Caitlyn Jenner: I played golf instead of voting in 2020

Caitlyn Jenner, running to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election, said she didn’t bother to vote for then-President Donald Trump in November 2020 or show up at the polls at all.

Ms. Jenner, who could be one of a number of GOP challengers, said she saw little point in trying to vote for a Republican presidential candidate in blue California.

“It was voting day and I thought the only thing out here in California that I worry about, which affects people, is the propositions that were out there,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash in a sit-down interview that aired Tuesday. “And I didn’t see any propositions that I really had one side or the other. And so it was Election Day and I just couldn’t get excited about it. And I just wound up going to play golf and I said, ’I’m not doing that.’”

Ms. Jenner is hoping to stake out a kind of common-sense middle ground for her candidacy, distancing herself from Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about alleged fraud in the election and his policies toward transgender persons while trying to keep Trump supporters in her corner — especially since they’re partly animating the bid to recall Mr. Newsom.

The former male Olympian, who later found fame on Keeping up with the Kardashians and her high-profile emergence as a woman, said she doesn’t believe biological boys should play in girls’sports, supports “legal immigration” but the “bad ones have to leave” and said she is in favor of the death penalty.

On the pandemic, she said she “would have definitely done my best to open up as quick as possible,” hoping to draw a contrast with Mr. Newsom.

She told CNN that people think of her as a reality-TV star but she’s had a breadth of experiences as she eyes a government post.

“Entertainment is a business, and you have to run that business,” Ms. Jenner told Ms. Bash. “But I’ve also done other things. We sold a billion dollars worth of exercise equipment on television. I’ve had aviation companies. I’ve just always been involved [in] being an entrepreneur and tried to inspire my children to do the same thing. And they’ve done very well in that department.”