Thread: California votes today, with control of Congress in play

California votes today, with control of Congress in play

Andrew Romano West Coast Correspondent
,Yahoo News•June 5, 2018

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democratic candidate for governor of California, during a campaign visit with Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas on May 31, 2018, in Los Angeles. (Photo: Patrick T. Fallon for Yahoo News) More

LOS ANGELES — The polls are open. The voting has begun. And hordes of national political reporters have descended, Iowa style, upon the big cities, the sprawling suburbs, the dusty inland farm towns and the sparkling southern coastline of California.

As one of America’s most reliably Democratic redoubts, the Golden State rarely gets its day in the sun, politically speaking. But today — Primary Day 2018 — is different.

A former San Francisco mayor (Gavin Newsom) is battling a former Los Angeles mayor (Antonio Villaraigosa) for the chance to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown, 80 (a former mayor of Oakland), who is wrapping up his record fourth term in office. The first Latino president of the state Senate (Kevin de León) is gunning for the nation’s oldest U.S. senator (Dianne Feinstein), claiming his brash progressivism is a better fit for the state than her conscientious moderation. And throughout California, an unusual “jungle primary” system is upending expectations, scrambling strategies and, in several Republican-held congressional districts won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, threatening to derail the Democratic Party’s dreams of winning back the House of Representatives in November.

For the next 24 hours, California will be the center of the political universe — with repercussions that will almost certainly reshape this fall’s high-stakes midterm elections.

Here’s everything you need to know about Tuesday’s key Golden State primaries.
*****

Welcome to the jungle

Every candidate competes in California’s primaries, regardless of party, and the top two finishers advance to a fall runoff, even if both are Democrats (or Republicans). In theory, this nonpartisan system was supposed to foster moderation; in practice, it has done little to lessen reflexive polarization or partisanship, instead putting Democrats at serious risk of boxing themselves out of some very winnable general election contests.

“Boxing themselves out” is the key phrase here.

In total, Clinton carried seven Republican-held congressional districts in the state, some of which hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in decades. All seven districts instantly became midterm targets — nearly a third of the 23 pickups that Democrats need to retake the House.

But now Dems are in danger of not having anyone represent their party on the fall ballot in three of these districts, and the reason is simple: Too many of them are running.

Triggered by President Trump and eager to resist, a record number of Democrats have launched congressional campaigns this cycle — more than 500 at last count, the most for any one party since Republicans flipped 63 House seats in 2010.

This is usually a good problem to have, and at first, the Democratic Party’s strategy seemed simple enough. Let all these enthusiastic new Democratic candidates duke it out for a chance to compete in the general against a wounded GOP incumbent. Tie said incumbent to Trump, who is enormously unpopular in California.

Then sit back and watch as the Democratic survivor rides a “blue wave” to Washington.


Democratic congressional candidate Mike Levin with his wife, Chrissy, in front of supporters at the 2018 California Democratic State Convention, on Feb. 24 in San Diego. (Photo: Denis Poroy/AP) More

But matters soon became much more complicated. In California’s 49th Congressional District, on the coast north of San Diego, Rep. Darrell Issa decided to retire; in the 39th Congressional District, Rep. Ed Royce did the same. A glut of new Republican candidates rushed to fill the void. Meanwhile, in the 48th Congressional District, a wealthy slice of the suburban Orange County shoreline, controversial Rep. Dana Rohrabacher — aka “Putin’s favorite congressman” — attracted a potent last-minute GOP opponent in former county GOP Chairman Scott Baugh.

The upshot was unsettling. Before, the GOP incumbent was guaranteed to secure one of the top two slots; the strongest Dem was a shoo-in for the other. But now that these Republican races were free-for-alls as well, the numbers stopped adding up. Divide the Democratic vote among four, five or six candidates, the thinking went, and the only two candidates on the November ballot could both wind up being Republicans. (California doesn’t allow write-ins.)

We’ll find out Tuesday whether this Democratic nightmare comes true.

In CA-49, two Republicans — state Board of Equalization representative Diane Harkey and state Assemblyman Rocky Chavez — have regularly finished at or near the top of the polls.

Retired Marine Col. Doug Applegate was the early Democratic favorite, having surprised everyone by finishing with a mere 1,621 votes, or 0.6 percentage points, behind Issa in 2016.

But Applegate has been fading amid chatter about a contentious divorce, and environmental lawyer Mike Levin has emerged as perhaps the party’s leading contender, with several key endorsements and a first-place finish in the most recent public survey.

The problem is that two other well-resourced Democrats are running as well: 29-year-old Sara Jacobs, who has benefited from $1 million in super-PAC donations from her grandfather, Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, and Navy veteran and businessman Paul Kerr, who has so far spent more than $5 million of his personal fortune — in part on controversial ads attacking Levin and Jacobs. All these candidates, including Applegate, are still viable, as are both leading GOPers. Unless Democrats turn out in unprecedented numbers — and/or throw the lion’s share of their votes to one of their party’s four candidates (most likely Levin) — they could end up sending two Republicans to the November runoff.

CA-48 is a similar story. At first glance, Rohrabacher didn’t seem like one of the most vulnerable House Republicans. In 2016, he defeated his Democratic opponent by more than 16 percentage points, and registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats by more than 10 points in his district, which stretches from Seal Beach to Laguna Beach and includes some of California’s whitest, wealthiest and most traditionally Republican towns. In fact, Orange County has long been known as the birthplace of the conservative movement.


Harley Rouda, a Democrat running for California’s 48th Congressional District, speaks during a campaign rally in Laguna Beach, Calif., on May 20, 2018. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images) More

But this time around, changing demographics, local antipathy toward Trump and Rohrabacher’s own strange relationship to Russia lured seven Democratic challengers into the race. Since then, many have fizzled or dropped out, leaving two strong candidates — stem-cell pioneer Hans Keirstead and real-estate entrepreneur Harley Rouda — as the last men standing. Keirstead was initially considered one of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s top recruits nationwide, and he earned the state Democratic Party’s endorsement earlier this year. But Rouda seems to have gained late momentum — and the committee’s official support — amid questions surrounding Keirstead’s exit from a UC Irvine lab. Despite his vulnerability, Rohrabacher is still likely to finish first. The question is whether Rouda and Keirstead’s increasingly vicious infighting will help boost one of them past Baugh for second place — or whether it will keep both of them out of the runoff.

Whatever the Democratic Party’s worries in CA-49 and CA-48, however, they’re nothing compared with the situation in CA-39. With four viable Democrats and three viable Republicans (frontrunner Young Kim, a former state assemblywoman; former state Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff; and Orange County Supervisor Shawn Nelson), the top-two math in Rep. Ed Royce’s district, which stretches northeast from Fullerton, is more daunting for Dems than anywhere else.

By all accounts, Kim is a lock for first place. But no one has any clue who will join her in the general election. Both Huff and Nelson are well known and well liked in the district. The Democratic frontrunners, meanwhile, are a pair of largely self-funding, and less familiar, millionaires: Gil Cisneros, a former shipping and distribution manager at Frito-Lay who won a lottery jackpot of $266 million with his wife in 2010, and Andy Thorburn, a Villa Park health insurance executive and former teachers’ union leader who loaned his campaign $2 million right out of the gate. Cisneros has the Congressional Campaign Committee’s backing; Thorburn was endorsed by Our Revolution, the Bernie Sanders super-PAC.

Further dividing the Democratic vote field are a pair of political neophytes: pediatrician Mai-Khanh Tran, a Vietnamese-American immigrant who worked her way through college at Harvard as a janitor and later survived two bouts of breast cancer, and former Obama administration Commerce Department staffer Sam Jammal. Unlike several other lower-tier Dems, both Tran and Jammal refused to bow out when pressed by national party leaders.

And then there’s turnout to consider. As David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report noted Monday, “A big reason why Democrats are nervous [is that] 22 percent of 39th CD Republicans have returned ballots versus 17 percent of Democratic voters (unlike in the 48th and 49th CDs, where Democrats have [turned] out at higher rates).”

The result could be a Democratic shutout in one of the most flippable districts of 2018.

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THE BLUE WAVE GOES BYE BYE

VOTE REPUBLICAN IN NOVEMBER!!