Tag: Jerry Brown

RNC Chair Steele Insists Party Will Waste Money, Resources on California GOP Campaigns This Year

Jon Ponder

Steele
Steele
Despite the fact that the two highest profile Republican candidates running in California this year — gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman and U.S. Senate nominee Carly Fiorina — both oppose abortion in a state that is solidly pro-choice, RNC Chairman Michael Steele says the national party will pour money and resources into GOP campaigns this year:

[National] Republicans, buoyed by what they see as a potential resurgence in California, pledged on Tuesday to send significant financial, logistical and strategic resources to the state in coming weeks.

[Steele], speaking to reporters on a conference call, said Republicans in years past have treated California as a “flyover” state because of Democrats’ electoral edge, or little more than fertile grounds for fundraising.

“The days of just grabbing and going or just ignoring altogether are over,” he said, after meeting with California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring in Washington. “We’re going to be full partners on the ground.”

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Energy on the Right? Voter Turnout in the California Primary was 25%, Lowest in 96 Years

Jon Ponder

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.

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.

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.

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CA Primary: eMeg, Carly Dodge Birther Bullet – Orly Taitz Loses GOP Nod for Secretary of State

Jon Ponder

Orly Taitz
Orly Taitz
The results at the top of the ticket in the California primary yesterday were a foregone conclusion going in — the Democrats, Jerry Brown, the gubernatorial nominee, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, mostly ran unopposed and the top two GOP candidates — Meg Whitman (governor) and Carly Fiorina (U.S. Senate) literally bought their wins by outspending their opponents — Whitman, the former eBay CEO, spent $80 million of her own money on the primary, and Fiorina spent $7 million of the $21 million golden parachute she received when she was fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

There was one contest in doubt, however. And with results in, the only bad news for the state’s liberal majority is that Birther queen Orly Taitz lost her bid to run as the Republican candidate against incumbent Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, in November.

Taitz received 368,210 votes, but her opponent won with over 1 million votes. (Now we know that the approximate number of certifiable nutcases in California is 368,000, or about 1 percent of the state’s population.)

Taitz’ loss is also another sign of the weakness of the tea party mob phenomenon in California — as was the loss of tea bagger Chuck DeVore in the U.S. Senate Race. DeVore received just 19 percent of the Republican vote.

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CA Primary: Don’t Buy the Beltway Pundits’ Hype, Dems Looking Good in November Matchups

Jon Ponder

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.

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.

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:

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