Issa Out

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional races as well as the presidential election.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA-49) just announced that he will not seek reelection.  He had a very close race in 2016 and was going to be a top Democratic target in 2018.  

There is a stark regional divide in California politics:  not just north-south, but coastal-inland.

Issa is one of just two California Republican House members whose district touches the Pacific Ocean.  The other is Dana Rohrabacher.  Both districts are potential Democratic pickupsl

That is not mere coincidence. Coastal districts have different demographics and economics,  They are also more attuned to environmental issues, and the Trump administration's decision to allow new offshore oil drilling (except in Florida) is likely to be unpopular in any district where one can smell seawater.

Boxer's Retirement

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has announced that she will not run for reelection.

In the Democratic race, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris have the advantage of statewide name recognition.  They may end up with a tacit understanding that one will run for Senate in 2016 and the other will run for governor in 2018, but the hard part will be deciding who runs for which office.  Some Democratic House members may be also be looking at the race.  It seems likely that the GOP will hold the majority in the House for a few more years at least, whereas Democrats have a reasonably good chance of regaining the Senate next year.  (Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who was among the most senior House Democrats, gladly ran for the chance to be the least senior member of the Senate Democratic majority.)

It would be really hard for a Republican to win a Senate seat in California.  No Republican has done so since Pete Wilson in 1988.  Republicans can sometimes win blue-state governorships (Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts in 2014, for instance), but a senatorial election is a different kind of vote.  National issues and party identification play a bigger role in Senate elections:  only 15 senators come from statesthat went for the opposite party in the 2012 presidential election. In California, party registration and party identification are deep blue.  And since 2016 will be a presidential election year, we can expect Democratic turnout to be reasonably high in California.

Republicans have a weak bench in California.  They hold no statewide offices.  No Republican House member from California has statewide name recognition.  Even House majority leader Kevin McCarthy is a familiar name only among political junkies.  If Californians have heard the name at all, they’ll think of the actor who starred in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

There are a couple of significant GOP mayors, Kevin Faulconer of San Diego and Ashley Swearengin of Fresno, but they are little-known statewide. (Swearengin ran for controller in 2014, and lost.)

Running in California requires lots of money.  Rep.Darrell Issa is very wealthy, and may wish to move up now that term limits have forced him to give up the chair of the House Oversight Committee.  But he is probably too conservative to win statewide, and ethics issues would dog him in a statewide campaign.  There may be other rich Republicans out there, but memories of Meg Whitman may deter them.  In the 2010 gubernatorial race, she spent lavishly from her eBay fortune, but still lost badly to Jerry Brown.

With some financial backing, a moderate-to-liberal Republican might have an outside chance.  Schwarzenegger designed the top-two primary to encourage the nomination of such candidates, but evidence for its effectiveness is mixed.  Anyway, it is hard to identify who the moderate-to-liberal Republican would be.  Tom Campbell ran against Feinstein in 2000 and lost by nearly 20 points.  Neel Kashkari had to spend a large share of his personal funds to run for governor in 2014, and it is unlikely that he could afford to run statewide so soon. 

Scandalabra: Restraint and Overreach

At a committee hearing, Darrell Issa allowed Lois Lerner to leave after invoking the Fifth Amendment.  At RealClearPolitics, Caitlin Huey-Burns writes:

Issa isn’t typically empathetic or restrained. He has accused Lerner of providing false or misleading accounts to Congress in previous conversations with members of Congress. But he accomplished two ends on Wednesday. While the beginning of the hearing and Lerner’s exit made for some drama and headlines, he avoided what could have been a major distraction. (Recall a 1999 oversight hearing where then-Chairman Dan Burton let former White House official Mark Middleton be questioned for more than half an hour after Middleton took the Fifth in an investigation of a Clinton campaign funding controversy. That tactic brought a scathing response from then-ranking member Henry Waxman, who stated in a letter to Burton: “Our investigation has become far better known for its abuses rather than its results.”)

Also, by saying he intends to call Lerner back before the committee, Issa ensured that the story and his committee will stay in the spotlight heading into the Memorial Day recess, when congressional news tends to tamper off.

In a recent Tweet, RNC chair Reince Priebus wrote of the administration's "lawlessness and guerrilla warfare." At RealClearPolitics, Ron Fournier writes:

While the White House is guilty of incompetence and mangling its credibility in recent weeks, and while the IRS admittedly engaged in wildly inappropriate political targeting, nobody has been charged or convicted with a crime.

Congressional and FBI investigators will determine who directed (and knew of) the targeting, but there is no evidence today that it reached into the White House or Obama's campaign. Based on what we know so far, it is incorrect to say the president is "in the middle" of "lawlessness and guerrilla warfare."

It is also irresponsible. And it's bad politics.

Priebus was scheduled to appear Thursday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" shortly after my appearance on the show so I pointed out the tweet to panelist John Heilemann of New York magazine. He pressed Priebus to clarify. The chairman doubled down.
....
Some Republican strategists watched in frustration. "When you have your opponent on the ropes, no need to punch below the belt," emailed Republican consultant Reed Galen. "Now is the time to swing to what make the GOP different and better for these times."

Filling Gaps in the White House Website, Part 41

In an interview with CNBC's John Harwood, the president denied any link between the White House push for financial regulation and SEC action against Goldman Sachs:

Well, what I'd say is that I gave a speech about financial regulatory reform in 2007. Before our current crisis. In 2008, before we fully knew what this crisis was gonna be. We released financial-- reform-- as a package over a year ago. And so, we're not Johnny Come Lately's to this thing. We've been pushing this hard throughout. And the SEC is an entirely independent-- agency that-- we have no day to day control over. And they never discussed with us anything-- with respect to the charge that will be brought. So, this notion that somehow-- there would be any attempt to interfere in an independent agency is completely false.

JOHN HARWOOD: So, you say categorically no winks, no heads up in advance--

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Categorically.

JOHN HARWOOD:--no signal from anyone--

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Categorically. We-- we-- we found out about it on--CNBC.

Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) isn't buying it.