Sonoma County sorts out divisive presidential campaign

Ariel Kelley, who runs a Healdsburg nonprofit and has two children, felt relieved by Joe Biden’s triumph in a torturous election that exposed the nation’s seemingly indelible divides.

But Kelley, also a winner in Sonoma County races that injected diversity into local politics, hailed the end to what she called President Donald Trump’s politics of animosity and prejudice that she found threatening.

“I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for four years,” said Kelley, 38, a Healdsburg councilwoman-elect. “As a Jewish woman living in America, I’ve never felt so unsafe.”

Joanna Paun, 42, a Petaluma City Schools board member, said Friday she was “feeling very hopeful today” — about 24 hours before Biden’s wins in Pennsylvania and Nevada locked up a majority of Electoral College votes.

“There was never any doubt he was a racist,” she said, recalling Trump’s refusal to disavow white supremacists.

As votes were tallied this week and showed Biden moving closer to claiming victory on Saturday, a chorus of Sonoma County residents and elected officials expressed hope that Biden’s election would herald a return to a more civil public discourse. Yet at the same time they recognized the record-breaking vote totals piled up by each candidate indicate that America remains polarized.

Democratic Rep. Mike Thompson and Jared Huffman, who both represent parts of Sonoma County, hailed the outcome, with Huffman suggesting Biden could win the popular vote by 6 million or 7 million and end up with more than 300 votes in the Electoral College.

“That is not a close election,” he said, adding that Trump’s tenure will go down as “an impeached, one-term presidency and no one can dispute that.”

Trump will be the fourth one-term president since the end of World War II, preceded by Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.

“It’s a repudiation of Trump and his administration,” Thompson said, calling the president’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge his loss “mind-boggling.”

But the reality is that while Biden’s 74 million votes to date are the most ever for a U.S. president, Trump’s 70 million were the second most, just ahead of the 69 million for Barack Obama in 2008. More Americans voted for Trump to have a second term in office than the coalition that propelled him past Hillary Clinton in 2016, indicating the president has a broad and loyal base of supporters.

“That’s a shock to the system,” said Rabbi George Gittleman of Santa Rosa’s Congregation Shomrei Torah. “Many of us are shocked that half the country finds this president acceptable for another four years.”

“I was hoping the country would repudiate his behavior regardless of party affiliation,” he said. “I was naive.”

In his victory speech Saturday night, Biden acknowledged America’s divisions and pledged to work to heal them.

“I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify,” Biden said from Wilmington, Delaware. “Who doesn’t see red and blue states, but a United States. And who will work with all my heart to win the confidence of the whole people.”

Biden’s words stood in contrast with the recent actions of President Trump, who has blasted some Democratic governors’ response to the coronavirus pandemic and moved to withhold federal aid from liberal California, a decision he later backtracked on. Biden gleaned a bit over 50% of the popular vote nationwide, with Trump getting close to 48%.

Unsurprisingly, Biden steamrollered Trump in liberal Sonoma County with 76% of the vote, leaving the billionaire former reality TV star with 22%.

Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 among the county’s registered voters, while 34% of voters nationwide identify as independents, 33% as Democrats and 29% as Republicans, according to Pew Research Center surveys.

Reflecting Democrats’ local domination, Thompson and Huffman each won reelection Tuesday with 78% of the vote.

Huffman of San Rafael tempered his assessment of the national vote, acknowledging that Democrats shed part of their House majority and failed to capture the Senate, a goal that would — along with the presidency — have given them unified control of the federal government.

“No question about it, this is a glass half full,” he said. “We had hoped it would be a lot more than half.”

“We did not win every battle, but we did win the war,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said Friday. One House leader called the party’s position “a fragile majority.”

Thompson of St. Helena noted that Democrats had gained a net total of 41 seats in the 2018 midterm election, including 30 in districts Trump had won two years earlier, and taking control of the House. “No surprise we lost a bunch of seats,” he said.

Democrats are looking at a net loss of seven to 11 seats, according to a Politico report Friday.

Herman J. Hernandez, a Latino community leader from Guerneville, said he, too, was expecting a Biden landslide on Election night.

But Hernandez, 69, founder of the influential Latino group Los Cien, said it will be a relief to have a chief executive “who talks about what he can do for the country instead of himself.”

Top priority for the Biden administration should be taking control of the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted Latinos, Hernandez said.

More than 5,500 Latinos have been stricken by COVID-19 infections, accounting for 72% of cases and just 27% of the county’s population.

Hernandez hailed voter approval by a 2 to 1 margin of Measure P, which will boost the budget and authority of the county’s law enforcement oversight agency.

The measure put on the ballot by county supervisors drew opposition from Sheriff Mark Essick, three law enforcement organizations and the Sonoma County Farm Bureau.

A decade ago such a measure would not have had a chance, Hernandez said, but the county is changing “and I think it’s good.”

Law enforcement accountability is “part of a national movement,” he said.

Ruben Scott, president of the Sonoma County NAACP chapter, said he was optimistic Biden would be “the president we need going forward for the people — all parties, all sides.”

“We are still fighting for our constitutional rights, for equality,” said Scott, 43, who won an award from the national NAACP last month commending his role in reviving the local chapter.

Scott said he prefers to frame the struggle for equality as a “social class issue” — the haves and the have-nots — rather than a racial concern.

Black people account for about 2% of the county’s population.

Edelweiss Geary, the county’s Republican Party chairwoman, offered a terse comment on the presidential race. “I think there is a tremendous amount of fraud and I hope it can be taken care of in the courts,” she said.

Trump has offered no proof of his repeated claims of election fraud and many of the challenges recently filed by his campaign have been tossed out by judges.

Geary was not surprised by voter approval of Measure P, which the local GOP opposed. “We’ve been hearing a lot about police brutality,” she said.

Nor was she surprised by the success of eight county and city tax measures on the ballot, acknowledging that residents who feel government services are substandard are inclined to “put more money into them.”

The alternative view, she said, is that “the management of our money is not done well. I don’t think paying higher taxes assures better management.”

Tuesday’s voting was notable for injecting diversity into local government, including in Healdsburg.

Kelley, a county planning commissioner who is white, finished first, with newcomer, Skylaer Palacios, 25, of Latino, Black and indigenous descent, in second place.

Palacios, a youth counselor at a foster care nonprofit in Sebastopol, is the fourth person of color to serve on the council in the city’s 153 years.

Councilman Ozzy Jimenez, 33, a Latino appointed to the council following former Mayor Leah Gold’s resignation in June, was the third.

Including Mayor Evelyn Mitchell, Healdsburg’s incoming council will have three women and three members under 40 — Kelley, Palacios and Jimenez. Jimenez is openly gay.

“I think to have a true democracy we need diverse representation,” said Palacios, who thinks the county has “turned a page from white male leadership.”

She was the second Black Miss Sonoma County in 2014.

The incoming council needs to figure out “how we heal as a community,” Kelley said, in the wake of Gold’s resignation triggered by her comment in a June virtual council meeting that Healdsburg had no need to review the city Police Department’s policies.

Coming in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota the month before, the comment prompted outrage that led Gold to resign under pressure, and in August Councilmen Shaun McCaffery and Joe Naujokas declined to run for reelection.

Instead of facing three white male incumbents, Kelley and Palacios ran in a six-person race with three open seats and only one incumbent, David Hagele, who was relected.

In Rohnert Park, Jackie Elward, 41, became the first Black woman on the council by beating Jake MacKenzie, 81, a six-term incumbent, in the city’s first district election.

Elward, a mother of three who grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said she would always respect what MacKenzie has done for the city “but at the same time we need to have a rollover.”

A Biden supporter, Elward said she hoped the election “will define who we are as Americans, united Americans.”

Trump was out of line for disparaging soldiers, disabled people and “calling our doctors idiots,” she said.

“Nobody should talk the way he does about people,” Elward said. “That sends a message to our children.”

The Rev. Bev Spears, an ordained American Baptist Church minister and member of Santa Rosa’s Unitarian Universalist Congregation, said she gained appreciation for the national divide from the large red patches on the electoral map showing Trump’s support across the country and hearing murmurs of potential civil unrest.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 100 people Thursday during a peace vigil at Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square, Spears said our nation’s extreme polarity was unsustainable.

“I really do believe what connects us is greater than what divides us, but we just haven’t been able to get to what connects us because of all the rhetoric of fear and hate,” Spears said. “We just have to find a way to bridge that gap, and I think we can, but we just have to turn down this boiling water.”

Gaining an appreciation for other people’s condition, including their struggles, is the best way to connect, she said.

“What we know about each other, what we see, it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” she added. “Most of what a person is, it’s underneath the ocean. If we could just stay still long enough maybe we could see each other deeper.”

Rabbi Gittleman said the “American psyche” is deeply divided.

“These two halves of the country do not see things as one,” he said. “It’s not just CNN versus Fox News, it’s two disparate sides of America.”

“If America is going to continue as a democracy, survive the pandemic, cope with climate crisis and somehow be a great country we’re going to have to come together,” Gittleman said.

Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez contributed to this report, which also includes information from the Associated Press. You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-888-9149 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.