When Kamala Harris was formally installed as the Democratic presidential nominee, her home-state delegation had the best seats in the house, right up front.

Visions of the Golden State and a parade of its personalities filled the convention’s four-day program, and passes to California’s after-parties — featuring appearances by John Legend, the Killers and Oakland’s Tony! Toni! Toné — were among the hottest tickets in Chicago.

Suddenly, California is at the center of politics, in a way the nation’s most important and populous state hasn’t been since former Gov. Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

A California Democrat sits atop the party’s presidential ticket for the first time in history, thanks in good part to the machinations of another California Democrat who helped elbow the incumbent — and nominee-in-waiting — aside.

“California is having a moment,” said Don Sipple, a political strategist who helped elect several of the state’s governors, because of “the woman who opened the door and the woman who walked through it.”

(Though, it should be noted, the door-opening woman, Nancy Pelosi, and Harris have never been close. The former House speaker publicly spoke of an “open process” to replace President Biden before endorsing his vice president as the best alternative after Biden gave up his reelection bid.)

With heightened attention comes greater scrutiny, and with that added scrutiny comes a fight to define California — and, by extension, Harris — for the rest of America.

The outcome could very well determine who wins in November.

Is California a sun-kissed incubator of innovation and opportunity that continues to beckon doers and dreamers from the world over, as it has for well over 150 years?

Or is it an overburdened and overstretched collection of struggling communities that fail to provide even the basics — safety, clean shelter, sustaining livelihoods — for a shamefully large portion of its population?

Yes and yes.

“There is plenty of evidence” to support both views, said Jack Pitney, a former Republican operative and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He paraphrased Walt Whitman.

“California is large. It contains multitudes,” Pitney said. “It is possible for two things to be true at once.”

Red and blue America. Prosperous and failing California. Two ways of seeing the same thing.

Bill Carrick, longtime political advisor to the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, scoffed at the notion that Harris’ home state will hang like a millstone around the vice president’s neck.

“Ultimately, a presidential campaign is about picking someone who you think will make your life better,” said Carrick, who has worked extensively in national politics. It’s not, he said, about a candidate’s return address.

Sure, Carrick went on, “there are some ideological Republicans who are devoted to Trump” and who eagerly lap up the California-as-hellhole narrative — but “we’re not going to get them anyway.”

Most voters, or at least those who are open to supporting Harris, know very little about the vice president. That, Carrick said, gives her an opportunity to introduce herself — and her home state — on her own terms, “as opposed to the Republican cartoon characterization.”

Maybe so.

But Trump and his fellow Republicans, abetted by Fox News and other sympathetic media, will make a case that California is a case study in what goes wrong when Democrats are put in charge. They will hold up Harris, a statewide officeholder for more than a dozen years, as the prime example of its destructive ruling class.

That vastly overstates her power and influence, first as attorney general and then for a relatively brief stint as one of California’s two U.S. senators. But that detail will surely be lost in the fog of campaign warfare.

Harris is, however, an exemplar of her home state in one significant way.

There’s no doubting she reflects the politics and makeup of modern California, just as the two presidents the state yielded, Reagan and Richard M. Nixon, embodied the California of their day and age.

The two men rose to power at a time when California was mostly white and reliably Republican, with a broad and deep conservative streak. By the time Harris arrived in Sacramento after being elected attorney general in 2010, the state was solidly Democratic, increasingly liberal and had more Black and brown than white residents. Not least, there were also significantly more opportunities for a woman in politics.

In that way, Harris and Reagan serve as perfect bookends to the state they represented.

Given the changes of the last 30-plus years, it’s surprising California Democrats haven’t managed to put one of their own in the White House, said Jim Newton, a biographer and state historian.

“We think of it as such an exceptionally blue place,” he said, “and it’s produced so many national Democratic leaders.”

Among them, the legendarily powerful Rep. Phillip Burton, Pelosi (who succeeded Burton’s widow in representing San Francisco in Congress), and Feinstein. But until Biden chose Harris as his running mate, no California Democrat had come remotely near the White House, though several tried.

Of course, Harris wouldn’t have this shot at the presidency but for a unique set of circumstances. If Biden hadn’t performed so terribly in that June debate, if Democrats hadn’t panicked afterward, if Pelosi and other party leaders hadn’t maneuvered to shove the president aside, the vice president could very well have been out of a job come January.

That still might happen. But give Harris her due for getting where she is. After 20 years in politics, she stands within hailing distance of the White House and making further history from a geographic standpoint.

In politics, as so often in life, timing is everything.

The car industry is backing away from rolling out electric vehicles in favor of hybrid options, indicating more defeats to the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to force EV sales on American buyers. 

Ford announced last week that the car giant is changing its electric vehicle strategy and backing away from its planned all-electric, three-row SUV, instead favoring the creation of hybrid vehicles for its next rollout of three-row SUVs. 

“Our focus here is to remake Ford into a higher-growth, higher-margin, more capital-efficient and durable business, and that means these vehicles need to be profitable,” John Lawler, Ford vice chair and chief financial officer, said on a call with media Wednesday morning. “And if they’re not profitable, based on where the customer is in the market is, we will pivot and adjust and make those tough decisions.”

The announcement is a blow to left-wing electric car initiatives, many of which have been promoted by Harris across her last three and a half years as vice president. 

KAMALA HARRIS MOCKED FOR GUSHING OVER A ‘YELLOW SCHOOL BUS’: ‘THEY REALLY CAN’T LET HER TALK IN PUBLIC’

“It is abundantly clear that the federal government’s push to ram electric vehicles down everyone’s throat was unwanted and unworkable. The mandates forced on Americans under Biden-Harris will dismantle what remains of Michigan’s industrial base, destroy American jobs, and make us more dependent on Communist China,” Republican Michigan congressional candidate Tom Barrett told Fox News Digital in reaction to Dearborn-based Ford’s move last week. “In Congress, I will continue my fight to protect the rights of consumers to purchase the vehicle that meet their needs and their family’s budget, not the social engineering agenda of bureaucrats in Washington.”

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Fox News Digital examined Harris’ record and involvement with the electric vehicle push and programs amid her vice presidency, and found the Democrat has had a heavy hand in promoting the end to traditional gas-powered vehicles. Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket last month, after President Biden exited the race amid mounting concerns over his mental acuity and 81 years of age. 

Stretching back to her Senate career, Harris was one of the original co-signers of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Markey’s, D-Mass., 2019 Green New Deal legislation, which worked to establish a blueprint to shift the nation to 100% “clean energy” by 2040. The measure failed in the Senate. 

Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden on the campaign trail together. (Getty Images)

After the Biden-Harris ticket won the 2020 election, Harris continued spearheading climate change initiatives, most notably taking charge of the Clean School Bus program. The EPA-backed program was created nearly three years ago as a provision under the Biden administration’s 2021 infrastructure bill, and allocated $5 billion for the program. The EPA has since made $1 billion in grants available to help deliver nearly 2,500 electric school buses to school districts across the nation. 

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Harris and EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan were touted by the federal government as the point people for the program, but it has only delivered 60 battery-electric or low-emissions propane-fueled school buses, the Washington Free Beacon reported last month. 

“Every school day, 25 million children ride our nation’s largest form of mass transit: the school bus. The vast majority of those buses run on diesel, exposing students, teachers, and bus drivers to toxic air pollution,” Harris said of the program earlier this year. “Today, we are announcing nearly $1 billion to fund clean school buses across the nation. As part of our work to tackle the climate crisis, the historic funding we are announcing today is an investment in our children, their health, and their education. It also strengthens our economy by investing in American manufacturing and America’s workforce.”

Harris found herself in a viral moment in 2022, when she visited a Seattle school to promote the program and gushed about her love of yellow school buses. (The Image Direct for Fox News Digital)

Amid the bus plan rollout, Harris found herself in a viral moment in 2022, when she visited a Seattle school to promote the program and gushed about her love of yellow school buses – comments that were subsequently mocked on social media. 

“Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus, right? Can you raise your hand if you love a yellow school bus? Many of us went to school on the yellow school bus, right? It’s part of our experience growing up. It’s part of a nostalgia, a memory of the excitement and joy of going to school to be with your favorite teacher, to be with your best friends and to learn. The school bus takes us there,” Harris said in the rambling remarks. 

Critics quickly shot back that Democrats “really can’t let [Harris] talk in public about anything.” 

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“Democrats have been hiding Kamala, but she just had a press conference and talked about yellow school buses and my goodness they really can’t let her talk in public about anything,” OutKick founder Clay Travis posted on X at the time. 

“Selina Meyer,” The Federalist author Eddie Scarry tweeted, referencing Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character on the HBO comedy “Veep.”

Republican activist Matthew Foldi tweeted, “Find yourself someone who loves you as much as Kamala Harris loves Venn diagrams and yellow school buses.”

CNN contributor Mary Katherine Ham also joked, “Please sing Wheels on the Bus, please sing Wheels on the Bus.”

Harris was in fact caught on camera awkwardly singing “the wheels on the bus go round and round,” in another viral moment. 

Harris was also charged with helping lead the “Electric Vehicle Charging Action Plan” in December 2021, to ensure 50% of car sales were electric vehicles by 2030. The Biden-Harris administration further cracked down on the plan this year with one of the most significant climate regulations in U.S. history – it would force half of all new cars and trucks sold in 2030 to be electric. 

“Together, we’ve made historic progress. Hundreds of new expanded factories across the country. Hundreds of billions in private investment and thousands of good-paying union jobs. And we’ll meet my goal for 2030 and race forward in the years ahead,” Biden said in March of the plan. 

The $7.5 billion federal program, which was part of 2021’s infrastructure bill, aimed to install half a million EV charging stations across the nation, but has only produced as many as eight federal charging stations as of May. 

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was confronted with the lack of charging stations in May on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” when host Margaret Brennan grilled him as to why only up to eight stations had been installed. 

“Now, in order to do a charger, it’s more than just plugging a small device into the ground,” the secretary said. “There’s utility work, and this is also really a new category of federal investment. But we’ve been working with each of the 50 states.”

“Seven or eight, though?” Brennan said with a laugh.

“Again, by 2030, 500,000 chargers,” Buttigieg said. “And the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built.”

Electric vehicle plugged in at a charging station. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

Car industry leaders have long argued that the push by Democrats – most notably the Biden-Harris administration – for EVs was rolled out too quickly and will likely fail. 

“The problem with the whole EV movement is that there was a colossal amount of hype behind it, largely from what I like to call the liberal mainstream media, making it sound like everybody’s next vehicle was going to be an EV,” former Ford, Chrysler and General Motors executive Bob Lutz told Fox Digital in April. “And of course, the government was pushing it, because of their climate change policies. And it just plain wasn’t going to happen.”

“And yes, it did come too soon and too fast,” he added. 

Earlier this year, data found that electric vehicles were eating into Ford’s profit margin. Ford Model e, the company’s EV division, had a net loss of $4.7 billion last year – with $1.6 billion of that in the last quarter – and Ford’s chief financial officer John Lawler explained during the company’s earnings call in February that both “the quarter and year were impacted by challenging market dynamics and investments in next-generation vehicles.” 

BIDEN FINALIZES CRACKDOWN ON GAS CARS, FORCING MORE THAN HALF OF NEW CAR SALES TO BE ELECTRIC BY 2030

President Biden participates in stage testing ahead of the start of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19, 2024 in Chicago. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Ford, which is the second-largest EV brand in the nation behind Tesla, said last week when announcing its shift in its EV strategy that it will face a $400 million write-down of “certain product-specific manufacturing assets” for canceling the EV SUV. 

Fox News Digital reached out to Ford Sunday for additional comment on its future with EVs, but did not immediately receive a reply. 

HEY JOE BIDEN, HOW MANY EV CHARGING STATIONS HAVE YOU BUILT? 3 LESSONS FROM THIS MONUMENTAL SCREWUP

As Democrats continue championing the frenzied electric vehicle push, former President Trump has vowed to end the Biden administration’s “mandate” increasing the sales of electric vehicles. 

Former President Trump laughs while responding to a queston from a reporter after his remarks on Aug. 20, 2024, at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Michigan. (Nic Antaya/Getty Images)

“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one. Thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now, and saving U.S. customers thousands and thousands of dollars per car,” he said from the RNC in Milwaukee last month. 

Trump again discussed electric vehicles in his interview with Tesla founder Elon Musk earlier this month. Musk’s Tesla is the nation’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer. Trump explained that Musk’s cars are “incredible,” but that fossil fuels are deeply intertwined with even building EVs and that the U.S. needs to “drill, baby, drill.”

Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on the state of EVs just days after she accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination, but did not immediately receive a reply. 

Fox News’ Kristen Altus and Eric Revell contributed to this report. 

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

When the federal government closed Castle Air Force Base in Merced County in the 1990s, the dilapidated buildings and vast expanse of aging tarmac left behind seemed more like a liability than an opportunity.

But by 2018, the old runways that once carried B-52 bombers had found a new and unexpected customer: Google, which was testing its experimental self-driving vehicles there, far from the prying eyes of Silicon Valley.

At the urging of then-state Assemblyman Adam Gray, California gave Merced County $6.5 million that year to expand the self-driving testing program at the old base.

A few years later, Gray invested there, too.

In 2022, a company in which Gray is a minority owner bought four apartment buildings on the former base from Merced County, according to a Times review of business filings, property records and Gray’s financial disclosures. Gray’s link to the real estate deal has not been previously reported.

The sale closed for $600,000 in August 2022, records show, and the property is now valued at more than $2.5 million. Gray’s representatives said that the investment shows his interest in providing affordable housing, and that renovations have been so costly that he has yet to make money.

Nonetheless, the real estate deal in rural Atwater, Calif., has come under scrutiny as Gray, a Democrat, fights to unseat first-term Rep. John Duarte (R-Modesto). The race in California’s 13th Congressional District is a bitter rematch of 2022, when Duarte beat Gray by the second-closest margin in the nation: 564 votes.

The race is among the handful of contests across the U.S. that are seen as pivotal in determining which party controls Congress after the November election.

Republicans have questioned the timing of Gray’s purchase, which closed four months before he left the Legislature and less than a year before California officials awarded nearly $50 million in new funding for the site. The 2023 grant from the California State Transportation Agency helped Merced County build out a rail hub on the base site to handle cargo loaded onto trains from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“Gray’s self-serving scheme reveals his true colors as a Sacramento politician who lines his own pockets at the expense of Valley families’ trust and hard-earned dollars,” said Ben Petersen, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the House of Representatives.

Petersen accused Gray of “mixing taxpayer money with personal profit” and said the apartment deal should be investigated.

Far from Gray lining his pockets, his campaign and company said, the old Castle Air Force Base apartments have required so much renovation that Gray has actually lost money.

Ben Rodriguez, Gray’s campaign manager, said the allegations were false and “intended to distract voters from John Duarte’s disastrous record.”

“While Adam Gray has brought back real help for families across this district, Duarte is making things worse for families every day he spends in Congress,” Rodriguez said.

Gray is a minority owner in Gemenii LLC, the company that owns the apartment complex at the base. Gemenii is a subsidiary of a family-owned residential and commercial construction company of which Gray is also a member, the firm said.

Gray learned about the Castle Air Force Base apartments about six months before the sale, when “partners that own other properties at Castle” approached him with the idea of renovating the 80-unit complex to provide affordable housing, the company said.

The four spartan buildings, once barracks for airmen, were in disrepair, and three were vacant. Merced County had classified the property as surplus and assessed the buildings and the 5.3 acres of land beneath them at $400,000 to $600,000, the company said.

When the county received “no other competitive offers,” the firm said, Merced County sold the buildings for $600,000.

The firm has since spent millions on renovations, “exactly as intended by Merced County when the property was sold in an open and public sale process,” company attorney Richard Marchini said in a written statement.

Gray was still representing the Modesto area in the state Assembly when the sale closed.

Gray has a 30% stake in the firm that owns the apartments, the company said. His name does not appear in the company’s state business filings.

Gray first disclosed his investment in his 2022 Form 700, the financial disclosure that California lawmakers are required to file annually with state ethics officials.

Government experts said it did not appear that Gray’s real estate deal broke the law.

But, they said, elected officials who invest in real estate must be aware of the appearance of conflicts of interest, particularly when investing in their districts.

Dan Schnur, the former head of the California Fair Political Practices Commission, said that Gray’s real estate investment at the site being bookended by the award of taxpayer funds seemed “suspicious.”

“Everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, but the best way to receive the benefit of the doubt is to earn it,” Schnur said. “A public servant ought to be aware of how these things might be perceived.”

After Gray lost his run for Congress in 2022, he filed a federal financial disclosure with the House in which he did not disclose the real estate investment or his stake in the LLC that owns the buildings.

His campaign said that Gray did not mention the apartment complex investment because there was no revenue to report, but that he disclosed his position in the parent company.

In a new filing made public this month, for Gray’s second run for Congress, he said he received between $100,000 and $1 million from the LLC that owns the apartments in 2023, and between $50,000 and $100,000 in the first half of 2024.

Those figures represent the company’s total revenue, rather than Gray’s, and were listed “out of an abundance of caution,” the campaign said.

Gray has not received any income from the business in 2023 or 2024, the campaign said, and the investment has not made a profit.

The former air base, now called Castle Commerce Center, covers about 3 square miles. It’s home to miles of empty roads, as well as dozens of private and government tenants, including a federal prison, a post office, Merced’s commercial airport and Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle company.

After Gray helped secure the $6.5-million grant for the self-driving car testing site in 2018, Merced County converted vast stretches of unused tarmac at the base into a testing hub. There are now full intersections with traffic lights and signage and a 2.2-mile test freeway with on- and off-ramps where vehicles can practice driving in urban environments.

The site, operated by an Ohio-based company, has hosted two dozen companies from Silicon Valley and major automotive firms.

In the midst of that boom, Merced County’s supervisors continued selling portions of the base as surplus land. That included the 5.3-acre site and the 80-unit apartment complex, which the board sold on a 4-0 vote in May 2022 to Gemenii.

At the time of the sale, the land was valued at $465,000, and the structures were valued at $135,000, according to tax records provided by the company.

The company took out an $885,000, 30-year mortgage at the end of 2022, and a $3-million, 15-year mortgage in June of this year, to finance renovations at the building, the company said.

Two buildings have been gutted and renovated so far, a process that included asbestos removal and replacing windows and appliances, the company said.

The renovated buildings are now valued at more than $2 million, while the underlying land value has risen by $9,300, according to tax bills provided by the company.

The increase in value is “directly connected to the material financial efforts of Gemenii to revitalize the property,” the firm said. Any developments at the air base site, the company said, “have had no impact on the property’s value.”