.@DanaRohrabacher has so many ties to Russia it is hard to get them into a 30-second ad. But we did. Replace him in 2018. pic.twitter.com/j5fS2dF50P— Pac For A Change (@PacForAChange) January 8, 2018
Assume a crowded Democratic field with several good, well-funded candidates. Assume Republicans could rally around just two really good candidates. Suppose a large and divided Democratic field left the two Republicans as the top vote getters in the primary. Could Republicans plausibly sneak away with California’s Senate seat by exploiting this ill-thought “good government” jungle primary reform?
It is worth pondering. It is hard to clear a primary field for national offices like the Senate because political ambition is overweening, but it would be fun to watch the liberal panic if it came about. GOP party elders in California, if there are such, should think strategically about this.
P.S. Or, if Republicans really want to be clever, they won’t run a candidate at all, but would instead back Mickey Kaus in the Democratic field. Wouldn’t that be fun.
A new poll from the University of Southern California shows that although Feinstein and Boxer have image ratings that are much more positive than negative (by double digits), about six in 10 Californians (59 percent) would prefer that they not seek reelection. Just three in 10 (29 percent) say they should run again.
Nearly half of Californians -- 48 percent -- say they "strongly" want new people to run. Even among Democrats, 44 percent say it's time for new blood, while 43 percent say the two senators should seek reelection.
...Also note that the just-reelected Jerry Brown (born April 7, 1938 (age 76)) is the oldest governor in the United States,* and both the oldest and longest-serving governor in California history. What is more, a member of the Brown family was on the statewide ballot in 15 of the past 18 gubernatorial election years.
At least part of the reason for the call for a changing of the guards is undoubtedly that Feinstein and Boxer are among the nation's oldest senators. Feinstein is the oldest senator, at 81, while Boxer, who is 73, ranks 16th.
The most prominent member of the congressional delegation, 74-year-old House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, started out as chairwoman of the California Democratic Party when Ronald Reagan was president. The current party chairman, 81-year-old John Burton, is a former congressman who first went to Washington in the 1974 post-Watergate revolution.
In mid-September, many California voters got their first introduction to Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, and it was not a pleasant one. She was, TV viewers were told over and over again, a heartless corporate bigwig who blithely fired her workers and sent their jobs overseas, all while raking in millions and living the high life.
The former Hewlett-Packard CEO has barely responded to that damning portrayal in a 30-second TV ad aired by her opponent, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. And if the first-time candidate loses on Tuesday, as polls indicate is likely [or not: see PPP poll --ed.] , one of the main reasons will be that she violated a cardinal rule of politics: Don't allow your opponent to define you.
For all of the contests’ surface similarities -- high-tech female Republican CEO vs. venerable California liberal -- the races are running on very different dynamics. The difference was apparent within minutes when Brown and Boxer each appeared before President Obama during his rally at the University of Southern California last Friday.
Still, probably the most important difference between the two races is their contrasting backdrop. “It’s the Washington dynamic versus the Sacramento dynamic,” said a senior Democratic strategist working in the state, who asked for anonymity while discussing the vulnerabilities of the party’s contenders. “Which is to say you’ve got a Democratic president, Democratic Congress and Democratic senator who get blamed, if you will, at the federal level while you have a…Republican governor in Sacramento [Arnold Schwarzenegger] who is extraordinarily unpopular and that hurts Whitman. Boxer gets hurt by the national scene; Whitman gets hurt by the local scene.”
Democrat Jerry Brown leads Republican Meg Whitman in the governor’s race, and Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer is locked in a close contest with Republican challenger Carly Fiorina in the U.S Senate campaign. These are the results of a survey released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) with funding from The James Irvine Foundation.
Likely voters favor Brown over Whitman by 8 points (44% Brown, 36% Whitman, 16% undecided). The two candidates were in a virtual tie in September (38% Whitman, 37% Brown, 18% undecided). The Senate race is tight (43% Boxer, 38% Fiorina, 13% undecided) among likely voters. Boxer held a 7-point lead in September (42% Boxer, 35% Fiorina, 17% undecided).
In the final weeks of the campaign season, California’s likely voters express discontent in a number of ways: approval ratings of elected officials that are at or near record lows, a belief that the state and nation are headed in the wrong direction, and pessimism about the economy. While most (62%) are satisfied with their choice for U.S. Senate, more than half (55%) are dissatisfied with their choice for governor. Farther down the statewide ballot, none of the four state ballot initiatives included in the PPIC survey has the majority support today that is necessary for passage on November 2.
On Sunday morning, California GOP Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina joined Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” for what should have been a friendly interview. Instead, it was a train wreck.
Wallace started his questioning by explaining that an extension of all the George W. Bush-era tax cuts would increase the federal debt by $4 trillion over the next decade. He then pressed Fiorina to explain what specific areas of the federal budget she would cut in order to close the budget gap. Over and over, she repeated her desire to balance the budget, but she failed to detail any cuts. Instead, she emphasized closing the budget gap by addressing the “waste, inefficiency and fraud” in Washington.
There were 19 Republicans sitting on stage behind Sarah Palin when she rallied GOP activists here Saturday, but none was named Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina.
And just as the Republican candidates for governor and Senate here were physically absent from the event, they were also missing from Palin’s speech.
Not once during remarks that lasted just over 20 minutes did the former Alaska governor mention two of the national party’s most buzzed-about candidates running in the country’s largest state.
It’s possible that Palin didn’t want to mention Whitman and Fiorina for fear of handing Democrats fodder to use in the final two weeks of the election. She was on safer ground launching attacks against familiar national Democratic bogeymen and the mainstream media to a couple thousand Republicans who paid at least $25 per-person to the Republican National Committee to hear their party’s 2008 vice-presidential nominee.
Maeve Reston reports that John McCain got harshly personal about Boxer:
Former Republican presidential contender John McCain reunited with his onetime advisor Carly Fiorina on the campaign trail Saturday in San Diego, offering a blistering indictment of Barbara Boxer’s record on military issues and calling her the “most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today” -- an assessment he said he’d made while having “the unpleasant experience” of serving with her.
“When you hear her say that she supports the men and women in the military, my friends, she does not,” said McCain, a former Navy pilot who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and half years after his plane was shot down in 1967. “Because she has never supported the mission; she has never supported victory whether it be in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else in the world. Barbara Boxer wants to wave the white flag of surrender and endanger this nation’s national security. It’s time she went back to San Francisco with [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi.”
Carla Marinucci reports at The San Francisco Chronicle:
California Democrats clung to narrow leads in three high-profile state-wide races as early voting began, according to the latest exclusive SurveyUSA polling for CBS 5. The poll also found increasing support for Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana.
Download Full Poll Results (.pdf)
In the race for U.S. Senator, incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer held onto a 46% to 43% advantage. That lead is unchanged from a poll released 12 days ago and within the poll’s margin of error of ± 3.9%.
In the race for the open Governor’s seat, Democrat Jerry Brown inched slightly higher in the latest poll, where he holds a 47% to 43% advantage. The percentage of Brown backers is up a point since the previous poll. The numbers for Republican Meg Whitman remained flat.
For weeks, Democrats have pushing the story that the national Republican Party -- looking at the gap incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer is opening in the polls against Republican challenger Carly Fiorina --was pulling the plug on it's $1.9 million ad campaign to defeat Boxer.
The Republicans said that was a lie, and today, made good on at least part of their promise by funding Fiorina's second TV spot, a 30-second ad called "Day," funded by the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. The ad buy indicates the GOP is confident enough in Fiorina that it is willing to commit scarce campaign funds to a very expensive state. The GOP is betting on a wave election to take home a trophy as big as the Boxer seat.
On issue after issue, the battle for the Senate seat in California between incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer and Republican Carly Fiorina is a study in contrasts. That is no less true when it comes to who is bankrolling their campaigns.
Trial lawyers, abortion-rights advocates and entertainment executives are among Boxer's top campaign contributors, while Wall Street investors and oil and mining interests are major financial backers of Fiorina's bid. And despite Fiorina's close Silicon Valley ties as a former Hewlett-Packard CEO, high-tech firms are giving substantially more money to Boxer, a three-term senator.
Parties and politicians preparing for the final months of the 2010 election cycle have opened a record number of joint fundraising committees to allow donors to write larger checks than individual campaigns can collect.
Campaigns have filed paperwork for more than 700 such groups since the beginning of 2009 — doubling the number that were active during the 2006 midterm elections, according to a CQ MoneyLine study of Federal Election Commission records.
Joint fundraising committees are separate entities set up by existing committees that allow them to fundraise together at joint events. Usually a campaign is limited to raising a maximum of $2,400 from one donor per election. But joint fundraising committees receive checks that are often in excess of $20,000 at major fundraising events. These large sums of money are pooled together through the committee, then divided among campaigns, parties and even politicians’ political action committees.
“Candidates are under more pressure than ever to raise money, and it may simply be that word is getting around that this is a simple way to do it,” said Paul Ryan, FEC program director and associate legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center. “The only thing that a joint fundraising committee allows is for one check to be written instead of multiple checks.”
...
Under campaign finance laws, federal candidates can set up as many joint fundraising committees as they want. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who is running for re-election this year, has at least three such committees that have collected more than $1 million each.
In February, Politico reported:
“It’s kind of like the used-car-lot approach to fundraising,” said a longtime Democratic fundraiser. “You need as many cars out there as possible because you never know which one somebody will buy and take home with them.”
Besides joining with Reid, Boxer has also set up shared committees with the DSCC, the California Democratic Party and Minnesota Rep. James Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Boxer’s cut from these committees amounted to more than $275,000 last year, a big chunk of which came from two fundraisers headlined by Vice President Joe Biden. Boxer reported having $7.2 million in cash on hand as of Dec. 31, according to her campaign’s latest filing with the Federal Election Commission.
“It’s efficient for the candidates and efficient for the donors,” said Boxer campaign manager Rose Kapolczynski. “The candidates have very busy schedules, so they look to combine two events into one.”
Back in 2009, NRSC established a joint fundraising committee with Carly Fiorina, which some saw as a quasi-endorsement in the GOP primary.
A conservative group with ties to former Bush adviser Karl Rove announced Wednesday they have Barbara Boxer in their sites.
The Crossroads GPS, announced they would hit the airwaves with a new "issue ad" focused on Boxer and her support for cuts to Medicare that were part of President Obama's health-care overhaul.
Crossroads said ads will run in Los Angeles, beginning Wednesday, for one week. The group says it spent $1 million to buy the TV airtime.
Crossroads GPS and its affiliate, American Crossroads, both receive advice and fundraising support from Rove. During a campaign stop at a beachfront cafe in Santa Monica Wednesday, Boxer said the group's interest in her race was evidence that a Fiorina win would mean a return to the policies of George W. Bush.
The ad -- which has a theme similar to an attack on Sestak -- is here:
With 80 days to go before the November election, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer turned her energies to mobilizing volunteers Saturday, tapping into the Democrats’ national get-out-the-vote network, Organizing for America, during an appearance near downtown Los Angeles.
Joined by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Boxer asked a group of about 100 volunteers to begin making phone calls and walking neighborhoods to ensure that first-time voters who supported President Obama in 2008 will turn out again in November when she will face former Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Carly Fiorina
Villaraigosa may or may not have been helpful with his remarks:
Villaraigosa, who described Boxer as one of his heroes because of her “unabashedly progressive” outlook, was on hand at Saturday's event to fire up volunteers and defend Boxer's record on local issues like his 30/10 plan, which would accelerate 12 transit projects to complete them in a decade instead of three.
“When you’re mayor of L.A., you go to two places when you’re looking for money,” Villaraigosa said. “You go to — well you used to go to Sacramento — and you go to Washington D.C., and I can tell you whenever I knock on her door, she’s there.”
The "unabashedly progressive" outlook may be a bit of a liability. Even in the 2008 election, the conservatives outnumbered liberals among California voters, with self-described moderates holding the balance. And talking up pork for Los Angeles may be less popular outside the city limits than within. Furthermore, the national debt has diminished the political appeal of pork in general. “Earmarks are no longer there to bail you out,” said Steve Ellis, vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense recently told the New York Times. “They don’t make you bulletproof anymore.”
In a San Diego campaign stop to showcase her support for veterans, Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina again criticized Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer for backing the federal economic stimulus act and questioned her support for the military.
Surrounded by about 60 people, many of them veterans, at the Veterans Museum and Memorial Center in Balboa Park on Tuesday, Fiorina said the stimulus act has actually cost jobs rather than helping create them. Boxer says just the opposite.
“Barbara Boxer will claim that things are getting better because of that $862 billion stimulus package,” Fiorina said. “She will claim that things are getting better, but in fact things have gotten worse since that stimulus bill passed."
A recent Boxer comment has given ammunition to critics of her record on the military. The Daily Caller reports:
At a campaign event over the weekend in Inglewood, California, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer seemingly equated being a politician to serving in the military –- and an Iraq War veteran supporting Boxer’s November opponent is calling on her to apologize.
“We know that if you have veterans in one place where they can befriend each other and talk to each other. You know when you’ve gone through similar things you need to share it. I don’t care whether you are a policeman or a fireman or a veteran or by chance a member of Congress,” the California senator said. “[Democratic Rep.] Maxine [Waters] and I could look at each other and roll our eyes. We know what we are up against. And it is hard for people who are not there to understand the pressure and the great things that go along with it and the tough things that go along with it.”
“Barbara Boxer’s disrespectful comments underscore just how out of touch she has become after her 28 years in Washington,“ Veterans for Carly Coalition Co-Chairman Lt. Commander Paul Chabot said in a press release, in response to Boxer’s comments. “Equating the experiences of members of Congress with those of brave soldiers who have fought to defend our country is just the latest example in a failed career marked by disrespect for our men and women in uniform.”
Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer's job performance rating has fallen to a near record low, though she maintains a narrow, three-point lead over Republican rival Carly Fiorina in the U.S. Senate race, according to a Field Poll released today.
Forty-three percent of registered voters disapprove of the job Boxer is doing, while 42 percent approve, according to the nonpartisan poll. Among likely voters in November, 48 percent disapprove of the job Boxer is doing, the poll showed.
Not since 1994, two years after she was first elected, has Boxer's job rating been so low.
Still, Boxer leads Fiorina 47 percent to 44 percent among likely voters, according to the poll. Fiorina had come within one percentage point of Boxer in March, after trailing by as many as 30 points early last year.
...
For months, her Republican opponent Carly Fiorina has contended that Boxer is a "failed senator" with little to show for her time in the Senate. Fiorina's supporters tailed Boxer on Wednesday with signs bearing that message, and her spokeswoman, Julie Soderlund, kept up the criticism by accusing Boxer of trying to "rewrite the facts about her record and pretend she has actually accomplished something for the people of California."To refute those attacks, Boxer's staff has spent the last few months cataloging every amendment, earmark and executive order that the senator has worked on over her three terms — posting many of them on her website and assembling packets of the "highlights" for local reporters in each city in her two-day campaign swing across California. The trip marked the formal campaign kickoff for Boxer.