Republican congressional candidate Kevin Kiley used the national conservative stage Saturday to forcefully denounce Gov. Gavin Newsom and paint California as a place where people “walk down streets that double as restrooms and injection sites.”
Kiley spoke Saturday at the CPAC convention in Dallas, a gathering that included some of the conservative movements’ biggest – and most controversial – figures, including former President Donald Trump. Trump endorsed Kiley during the primary campaign in May.
“Gavin Newsom’s California is not a model to the nation. It is a warning to the nation,” Kiley said as the audience cheered.
California “used to be a state where anyone could get ahead, the California dream,” Kiley said. “Now we’re the state everyone can’t wait to leave behind.”
Kiley, who faces Democrat Kermit Jones in November, has been a consistent, vocal critic of Newsom. Newsom has tried recently to boost his national profile, with a television ad in Florida criticizing that state’s conservative policies and newspaper ads in Texas criticizing Gov. Greg Abbott’s policies on abortion and guns.
Kiley was a candidate in last year’s California election attempting to recall Newsom. The governor won easily. Kiley received 3.5% of the vote.
Since then, Kiley, an assemblyman, has turned his attention to his bid for the new Third District House seat.
The district is being closely watched as Republicans need a net gain of four seats to win control of the House.
It goes from Plumas County in the northeast corner of the state, through Sacramento’s suburbs and south to Inyo County, between the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Nevada border. The district is rated by independent analysts as a likely Republican win in November.
CPAC is a gathering of conservatives that in recent years has become more identified with the Trump wing of the party. The national Democratic Party this week called the meeting “nothing but an extreme GOP cattle call.” The program has featured a parade of conservative stars, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., My Pillow CEO and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell and others.
Kiley spoke for five minutes Saturday and told the appreciative audience that while a Democratic-run legislature and State House caused California to decline, Newsom “brought that decline to a total freefall.:”
He cited Newsom’s Jan. 19, 2021 letter to Biden calling California “a model for what’s possible.”
He then rattled off a list of what he felt otherwise.
“You pay the highest gas taxes while driving over the deepest potholes. You pay for billions in homelessless spending as tent cities just multiply around you,” Kiley said.
“You’re told to take a shorter shower as water flows abundantly into the ocean,” he said, and “in the progressive utopia of California, you walk down streets that double as restrooms and injection sites.”
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