Trump, California, and Rotten Boroughs

At Western Journalism last summer, James V. Lacy made an important point about Trump's strength in California:

Tim Donnelly is no Donald Trump. Yet he really did make an impact capturing a strain of California voters, angered over illegal immigration, with a greatly under-funded campaign. Moreover, highly unreported is the fact that Donnelly was THE leading GOP vote-getter in the Governor’s primary in many counties throughout the state that will be sending delegates to the Republican National Convention. Donnelly did not best Kashkari in all the hard-core conservative southern California counties near the border with Mexico, but he won San Bernardino and Imperial counties; and he scored big in North State counties, around Republican Congressman Doug LaMalfa’s district where dissatisfaction with government runs high, namely Butte, Del Norte, Glenn, Lake, Lassen, Nevada, Trinity, Tehama, Siskiyou, Sierra, Shasta, Plumas, and Modoc. He drew to a tie in the central valley county of Merced, won nearby Mariposa, and took the central valley prize of Kern County (in Congressional Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Congressional District no less); and Donnelly surprisingly even topped Kashkari in a clean-sweep of the state’s top wine country counties of Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino. Donnelly beat Kashkari, who was considered the GOP establishment’s candidate, in the central coast counties of San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, and San Benito, the Bay Area counties of Alameda and Contra Costa and even won most of the handful of GOP voters in San Francisco, in Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional District!

Charles Munger and Political Money in California

Tony Quinn writes at Fox and Hounds:

Neel Kashkari is the Republican candidate for governor because of the efforts of a mild mannered, bow-tied Stanford University physicist named Charles Munger Jr. Munger is also responsible for the defeat and retirement of several powerful California members of Congress, and he is the major funding source keeping the California Republican Party afloat. Not bad for a guy almost no one has ever heard of.

Munger has become the major funding source for a moribund and nearly broke state GOP, investing some $2 million in favored candidates this spring alone. The obviously wealthy physicist did not make this money as a Stanford professor, but through the very good luck of the being the son of Charles Munger Sr., senior partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. The 90-year-old senior Munger ranks number 1,432 on the Forbes list of world billionaires.
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A month out from the June primary, Neel Kashkari was running at a dismal two percent in the polls, one poll even had him trailing a convicted sex offender. Republican voices around the country began warning that if Assemblyman Tim Donnelly with his harsh rhetoric on immigrants were the GOP candidate for governor he would drag down the ticket in November. But what to do? Most Republican voters knew nothing about Kashkari and Donnelly was leading in the polls.

To the rescue came Charles Munger. He paid for “An Urgent Warning from Gov. Pete Wilson about Candidate Tim Donnelly,” a tough attack on Donnelly for being on probation and his extreme statements that also boosted Kashkari as “the right choice to take on Jerry Brown.” The mailer did the trick and Kashkari topped Donnelly in the primary. Without Munger’s last minute funding of this piece, it is doubtful Kashkari would have won.

This June Munger began what is probably a long process to reshape the state GOP by supporting with major independent expenditures centrist candidates for the legislature in the top two primary.

Kashkari

Neel Kashkari's victory -- actually, a second-place showing in the top-two primary won't bring California Republicans into the sunshine, but it may keep them from digging deeper into the hole.

California is a blue state, but that doesn't rule out future victories for Republicans not named Schwarzenegger. States that are even bluer than California -- New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Maryland -- have all elected Republican governors. The challenge is to find a well-qualified candidate who can hold onto the GOP base and appeal to other voters.

Kashkari will have a hard time beating Brown. But if he can hold his own, he can open the door for other Republican candidates in 2018 and beyond.

On Donnelly

At Fox and Hounds, Tony Quinn writes about California gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly:

Donnelly’s claim to fame is a Minuteman leader who has called for a war with Latinos over immigration. “We are in a war. You may not want to accept it, but the other side has declared war on us”, Donnelly told a Minuteman rally at the Mexican border in 2006.

So there is no doubt that Donnelly would bring out a huge turnout of straight ticket voting Latino Democrats. There is almost no ticket splitting left in California so even the strongest Republican candidates would simply be swamped by Democratic votes. Four GOP-held Congressional districts are on the Democratic radar, those of GOP Reps. Jeff Denham and David Valadeo, and the open Buck McKeon and Gary Miller districts – all four would be lost as the Latino base in those districts is large. Republican challengers to newly elected Democratic congressmen and legislators all would fail, and the GOP would lose more of its own incumbents, opening the way for massive Democratic tax increases in 2015.

Donnelly had no ability to raise funds, an absolute prerequisite to campaign effectively in California. In fact, his campaign manager quit in disgust last spring; and he had no media operation, no formal campaign organization, no nothing. Were he to end up running against Gov. Jerry Brown, Democrats would just pick him apart while tying every GOP candidate to his hopeless cause.

But the worst thing for California Republicans is that the donor class would just walk away – they pretty much already have. Business now spends its money trying to elect pro-business Democrats. If Donnelly gets the runoff spot to go up against Brown, donors will just kick the last remaining bit of the GOP carcass over the cliff.

Dear California Candidates: Have Somebody Proofread Your Web Pages!

Tim Donnelly, candidate for Governor: "After five years, he started his own small business, providing solutions to his customer’s manufacturing problems."  According to this sentence, he had exactly one customer.  No wonder he did so badly.

John Perez, candidate for Controller:  "His prudent fiscal leadership helped eliminate the structural deficit that led to a half billion in savings to finance the state’s debt."  So did the structural deficit really lead to half a billion in savings?

Phil Wyman, candidate for Attorney General: "He has served as the California Vice Chairman of the Assemblies Committee of Higher Education."  It should be "Assembly's Committee.."

Kamala Harris, Attorney General: "Before the Supreme Court found portions of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional, Attorney General Harris was joined by 14 other Attorneys General in a brief that urged the overturn DOMA."  There are some words missing at the end of that sentence.

Ron Gold, candidate for Attorney General: "He supports legislations that will allow undocumented residents to register in a State sanctioned program that will let them stay in California and work."  Legislations?

Kashkari Mailer

There has been a smattering of mailings in the California primary campaign. I have not received any mailers from the Donnelly campaign.  Here is one from Kashkari (click images to enlarge):

Mailer Hits Donnelly, Praises Kashkari

Previous posts described slate mailers in the 2014 California gubernatorial race.  Now we are seeing single-candidate mailers. At The Los Angeles Times, Seema Mehta reports:

Major Republican donor Charles Munger Jr. has contributed $350,000 to a new independent committee he formed to boost GOP gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari, a reflection of establishment Republicans’ growing concern about his bid.

The move brings the total being spent by others on the candidate’s behalf to more than $650,000, according to records filed with the secretary of state’s office.

The new group, called Californians for Kashkari for Governor 2014, has raised a total of $415,000, including $50,000 from billionaire investment fund founder Robert Day. The organization, which by law cannot coordinate its efforts with the candidate, was formed Monday and has already reported spending more than $170,000 on mailers.

Here is one of those mailers (click images to enlarge).

Donnelly and Parties

John Wildermuth reports at The San Francisco Chronicle:

Donnelly's strong showing in polls - he's a solid No. 2 in a primary where the top two finishers advance - has brought warnings from the GOP establishment that a Brown-Donnelly face-off in November would be a disaster for California Republicans. Top-tier Republicans like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former Gov. Pete Wilson have lined up behind a more moderate candidate, former Treasury official Neel Kashkari, to be the GOP choice.

Being more popular with California's conservatives and the Tea Party grass roots than withRepublican Party leaders is not a problem for Donnelly.

"I could care less about parties," he told the room full of cheering supporters in San Jose. "They're not the answer, they're part of the problem. We the people are the answer."

This line points out something important about the race.  If Donnelly faces Brown in November, he could drag a lot of Republicans down with him.

BUT HE DOES NOT CARE.

Disavowing Donnelly

Seema Mehta reports at The Los Angeles Times:

As Neel Kashkari tapped his personal coffers to put another $1 million into his gubernatorial bid Friday, GOP strategist Karl Rove declared that if Kashkari’s rival ends up as the Republican standard-bearer in California after the June 3 primary, candidates across the nation would be forced to disavow him.

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly "is quite prone to sharing the weird recesses and corners of his mind; it could be really problematic for the GOP," Rove told Hugh Hewitt on nationally syndicated radio. Hewitt has endorsed Kashkari.

Donnelly has made controversial statements on immigration and other matters that have drawn condemnation from Republicans. Rove said such statements would dominate the debate with incumbent Gov. Jerry Brown in the fall if Donnelly is elected in June to challenge him.

“If the California Republican Party has as the leading candidate … somebody who has said the outrageous things that he’s said, and prone to the outrageous behavior that he routinely engages in, it will be used to tarnish not only the California Republican Party, but they’ll throw it at everybody on the ballot,” he said.

“And everybody else will, across the country, disavow the guy.”

National Figures Absent from CA Governor's Race

David Siders writes about the CA GOP gubernatorial primary at The Sacramento Bee:

"This is like two very different people in this epic struggle to see who will lose in November,” said Jon Fleischman, a conservative blogger and former state GOP executive director. “Because of that, it takes on kind of a Keystone Kop-ish feel.”

The race between Kashkari, a moderate Republican, and Donnelly, a tea party favorite, has been billed for months as a test of the ideological direction of the Republican Party in California. Kashkari, a former U.S. Treasury Department official, announced endorsements from former California Gov. Pete Wilson, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

But big-name supporters aren’t here rallying with Kashkari. Nor are tea party personalities flying to California to give Donnelly a lift. The race has drawn so little interest that the outcome could just as easily be taken not as a beacon for the party, but as a peculiarity.

“Neither Republican is a marquee figure,” said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at Stanford University. “There’s no glitz factor. There’s just nothing there.”

Yet Donnelly and Kashkari keep fighting like there is. Kashkari, who trails Donnelly badly in publicopinion polls, recently dropped $1 million into his campaign and began airing TV ads in what is likely to be a limited statewide run. He also put up an attack website intended to drag Donnelly down.

Its BuzzFeed-inspired headline: “9 Reasons Why Tim Donnelly Would be a REALLY Bad Choice.”

Donnelly, an assemblyman from Twin Peaks, busied himself online, as well, with his campaign posting social media messages connecting Kashkari to Shariah law. The basis for Donnelly’s claim was a program for an “Islamic Finance 101” seminar at the Treasury Department in 2008, when Kashkari was a senior Treasury official.

Donnelly's Bizarre Charge

Josh Richman writes about a very strange turn in California's gubernatorial race.

Somebody within Donnelly’s campaign on Monday posted a Facebook item alleging that Kashkari “supported the United States submitting to the Islamic, Shariah banking code in 2008 when he ran TARP.”

“Shariah is ‘the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy,’ ” the post said. “This revelation is spreading fast, as people like Anita Gunn refer to Mr. Kashkari’s support of Shariah an ‘October Surprise.’”

The post includes a link to a Tweet by Gunn, a conservative online columnist, which in turn links to a 2008 commentary by conservative pundit Frank Gaffney published by the Washington Times. And that’s where the BS begins in earnest.

Gaffney’s opinion piece is full of rhetorical leaps unsupported by facts or evidence – essentially surmising that the Treasury Department’s study of whether Islamic banking could be useful in combating the world’s financial crisis was a foothold for Shariah law that would have everyone in America bowing toward Mecca within a few years

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Even in 2008, it was a reach. And in 2014, with TARP not only having succeeded in stabilizing the financial sector but also having profited taxpayers to the tune of $13.6 billion, it’s clear that no creeping Shariah ever materialized.

Yet Donnelly told the Los Angeles Times he stands by the Facebook item: “Given the recent stories and protests about the outrage of the discriminatory nature of Sharia law, we’re horrified that Kashkari would support Sharia anything.”

Except that he didn’t. The only real question Donnelly’s insinuation raises is whether he’s trying to capitalize on Kashkari’s ethnic-sounding name – he’s actually Indo-American, and a Hindu – to score cheap points.

Dems to Play in CA Primary?

At Fox and Hounds, Joel Fox notes that some Democrats want Tim Donnelly as Jerry Brown's November opponent:

A whispering campaign urging some loyal Democrats to vote for Donnelly in the open primary to assure Donnelly a place on the November ballot wouldn’t work according to Allan Hoffenblum, a keen observer of the California political scene and publisher of the California Target Book which tracks candidate elections. “It would have to be out in the open, you would need to use persuasion techniques and that couldn’t be kept secret. And it would cost money.”

However, Hoffenblum says that it might be possible for a mischief effort to boost the Donnelly campaign by running ads against Donnelly’s opponents in the primary, particularly his best-funded opponent, Neel Kashkari.

It’s been done before, Hoffenblum reminded me, although he didn’t have to since I was involved on the receiving end of such mischief. When former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan was seemingly running away with the Republican nomination for governor in 2002, Garry South, Gov. Gray Davis’s campaign strategist hit Riordan with negative ads during the primary. I was on the Riordan team. The shots hit their mark and Riordan’s huge lead in early polls vanished as Bill Simon bested him on Election Day.

Another option for Democrats is to do for Donnelly what Claire McCaskill did for Todd Akin in 2012:  run an ad that nominally attacks Donnelly but actually (and intentionally) helps him get GOP votes.  As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch explained at the time:

To conservatives, McCaskill's "criticisms" in the Akin commercial sound more like compliments: that he opposes big government and wants to cut the federal departments of energy and education; and that he has been hotly critical of Obama.

At one point, the ad makes an allegation that sounds as if it could be on an Akin bumper sticker: "Todd's pro-family agenda would outlaw many forms of contraception."

The ad closes with the narrator speaking words that are shown on the screen next to Akin: "Missouri's TRUE conservative ..." Only after a pause does the rest of the phrase come up: "...is just TOO conservative."

"That's music to their ears" in the Akin camp, said [St. Louis University's Ken] Warren, the political scientist. "No one is 'too conservative' for a Tea Party Missourian.

PPIC Poll on California Governor Race

At KQED, John Myers reports on a PPIC poll showing Governor Jerry Brown with 46 percent support in the June first-round election.

But among Republicans, he’s the choice of 7 percent of those surveyed, while Kashkari only musters 5 percent GOP voter support.

A small plurality of Republican voters — 20 percent — favor Tim Donnelly, the Tea Party-aligned assemblyman from San Bernardino County. Andrew Blount, the mayor of Laguna Beach, barely edges the governor among Republicans with 8 percent support. The vast majority of GOP voters — 58 percent — are undecided.

The PPIC survey is just the latest statewide to show Donnelly, a staunch conservative who gets a warm reception from die-hard GOP audiences, as the de facto frontrunner. And yet his support remains relatively small, with some political observers arguing that Donnelly has limited appeal beyond core Republican voters. Some have started publicly saying they fear a Brown vs. Donnelly fall matchup could hurt the GOP’s chances in other races.

And yet Kashkari, a former federal official who crafted the TARP effort of 2008 and a first-time candidate for office, clearly has failed so far to make any noticeable inroads among likely voters. And it’s not as though he’s not trying: the 40-year-old Newport Beach resident has been traveling the state for more than a year, he’s released relatively substantive position papers on jobs and education (the latter coming just Tuesday), and it’s hard to browse a California news or political website without seeing a “Kashkari for Governor” ad pop up on the screen.
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If Kashkari can gain any traction with voters, education issues could be part of his arsenal. The PPIC poll, which is largely about how Californians view K-12 and higher education, shows Brown is on thinner ice with the electorate when it comes to schools. Just 33 percent of likely voters approve of his work on public schools. And on Tuesday, Kashkari released his thoughts on schools — which, in a nutshell, are to send tax dollars to individual schools and let them pretty much do whatever they want with it.

Brown First, Donnelly Second, Spelling Last

The Field Poll reports that Tim Donnelly is running second in California's top-two primary

[Governor Jerry] Brown also holds a huge preference lead when likely voters in the June open primary election are asked whom they would support if the election were being held today. When listed with three Republicans, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, Laguna Hills Mayor and businessman Andrew Blount and businessman Neel Kashkari, Brown is the choice of 57%. Donnelly places a distant second at 17%. No other candidate receives more than 3% of voter preferences.

A 2005 article by Donnelly:

Another challenge that I would love to see fought in the Supreme Court is the seemingly forgotten 9th Ammendment [sic], which says, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Why can't this Ammendment [sic] be used to override the "equal protection" clause of the 14th Ammendment [sic], which is clearly used to "deny" and "disparage" so many rights of American citizens in favor of lawbreakers.

The most notable, of course, is the questionable interpretation of the 14th Ammendment [sic] that allows any child born on US soil to become an instant citizen, in spite of the fact that the parents broke US Federal law just by being here. This "anchor baby" or "Jackpot Baby", using Terry Anderson's term, has rights to social services that law-abiding citizens can never get. The "baby" qualifies for welfare payments, and medicare [sic] because the parents, many of whom arrived shortly before the birth of their "anchor baby" have no assets in the United States that routinely disqualify our citizens known as the "working-poor". If you think this is discriminatory on it's [sic] face, you are not alone. This is a battle that must be fought and must be won if we are to prevail in saving our country.