Thursday, June 10, 2010

Money Can't Buy You Love... But It Sure Can Buy You An Election

A few important lessons to take away from Tuesday’s statewide primary election:

First, the dynamics of a race can change dramatically in the last 2-3 weeks of a campaign. Until sometime in early May, the conventional wisdom in the U.S. Senate Republican primary was that former congressman Tom Campbell was headed for a victory over former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Most polls had Campbell holding onto a 10-to-15-point lead. Fiorina lurched to the right, picking up endorsements from Sarah Palin, anti-abortion rights groups, and supporting gun ownership rights for suspected terrorists. The media took this as a sign that Fiorina was going to split the conservative vote with far-right candidate Chuck DeVore, thus benefiting the moderate Campbell.

Here, as is often the case with elections, the conventional wisdom – and the media – was wrong. It appears that very few moderates voted in the Republican primary; maybe there just aren’t any moderate Republicans left. (I hate to say “I told you so” – actually, I don’t – but it was I who said of Campbell, back in January, The man supports same-sex marriage and proposed a temporary hike in the gas tax last year to pay down California’s budget deficit; mark my words, he is not going to win a Republican primary.) Either way, Fiorina took home an easy 56 percent of the vote, much more than either of her two challengers combined; she now goes into the general election contest against incumbent Barbara Boxer stronger than ever.

The same rule – about the dynamics of a race changing as the race comes to a close – applies in the gubernatorial contest. April was Steve Poizner’s month; the state insurance commissioner had been running a distant second in the Republican primary, often 40 to 50 points behind Meg Whitman in opinion polls. Before April his candidacy was widely considered DOA; but then Arizona passed its controversial immigration law, Whitman’s ties to Goldman Sachs were exposed, and Poizner dumped some of his considerable personal fortune (which nonetheless pales next to Whitman’s) into the campaign. All of a sudden, the polls showed a much tighter race; Poizner appeared to be within 10 points of Whitman. Could he eke out a victory?

Alas, Poizner’s brief comeback was not to be, and Whitman made a dramatic turnaround in May, amping up her media spending, nabbing coveted endorsements from prominent Republicans like Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, and shifting to the right, stealing Poizner’s momentum on the immigration issue. The jury is still out on how much, if at all, Whitman’s right turn will hurt her in the general election against Jerry Brown; but it certainly helped her take back the Republican race. It turns out those pre-April polls were the most accurate of them all; Whitman finished with a stunning 64 percent. Poizner, once considered a rising star of the state GOP, took just 29 percent. I’d be surprised if this hasn’t completely destroyed his career in statewide politics.

The second rule is that Los Angeles clearly no longer dominates state politics; for the moment, the power center of California politics is the Bay Area. All of the major-party candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and U.S. Senator are either from, or identify as their political base, the Northern California region. Indeed, in the race with the most prominent North-versus-South dynamic – the Democratic contest for lieutenant governor – San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom not only defeated Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn by more than 20 points, but won several Southern California counties, including San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo. Only in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties did Hahn’s vote total even exceed 50 percent.

Another new rule is that the Tea Party movement doesn’t do as well in large states, where campaigns usually cost in the several millions of dollars, as it does in smaller ones like Nevada. Here, the electoral results speak for themselves. In several prominent races, the candidate who most clearly identified himself as a Tea Partier pulled an embarrassingly low percentage of the vote, be it Poizner’s 29 percent in the gubernatorial contest, Sam Aanestad’s 30.5 percent in the race for lieutenant governor, senatorial wannabe Chuck DeVore’s 19 percent… Even in the campaign for attorney general, where the Tea Party had little or no presence that I’m aware of, the candidate backed by the Tea Partiers’ favorite congressman – Tom McClintock – came in a distant second, with 34 percent.

My personal favorite rule demonstrated by Tuesday's results is that money may be able to buy you a lot of love if you’re a candidate (Whitman, Fiorina), but not necessarily if you’re a corporation looking to use the initiative process to fatten your wallet. Pacific Gas and Electric, the state’s largest private utility, and Mercury Insurance, a large auto insurer, each spent millions of dollars to pass Propositions 16 and 17, respectively. Proposition 16 would have cemented PG&E’s monopoly on municipal power by requiring a two-thirds vote of the electorate any time a city or county tried to establish a competing public power company, like Sacramento’s SMUD; Proposition 17 would have dismantled state auto insurance regulations in such a way that would have benefited Mercury and other large insurers. For each initiative, the corporate proponents spent much, much more on advertising and media than their grassroots opponents; but in neither race were California voters fooled. Both 16 and 17 took less than 48 percent of the vote.

One rule that I previously thought to be written in stone in California politics – that any Republican who supports a tax increase is doomed to electoral failure – may have been upended this year. Abel Maldonado, the incumbent lieutenant governor who supported the February 2009 budget agreement that contained several short-term tax hikes, faced what was supposed to be a strong primary challenge from conservative anti-tax state Senator Sam Aanestad. Surprisingly, Maldonado, who was considered the Senate’s most moderate Republican by far before Governor Schwarzenegger appointed him lieutenant governor, pulled out a nearly 13-point victory over Aanestad.

Then again, in the race for state insurance commissioner, a little-known Republican candidate who spent less than $5,000 on his campaign and had absolutely no endorsements or establishment support whatsoever may have narrowly defeated a three-term GOP state legislator, Mike Villines, who voted for the same 2009 budget agreement. The race is still up in the air, as absentee ballots have yet to be fully counted, but challenger Brian Fitzgerald currently has a 10,000-vote lead over Villines, which a befuddled media is chalking up to Republican anger over Villines’s tax vote last year.

Ultimately, though, the election belongs to Meg Whitman. Whatever happens, both in the near and distant future, what we will all remember is the money. Something like $70 million of her own personal fortune was spent to win the primary alone; look for her to spend upwards of another $100 million on the general election. Whether she defeats Brown or not – and I fear for my state’s future if she does – we will remember the money. When all is said and done, and Whitman is thanking the volunteers for phone banking and going door-to-door, when she is attributing her victory to institutional support from GOP leaders like Mitt Romney and Condoleezza Rice, when her supporters boast of her scapegoating of undocumented immigrants as the reason for her victory, we will remember the money. For better or for worse, Meg Whitman has now changed California politics forever.

No comments:

Post a Comment