Why does Eric Swalwell keep saying Dublin was a poor city?
State Senate candidate disavows support for CA14 candidate, switches to frontrunner; Big shake up in county government coming this month; Judgment Day tonight for two 'Dro councilmembers
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Vol. VI, No. 1,210
—Eric Swalwell has long portrayed his upbringing in Dublin during the 1990s as something akin to a hardscrabble life on the wrong side of the tracks.
He has referenced the city’s as “Scrublin,” and more recently described it on his gubernatorial campaign website as “a place of low income and low expectations” that he helped transform into “one of the prosperous cities in the state.”
The framing resurfaced again over the weekend during an online exchange with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy about the U.S. strike on Iran.
Telling Portnoy to “stick to sports,” Swalwell added, “Your whiny-ass ain’t going to an Iran battlefield anytime soon. It’ll be poor kids from where I grew up.”
It’s a politically convenient one recasting of Dublin, but it stretches historical reality beyond recognition.
Swalwell moved to Dublin as a child after being born in Iowa. While Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s was less developed than neighboring Pleasanton and San Ramon, it was hardly an impoverished outpost.
—Instead, it was a growing Tri-Valley suburb, incorporated in 1982, that attracted Bay Area families seeking relative affordability and space. Crime rates were low, homeownership was common, and it functioned as a middle-class bedroom community — not a pocket of entrenched poverty.
Swalwell’s own upbringing reflected that middle-class norm. His father was a police officer. The family lived in a suburban environment that, while perhaps lacking the polish or prestige of nearby enclaves, was by no measure destitute.
The “low income and low expectations” label appears rooted less in economic hardship and more in comparison. In the 1980s and 1990s, Pleasanton and San Ramon developed corporate centers and higher-end subdivisions more quickly.
Against that backdrop, Dublin may have seemed less affluent to teenagers socializing across city lines. But relative perception is not the same as structural disadvantage.
Swalwell has at times acknowledged that his view of Dublin as “less desirable” was shaped by those comparisons — by how wealthier peers viewed the city — not by systemic poverty or blight.
Recasting Dublin as a place defined by poverty is like someone in a luxury high-rise describing life on the 20th floor as the “bad side” of the building — while the people on the ground are still waiting for a chance to get through the front door.
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