By a whopping 27 points, California independent voters want a U.S. senator who supports Pres. Obama. In the governor’s race, independents support Brown over eMeg, 48%-30%.
When it comes to elections, as far as the national media is concerned, if there’s no horse race, there’s no story — so take with large measures of salt the punditry you hear on cable news tomorrow night about the supposed vulnerability of Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., or the surging popularity of eMeg Whitman, the eBay billionaire who’s spent $500,000 a day in the Republican gubernatorial primary campaign.
Granted, all the energy going into the vote tomorrow at the top of the ballot is among the Republicans, but this is because their Democratic opponents are running virtually unopposed. Other than fundraising, both Sen. Boxer and Attorney General Jerry Brown, the former governor who’s running for governor again, have hardly begun campaigning. Neither of them has yet to spend a dime on television ads, the only vehicle for getting political messages out statewide.
Based on recent polling it appears that the Republicans’ two biggest spenders, eMeg, one-time CEO of eBay, and disgraced former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, will trounce their opponents tomorrow and become the GOP candidates for governor and senator, respectively, in the general. Whitman has spent nearly $80 million of her own money, so far, and Fiorina has spent a third of the $21 million fortune she received as golden parachute when the HP board fired her in 2005.
Despite the well-publicized unrest and anger in the fly-over states, internals in a Los Angeles Times-USC poll that came out around Memorial Day show that Brown and Boxer have the wind at their backs heading into the general election:
Brown has a narrow lead over likely opponent Whitman (44-38) and Boxer has the same lead over Fiorina, 44-38.
But here’s where drilling down into the poll numbers starts to pay off. 54 percent of voters want a US Senator who will support Obama, whereas only 35 percent want a Senator who will oppose him. DTS [“decline to state,” i.e., independent] voters are +27 when it comes to “Senator who supports Obama.”
There’s been some discussion of whether Boxer is helped by Obama coming to CA to campaign for her. This poll, along with Obama’s steady approval rating, indicates that Boxer should have Obama here as often as possible. Boxer’s path to re-election is through being Obama’s right-hand woman between now and November. Given the strong OFA [Organizing for America] presence here in California, left over from 2008, it seems all the more important that Obama and Boxer be a prominent political partnership over the next few months. If so, Carly Fiorina – with her endorsement from Sarah Palin – is toast.
Similarly, DTS voters indicate a strong preference for Jerry Brown over Meg Whitman, further fueling the widely accepted notion that most of California’s DTS voters are Democrats in disguise. 48 percent of DTS voters back Brown, compared to just 30 percent backing Whitman. Jerry Brown appeals very well to people who aren’t affiliated with any political party, and appears to have gotten a boost from the bloody battle between Whitman and [Insurance Commissioner Steve] Poizner.
The DTS poll results are bad news for eMeg and Fiorina because Republicans represent just 31 percent (5,228,320) of the California electorate compared with 44.5 percent (7,553,109) registered Dems and 20 percent (3,423,750) who are DTS.
The one tea bag candidate in the top tier is Chuck DeVore, who is running for Senate seat against Fiorina and former Rep. Tom Campbell. DeVore’s popularity doubled — it was 9 percent in April, now it’s 19 percent — after tea bag idol Sarah Palin endorsed Fiorina, even though Fiorina was essentially fired by the McCain-Palin campaign after making gaffes, one of which was her assertion that Palin was not qualified to run a major corporation.
DeVore’s failure to get traction is directly attributable to the fact that tea bagging has not caught on in California like it has in other parts of the country — in spite of the fact that Russo Marsh + Rogers, the Republican Party consulting firm that operates Tea Party Express, is based in Sacramento.
However, the fact that Whitman and Fiorina are so far ahead of their opponents in recent polling could depress GOP turnout, which might give DeVore a boost in the overall outcome, because turn out is higher among elderly and other dedicated hard-right voters. But even if DeVore gets 25 percent of the Republican vote in the primary, it will have no effect on the outcome of the general.
Bottom line
eMeg and Fiorina have been running hard to the right in order to win the GOP nominations. But in a state with such a small percentage of registered Republicans, they can’t win in November without capturing a majority of California’s decidedly left-leaning independents or without convincing significant numbers of Democrats to switch sides. That is highly unlikely, but starting Wednesday California voters are going to witness what will likely be the most dramatic political pivots — or 180-degree flipflops — since Mitt Romney and Rudi Giuliani reversed their long-held liberal Republican positions in order to run in the 2008 GOP presidential primaries.
I will be happy to see Whitman and Fiorina get a return of nothing for the millions they have spent/invested on/in trying to buy Californians’ votes when they lose to Boxer and Brown in November. It will be a huge repudiation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.
The article I read in USA Today said Whitman is paying a consultant $90,000 per MONTH, while stressing how she knows how to save California money. It also said the California Nurses Association claims Whitman is running for Queen of California.
GO Jerry Brown! I lived in California when Brown was Governor and he always did (or tried to do) the right thing.