immigration issue, stating that during her time as vice president, she had “helped fuel the invasion at our southern border.” But an attack ad from the Republican Party’s official X account went further, claiming that during her time as a prosecutor in San Francisco, “Harris allowed illegal immigrant drug dealers to enter job training and have their criminal records wiped clean.” The attack ad also states that “One of the illegal immigrants Harris released went on to steal an SUV and ran down a young woman, seriously injuring her.”
The “job training” in question refers to “Back on Track,” a program launched by Kamala Harris in 2005 when she was district attorney for San Francisco. Back on Track provided professional and personal development to young people ages 18–30 convicted for low-level drug trafficking with the aim of providing alternatives to selling drugs and preventing participants from committing the same crime in the future. During its initial run, Back on Track reported that less than 10% of its participants ended up committing the same crime after completing the program.
One of the participants was Alexander Izaguirre, an immigrant lacking permanent legal status, who in 2009 was accused of robbing an SF woman of her purse. According to reports, Izaguirre then jumped into a nearby SUV driven by an unidentified accomplice, who then ran down the woman and fractured her skull. Under Harris, the SF District Attorney’s Office later told ABC7 that they were not aware that Izaguirre lacked permanent legal status because the program did not ask for participants’ immigrant status.
It’s not the first time that the Trump campaign has specifically targeted the Bay Area’s immigration population for political gain. In 2015, Kate Steinle was fatally shot at San Francisco’s Pier 19 when a bullet from a gunshot by José Inez García Zárate nearby ricocheted off the ground and hit Steinle. García Zárate was in the country without legal status and had a criminal history, but the San Francisco sheriff had released him from jail shortly before the shooting despite a federal immigration request to detain him so he could face deportation proceedings.
“This is an absolutely disgraceful situation, and I am the only one that can fix it,” Trump said in 2015 as part of his 2016 presidential campaign, blaming San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy, which blocks local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration agencies.
Before the Trump campaign pins this one on Harris: San Francisco first adopted a sanctuary city policy in 1989 — long before Harris entered politics. The city enacted the policy thanks to a widely organized grassroots effort led by organizers from the city’s Latino and Asian communities, who have consistently supported it ever since.
Homelessness and substance abuse
This one is a popular attack line from Republicans: Point to the Bay Area’s unhoused population as proof that the region is in complete and utter decay.
Last summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — then an aspiring Republican presidential candidate — came to San Francisco to film a campaign ad, pointing to one littered street corner in the Tenderloin as proof that the city had “really collapsed.”
It’s absolutely true that Bay Area cities have frequently struggled to provide adequate shelter to their unhoused population. In some cities, like Oakland, homelessness has continued to grow in the past few years despite record investments from both local and state governments in affordable housing and drug treatment efforts.
However, it would be incorrect to attribute homelessness in the Bay Area to a single reason. The work of dozens of Bay Area journalists over the years — including KQED’s very own Housing desk — has shown that homelessness is caused by multiple factors, including insufficient affordable housing, stagnant wages and a shrinking social safety net. We’ve also debunked persistent myths about unhoused communities, including false notions that all homeless people abuse substances or reject work opportunities.
And there isn’t any unified “Bay Area approach” to unhoused communities, either. If you’ve followed Bay Area politics long enough, you know that there are deep differences among local leaders on how to tackle homelessness, which ranges from investing millions in temporary housing units — like what we saw this year in San José — to pushing for more aggressive and punitive sweeps of homeless encampments, like what is now happening in San Francisco.
Crime and retail theft
In 2020, Trump branded himself as “the law and order candidate” and blasted Democrat-led cities as crime-ridden national embarrassments. This time around, he’s doubling down on that message, focusing on retail theft.
“You see these gangs of hundreds of young — usually young people — go and attack a department store … in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Chicago, and they run in by the hundreds, and they’re running out carrying refrigerators and carrying air conditioners and big stuff,” Trump said at a speech in Arizona last month.
Since 2020, multiple videos have gone viral of groups of people robbing stores in the middle of the day and fleeing the scene with law enforcement nowhere to be seen. Several of these robberies have taken place in Bay Area cities but also are seen in less historically liberal areas of California, like the 2022 smash-and-grab in a T-Mobile store captured on camera in Orange County. Thieves go after big-name stores like Neiman Marcus but also target smaller family businesses, as in the case of an Oakland jewelry store owned by an elderly couple who, in April of this year, lost almost everything in a smash-and-grab robbery.
Republican officials have already linked these robberies to Harris. On Sunday, California State Assemblymember Joe Patterson wrote on X that “Kamala Harris is largely responsible for the increased retail theft and drug abuse you see today. She wrote the insanely misleading ballot title and summary for Prop 47.”
Proposition 47 is a statewide ballot measure passed by voters in 2014 that reduced certain theft and drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. In California, the attorney general does, in fact, prepare a title and summary for proposed ballot initiatives, and that’s what Harris did for Proposition 47, which in the 2014 ballot was named “Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative.”
Did Harris act in a way biased in favor of Proposition 47? There’s no evidence to make that claim: Harris did not take a position for or against the ballot measure, something progressives criticized her for. What’s more, these specific kinds of smash-and-grab thefts are also felonies that remain unaffected by Proposition 47, although that hasn’t stopped other politicians from linking the two.
As for a broader spike in shoplifting in California that both Patterson and Trump point to — that story is also a little more complex.
Earlier this month, the Little Hoover Commission — an independent state oversight commission — released a report tracking retail theft across California (PDF). The commission found that while reports of retail theft had indeed increased since 2019, they not only remained on par with numbers from the 2010s, but they were even lower than the 2000s and 1990s. The bump in theft around 2020–21 also happened in all other 49 states, according to the FBI data obtained by the commission. (An important caveat: the commission could only track reported incidents of shoplifting and commercial burglary and acknowledges that an important chunk of data could potentially be missing.)
Data aside, public perception is much more focused on retail theft than ever before, thanks to how newsrooms cover retail theft — in addition to the compelling nature of viral footage on social media. According to the Center for Just Journalism, which promotes best practices in the industry, news outlets nationwide published around 200 stories mentioning “organized retail crime” or “organized retail theft” in 2019. Just two years later, that number had tripled, a rate far outpacing the actual pandemic-era crime bump.
Big-name retailers used the narrative to justify closing locations across the Bay Area. Walgreens, for example, closed five stores in San Francisco in 2021, blaming theft, but an analysis of San Francisco Police Department data later found that other factors were likely to have also played a role, including competition from online shopping, reduced foot traffic and an oversaturation of Walgreens locations within the city.
“Maybe we cried too much last year,” James Kehoe, chief financial officer for Walgreens, said in an earnings call last year, admitting that the company may have overstated how much theft actually happened.
Tell us: What other claims about the Bay Area have you heard in the run-up to the 2024 election?
Use our form below to tell us what you’re hearing. What you submit will make our reporting stronger and help us decide what to cover here on our site and on KQED Public Radio, too.
