‘Oakland is already burning under her watch,’ the spokesman for the recall effort told National Review. ‘It’s a city on fire.’
Sheng Thao insisted she knows the fear her fellow Oaklanders experience in the troubled Bay Area city where crime remains stubbornly high and a consistent concern.
“I’ve had my car broken into, and I too felt angry. I’ve had my house broken into while my son was home, and I too felt scared,” the embattled mayor said.
Speaking in the Oakland City Council chamber in mid October for her state of the city address, the 39-year-old mayor said the safety of Oakland residents is “the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning. And it’s the only thing on my mind when I fall asleep at night.”
“I want to say very clearly that community safety remains and is my top priority,” she said.
Thao is now advocating for increasing the number of police officers on the streets, investing in crime-fighting technology, and creating a more responsive 911 system.
“It’s time,” she said, “to get serious about cleaning up our streets.”
True enough. But time may be quickly running out for Thao, a far-left progressive who just a few years back supported slashing the police budget, reimagining what policing should look like, and investing in unarmed “violence interrupters” and other public-safety alternatives.
Less than two years into her first four-year term, Thao is facing a flood of criticism over her leadership. On Tuesday, she could be the first mayor of The Town to be recalled if a simple majority of voters agrees to oust her. Polls indicate that is likely.
Thao’s opponents allege that she is dishonest and incompetent, and that she is responsible for accelerating the city’s decline.
“Oakland is already burning under her watch. It’s a city on fire,” Gail Harbin, the recall spokeswoman, told National Review. She said that if Thao continues to lead the city for another two years, “we won’t have anything left.”
Thao and her supporters contend that the recall is unfair and “undemocratic” and risks plunging Oakland into “political chaos” just as the city is turning a corner. They note that the city’s troubles long predate Thao’s tenure, and they say she’s making progress.
But Thao has flailed in the face of the recall, pointing blame for her political troubles at “millionaires and billionaires,” nefarious coal-industry investors opposed to the Green New Deal, and, of course, all the “radical right-wing forces” in deep-blue Oakland who’ve “built the rules to protect and preserve their power and maintain dominance over the rest of us.”
The effort to recall Thao comes amid rising frustrations over the high and persistent levels of crime in California’s eighth-most-populous city.
Restaurant chains like In-N-Out and Denny’s closed their Oakland locations this year, specifically mentioning “ongoing issues with crime” and the “safety and well-being” of their customers and employees. Other chains have closed their dining rooms, because “some people sometimes make trouble,” a Taco Bell employee told a KRON4 reporter in March.
Major employers, including Clorox and Kaiser Permanente, hired additional security guards to protect their workers and urged employees not to venture out for lunch.
Rental-car companies warned customers against refueling near the airport, lest they risk being robbed by thieves who target tourists. Earlier this year, a construction crew refused to finish filling potholes because of safety concerns. In at least one instance, the city replaced broken traffic lights at an intersection with stop signs because homeless people kept stealing the copper wires and tampering with an electrical box.
But while crime has received the bulk of the attention, particularly at the national level, the recall is about more than that. Oakland is also facing a serious budget crisis that risks cuts to key services, including public safety. And some Oaklanders are upset over the city’s bungled negotiations with the Oakland Athletics baseball team, which plans to move to Las Vegas in a few years and will play at a minor-league stadium in Sacramento in the meantime. (While A’s fans were reeling over losing their team, Thao’s chief of staff made a tone-deaf statement to a Las Vegas reporter, saying the A’s “won’t be missed” in Oakland.)
Concerns about Thao’s integrity intensified in June after the FBI raided her home. Thao hasn’t been officially accused of wrongdoing and the reasons for the raid remain fuzzy; it may be connected to a probe into potential campaign-finance violations and the political influence of a powerful local family, according to news reports.
“It’s easy to focus on [Thao’s] recall, easy to focus on her plight, but you have to look at Oakland in a larger context in the Bay Area, and the larger context of California,” said Bill Whalen, a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution, a free-market think tank at nearby Stanford University. “Voters here are not in a very happy mood.”
Whalen suggested that the Thao recall effort in Oakland is part of a pattern in the Golden State, starting with the failed recall of Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021 and followed by the successful recall of San Francisco’s far-left prosecutor Chesa Boudin in 2022.
San Francisco voters also ousted three progressive school-board members in 2022, overwhelmingly passed a pair of tough-on-crime ballot measures in March, and could trade in their mayor, London Breed, for a more moderate leader in November. In Los Angeles, voters appear poised to dump ultra-progressive district attorney George Gascón.
In addition to the Thao recall, the county’s far-left, soft-on-crime prosecutor, Pamela Price, is also facing a recall in November, which the San Francisco Chronicle has endorsed.
“Voters have long felt the state is on the wrong track, and I think they’re starting to now focus on their own communities,” Whalen said. “This is a sour electorate.”
But does Thao deserve blame for Oakland’s troubles after less than two years as mayor?
Oakland’s struggles with crime and corruption aren’t new. It has often been neglected by state and national Democratic leaders. And Whalen contends the city has been saddled with decades of bad local leadership. “It’s worth noting that Oakland has probably had one decent mayor in modern times, and that’s Jerry Brown,” he said.
Supporters of the recall point to a few moves that Thao made, or failed to make, that justify her recall. Most prominently, they fault her for firing Oakland’s popular black police chief, LeRonne Armstrong, barely a month into her tenure without the backing of the city’s police commission. Armstrong was eventually cleared of wrongdoing for his handling of police misconduct investigations, and he is now suing the city for wrongful termination.
Thao vowed to declare a state of emergency if the city didn’t have a new police chief in place by the end of last year, a promise she did not keep.
Recall supporters are also focusing on Thao’s failure to apply for millions of dollars in state grants to fight retail theft, a mistake that Thao acknowledges. “As mayor, I own that, and the buck stops with me,” she said during her state of the city speech.
Thao and her progressive supporters argue that she inherited rising crime rates, a failing 911 system, and a record budget deficit caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. They say she is “cleaning up the mess” left by her predecessor, Libby Schaaf, who has endorsed the recall.
“Look, if you’re upset, and you want to run against me, run against me come 2026 when I’m up for re-elect,” Thao said at a rally ahead of her state of the city speech. “But do not do this, do not do this to our town,” she added, referring to the recall.
Thao’s handling of the recall has raised additional concerns about her management abilities. She didn’t officially launch her anti-recall campaign until a few weeks ago, less than a month before Election Day. She also failed to file a statement in opposition to the recall to appear on the November ballot.
Whalen said it shouldn’t be surprising that Thao doesn’t have “the political chops” to successfully fight the recall, calling her essentially an “accidental mayor.”
Thao squeaked out a win in 2022’s multi-candidate field only because of ranked-choice voting. She lost the first round of voting to her main opponent, former city councilman Loren Taylor, but ended up winning by fewer than 700 votes when the ranked-choice process was run and other candidates were eliminated.
Taylor performed best among higher-income voters in the hills of Oakland, while Thao’s support was strongest in the city’s lower-income flatlands, according to an Oaklandside news analysis. Taylor has said he will likely run again if Thao is recalled, telling KRON4 that “I knew it would be bad” under Thao, but “I did not realize it would be this bad.”
As a result of her narrow win, Thao never really had a governing mandate, Whalen said.
He added that Thao’s background should make for a compelling human-interest story. She’s the daughter of immigrants from Laos who escaped genocide. Homeless at times as a teen, she escaped domestic violence as a young woman, put herself through the University of California Berkeley as a single mom, started in city politics as an intern, and rose to become the first Hmong mayor of a major American city.
But she’s not a great communicator, lacks the political gifts that more natural campaigners like Newsom have, and she’s sometimes failed to acknowledge how bad things have gotten in Oakland, appearing “awfully defiant” at times, Whalen said.
Matt Fleming, a writer and spokesman for the Pacific Research Institute, said the opposition to Thao is “significant, organized, well-funded, and motivated.” A large amount of the funding for the recall has come from a hedge-fund executive, Philip Dreyfuss, who is also a major funder of the Price recall and supported Boudin’s recall.
If Thao is recalled, the fallout will likely be complicated. The city council president, who normally would fill in as interim mayor, is running for county supervisor and will have to vacate her seat if elected. The council’s president pro tempore also recently gave up his seat, meaning the council would have to vote on a member to serve as president and interim mayor until a special election is called in early 2025.
Fleming is skeptical that recalling Thao will do much to solve Oakland’s myriad issues in the short term.
“The problems have existed long before her,” he said. “For Oakland to get a city that is headed in the right direction, I don’t think this recall one way or another is going to fix that.”