The Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket in the California primary ran mostly unopposed, so turnout on Tuesday should have been driven by the purportedly intense “energy on the right” that the national media has been promoting.
If voter turnout is a gauge, however, the right-wing’s “energy” fizzled in California. With all but a few mail-in ballots counted, it appears that voter turnout on Tuesday was about 25 percent, which makes it the lowest turnout in almost a century. The last time only a quarter of California voters showed up at the polls was 1914.
Until now, the lowest recent turnout was in 2006, when, as a solidly Democratic state that already had a majority Democratic congressional delegation, California merely ratified the wave that swept Democrats into power on Capitol Hill. The turnout that year was 33.6 percent.
This does not bode well for Republicans going into November. Neither do reports that the two women seeking the most high profile offices — Meg Whitman, the GOP nominee for governor, who is running against former Gov. Jerry Brown, and Carly Fiorina, who’s running against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer — are, at best, frenemies.
It does not help Whitman that she spent a whopping $80 million of her own money on her primary campaign. Golden State Democratic voters have a recent record of rejecting candidates who bankroll their campaigns out of their own pockets. In the 1998 gubernatorial primary, Democrats rejected Northwest Airlines CEO Al Checci in favor of then-Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, who went on to win in the general. In the 2005 primary, Democrats rejected state Controller Steve Westly, a Silicon Valley millionaire, in favor of party establishment favorite Phil Angelides, the former state treasurer who currently chairs the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Angelides lost in the general against incumbent Gov. Schwarzenegger. (Schwarzenegger is a bit of an outlier because he raised money for his campaigns, rather than spending the fortune he accumulated as a movie star.)
Calbuzz has done the math and figured out that Whitman spent about $90 per vote in the primary, while Jerry Brown — who barely campaigned at all — spent just 20 cents per vote.
In the Senate race, gaffe-prone Fiorina got off to a rock start, launching her general election campaign on Wednesday by opening her mouth and inserting her foot. In front of a live video camera, she did her best imitation of a catty reality show star from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” cackling about 69-year-old Sen. Barbara Boxer’s appearance, “God, what is with that hair? Sooo yesterday.”
I also read on the Las Vegas Sun site that voter turnout in Nevada was @ 26%, pretty low for a political party, some of whose members, want to kick the bums (incumbents) out and replace them with uber-conservatives.
Some of the candidates on the ballot running as Republican are scary unqualified to be there. Carly Fiorina ran HP into the ground and illegally spied on her board. When she was finally fired, HP stock went up. Meg Whitman who hasn’t voted personally in 30 years, being too busy becoming a billionare. Now she wants us to believe she knows enough about the state, it’s laws and politics to make everything right. It’s fine if you want to make buckets of money but it takes all your time and energy, enough that it keeps you from voting. I get it. But just because you’ve made your boatload of cash and need a new hobby, don’t start thinking your new cause de Jour is running an entire state with the fifth largest economy in the world. We don’t need somebody who thought she could call in her campaign to the media and hasn’t made any policy statements to show that she deserves our votes. Our State has been independant and basically blue for years. It helped us become the state at the forefront of technology and we need leaders who want us to be there again. Republicans have proved every time they gain power that what’s in the best interest of their particular special intrest group and major donors is what they care about, not those who vote for them based on the promises of campaigns.