Because of California’s unique primary system where all candidates run on one ticket and the top two advance to the general election (even if they represent the same party), the U.S. Senate race to replace Barbara Boxer will not feature a Republican. Instead, it will feature two Democrats: Rep. Loretta Sanchez and state Attorney General Kamala Harris.
So, we already know that the nation’s most populous state will soon be represented by a woman of color. We also know that Republican voters will not have much incentive to go to the polls. After all, the rabidly anti-Latino Donald Trump is going to get slaughtered in the Golden State, possibly in staggering fashion. Without a governor’s race and with the Senate race strictly an internecine Democratic affair, the average California Republican will be looking all the way down to the House races for a contest they might impact, and there are several districts where they won’t even have a candidate that far down the ballot (e.g. West Los Angeles, Central Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, the South Bay of San Francisco, North Central San Fernando Valley).
Of course, some of them will still vote, and they could be important in some of these Democrat-on-Democrat races. Loretta Sanchez (18% in the primary) will need all of them if she has any hope of beating Kamala Harris (40% in the primary) and becoming the next senator from California.
One fairly prominent Republican who might be (kind of unexpectedly) vulnerable is Rep. Darrell Issa of Northern San Diego. Issa is probably best known for chairing the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which serves as a kind of den for conspiracy theorists on the right. Somewhere on the internet there’s probably a running tally of how many subpoenas Issa has issued to the Obama administration, none of which have amounted to anything.
Last night, Issa received a disappointing 51% in his primary against Democratic challenger, retired Marine Colonel and Iraq War veteran Doug Applegate. His 51%-45% cushion is not very substantial and it’s possible Issa could succumb if some combination of Republican disengagement, engaged and enraged Latinos, and high Democratic interest in the Senate race results in a very bad turnout situation for him.
Issa is my congressman. 4 years ago I posted here that I felt he was vulnerable to a good candidate. I have never believed my district was as big a republican stronghold as others.
He can be taken.
Work is what it will take.
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I have a lot of disappointed CA Sanders voters looking for a race to get behind. I’ll point them your way. Taking down Issa would be fun.
Issa is a big…and I mean REALLY big nothing burger.
Virtually everyone knows that.
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Issa is also “my” representative. What a loathsome money wasting KNOWN CROOK.
I’ll do what I can see him go down to defeat. Almost nothing would cheer me up more.
Time wasting, money grubbing, lazy, amoral, low life parasitic vermin.
Wasted millions on his worthless stupd Clinton witch hunt vis Benghazi!!!!111!!! Which has been admitted to be a witch hunt.
Waste of time and money. ptui.
Did I say how much I dislike this creep?
Unfortunately, only Arnold Schwarzenegger can make him cry.
Sorry, I probably should add a link when making obscure references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VW0v7wwfkQ
I had forgotten how much the gropenator was Trump v0.1
Our energies should be spent on down ballot candidates who endorsed Bernie. (DNC may not evenly share $ resources with down ballot Bernie endorsers in the general election also.)
Marcy Kaptur in OH 9th District. the hardworking, good researcher Congresswoman since 1983. She’s clear reason term limits is not always the best policy. http://kaptur.house.gov
Janet Garrett in OH in OH 4th District challenging Rep. Jim Jordan (Freedom Caucus Chair) An elementary school teacher from Oberlin who was appalled that the Dem party did not forward any candidate 2 years ago to oppose Jordan. This is her second campaign & is mentored by Kaptur. Ohio redistricting was deliberately designed to make this district republican but she is working hard to prove it doesn’t have to be. janetgarrett.com
Oh, please, please, take Issa.
Some Dems in Texas vote strategically to try and keep the worst of the worst out. One party states are complicated.
I was feeling negative about a Harris vs. Sanchez primary because I figured Republican voters would make the less progressive (Sanchez) win. But Sanchez is fine, just less good than Harris, and when I think about the effect on Republican turnout it’s easily worth it. There’s nothing for even a half-sane Republican to vote for in either of the top races. As a fringe benefit, if Feinstein retires in 2018, the loser in this race will have a big head start for that seat, and I could really live with Harris and Sanchez as my Senators.
With only a 6% cushion, Trump on the ticket, and the double-Dem Senate vote, I think Issa is most likely gone in November. Probably a bunch of other Republicans too.
They should all be nervous.
In 2006 this happened
here
In that article they mention Vista, CA, not 7 miles from my house, the center of Issa’s district, where he lives, and where his office is (what a crap building its in, I pass it all the time).
All our workers stayed home, the freeway had ZERO traffic. It was amazing, and a LOT of people went ‘whoa’.
I am not at all shocked that two democrats won the senate nomination. Republicans are in trouble here. My republican friends are frantic.
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The CA GOP has no one to blame but themselves. Run by a bunch of entitled racist idiots.
>>The CA GOP has no one to blame but themselves.
a writer I can’t link to refers to five of their candidates as “at least somewhat well known”, and the top 5 Repubs split 24% of the vote; if they could have agreed on one serious candidate he would probably have made it to the November election. But they couldn’t, and the ones the writer interviewed didn’t seem too sorry about it either.
yes. Loretta Sanchez is pretty good, and has successfully raised her profile statewide.
It’s a damn shame they are not replacing Dianne “National Security” Feinstein.
She’s up in 2018. Don’t know if CA voters will look favorably on an incumbent that will be 85 years old as of November 2018. OTOH, she’s have the advantage of competing for the nomination in a non-presidential primary year; so, she could draw a repulsive GOP opponent for the general.
The scuttlebutt is that DiFi is FINALLY!! gonna retire. Geez. About frickin’ time. Can’t stand her, and had not much love lost over Boxer.
Kamala Harris will cake walk into Boxer’s seat and pretty much emulate Boxer and DiFi.
Not thrilled with Harris, either. But choices were not abundant.
We probably need some sort of mandatory retirement formula for the Senate. A combination of age and terms in office. No re-elections after age 75 and three or more terms in office. That allows for the fact that Senate seats get so locked up that some worthy politicians don’t have the opportunity to move up until an old Senator dies.
It clogs up the pipeline and leads to poor choices when openings do happen. Might be a good idea for the House as well — Age 77 and fifteen or more terms in office?)
At this point, there probably aren’t many CA Democratic politicians that won’t end up on my s*** list. (Boxer, like Ferraro in ’08, has trashed whatever decent legacy she had with lefties before this election cycle. Particularly painful for me to watch a woman that I interacted with at 1970 anti-war protest and voted for in her very first run for public office.)
Hear! Hear! I agree. Some of these old War Horses simply don’t want to get their oinky snouts out of the trough, do they?
Your formula for forced retirement makes sense. Stricter term limits aren’t always the answer, either, but what you propose makes sense and permits some new blood to move up.
Now CA will be stuck with 2 Junior Senators, which isn’t great. DiFi shoulda left a long time ago.
I agree re Boxer. Was once pretty decent but descended into venality like all the rest. Another reason to get them out of there.
Kamala Harris will take Boxer’s seat. My guess is that Loretta Sanchez will run again and probably get DiFi’s seat. If so, I won’t be sad about that.
To be an effective legislator, a certain amount of experience is required. (Elizabeth Warren is unique but she already had the relevant experience and just needed to reconfigure them slightly for her new job as Senator.) So, perhaps we should also consider an emeritus status for a two to four year transition period for certain retirees rated as exceptional by their peers. (Preferably among those that choose to retire before the age of 75.)
(Must be tough for Boxer to have a grandson that is also the nephew of HRC.)
Two new senators were elected in 1992. DiFi got to be the senior senator because she defeated the one appointed to Wilson’s seat and therefore, took office a few weeks before Boxer.
We’re not going to get better government if all we do is elect comparable replacements for retirees. So far not convinced that Harris is as liberal/progressive as Boxer. If she were succeeding DiFi then it would be an improvement. We need to do much better than Sanchez for DiFi’s successor.
Neglected to add that a NorCal and SoCal Senator might be an improvement over two NorCal senators. I’d back Xavier Becerra (even though at the moment I’m not at all pleased with him). Slim pickings for progressive with a decent amount of experience that isn’t a senior citizen. Actually, Becerra is it.
Because if you can’t lick ’em, ban ’em. Seems fair to me.
Then I guess you oppose all company and employer mandatory retirement age rules. Unlike voters, businesses and corporations understand that their organizations will not remain current and vibrant if their workforce is dominated by employees over the age of fifty.
It’s a tossup whether Issa or Gohmert is the worst Republican Congressman.
Depends on how one defines “worst.” Louie may be the dumbest. Issa may be the most ineffectual. But there’s a lot of competition for worst.
No quarrel there! My own local Congressional race is between a DWS protege and a dumb as rocks local mayor.
I’m hoping there will be a Green candidate as they are becoming more active in Illinois.
The USPS disagrees with your designation of Issa as ineffectual.
He had a plan to take down HRC over the Benghazi non-scandal too. Lots of atrocious plans exist in DC, but legislative effectiveness only counts if they are enacted.
And the USPS is still on the chopping block, with most people still thinking that it is a failing institution that needs to have X, Y, and Z done to it in order for it not to be failing.
Just because the USPS hasn’t been fully privatized doesn’t make what Issa did ineffectual. And even with the entire Benghazi thing amounting to a nothingburger, it doesn’t matter that Benghazi is a nothingburger, as it is still just “one more scandal” that Hillary has to spend time (and money, since it takes away time that she could be giving speeches to Goldman Sachs) to defend and deflect from it.
Issa is a massive dumpster fire of a politician, and even though his attempts to get people fired haven’t succeeded, the continual amount of shit that he can fling at the wall is dangerous, and makes him dangerous to the US and the governance that is required to be a functioning state.
I guess my argument is that Issa, while a failure at his goals, isn’t ineffectual as much as his failures are still destructive in general.
I realize that Gohmert as dumb as bag of hammers and less useful, but I really really despise money-wasting known crook Issa. Worthless. Used his position to enrich himself at the expense of his constituents, while wasting millions upon millions of tax dollars on useless witch hunts.
ptui!
The folks in his district know what to do and how many voters they have to turn out to dump him, don’t they?
He had a non-imbecile Republican primary opponent. Still won.
Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times: ‘It was just chaos’: Broken machines, incomplete voter rolls leave some wondering whether their ballots will count
After sixteen years, it should be clear that this situation in not a bug in US elections, it is a feature.
That is the first reason not to be triumphalist about this election until this situation is fixed in all 192,480 precincts.
The question about this growing failure is who is orchestrating it, who benefits, and how to end it before this November’s election. If this isn’t a topic in the meeting between Sanders and Obama on Thursday, it should be. It is the issue that is likely to be more significant for a Democratic wave election in 2016 than any other.
And more likely, it will be more of a problem than the number of Sanders voters who fail to vote for Clinton.
The fact that Democrats have not dealt with this issue in the states that they control means that a sufficient number of Democratic incumbents benefit from it. That policy and practice must stop if people seriously want to avoid a violent post-election period. That goes double for Democratic urban machines. Election protection was a definite priority for the Obama campaign. The frustration of the GOP is such that it must be more intense for a Clinton campaign. Roger Stone most likely is not the only skilled operative in dirty elections that Trump has hired.
What Sanders can offer in his meeting with Obama is molding his county delegates into a volunteer force for GOTV. If he has organized every county, that will provide broad local coverage among demographics an opinions that the Clinton campaign did not reach. To bring that off, those county delegates must at the very least must not be demotivated by the conduct of the convention and must be motivated. This might be a partial zero-sum game with the Clinton demographics. No doubt both Sanders and Obama know where those friction points exist and have ideas how to finess them so that they lose minimal numbers of supporters in the area of conflict.
Whatever happens, this must be a honest-to-goodness coalition and not a co-option of Sanders supporters. Any whiff of co-option causes a lot of Sanders supporters to break away. That’s the path that they feel they have been led down for the past (the count of years varies by individual) years, and the Sanders campaign this year is the last chance to change that. The withdrawal from political involvement altogether or the more intense involvement in extra-electoral movemental politics will be intensified.
Kennedy did not know how Ngo Dinh Diem would make his statement ironic so quickly. In fact, this is the fatal flaw that has caused the CIA’s 70-year-old policy of regime change to be a massive failure of a succession of failed states. The same failure of thinking could ironically haunt the United States. And we understand who has been arming to win in such a situation. For all their bravado, it isn’t the young lefties.
When Sanders says that this election goes beyond who the nominee is, the absolute necessity of absorbing the critical near-majorities into a reformed electoral politics is one of them. The American system presented the vision of a permanent revolution within a system that structurally frustrated that from happening easily (for some of the Constitutional conventioneers) and not at all (for the rest of the Constitutional conventioneers). The Constitution was the original finesse in the American political system. “We’ll work that out later.” said those hopeful of change. “We’ll act to control the processes any way we can,” said those who saw the Constitution as a step too far.
The obstructionists have tended to rule much too long before snaps of change. The incidence of violence shows.
It is those who have allied the movemental politics with electoral politics without co-option that have moved change along. That means that they get called unacceptable radicals and sell-outs at the same time. Note that sometimes these characters have been both at different times; Tom Hayden comes to mind. Sometimes, they structurally are not able to make that bridge; Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney come to mind. Too often those are personalized instead of seen as the competing institutional and movemental forces that could not be balanced. In fact, IMHO, charges of “poor leadership” often mask serious structural contradictions that prevent the integration of movemental priorities into established institutions, even when those institutions might be open to change. That is in fact the argument that those who cite the filibuster, the committee seniority system, and the influence of money are making and others criticize as excusing personal cowardice or corruption. A little more clarity on how these contradictions are happening in real time could allow better responses instead of wheel-circling discussion that spin out in personalized hostility. Are Sanders and Obama (and Clinton in time) leaders capable of that kind of analysis and alliance in coalitions?
That is what makes BooMan’s triumpalist view of the 2016 election come true.
Good link on the LATimes report. Otherwise, all you seem to be saying is that Bernie and his supporters must get on board with HER because of Trump.
My argument is one of authentic coalition. I recognize that if on Thursday all Obama does is ask for Bernie’s donor list and email list, Bernie is sort of under obligation to his supporters to say, “No, my supporters and donors have not released me to do that. They seek a working coalition not capitulation. And they insist that some degree of independence of full integration into the Democratic party machine or the Clinton campaign is necessary to the kind of revolution in politics that we are seeking.”
Working a suitable arrangement of exactly what the nature of the coalition of the two groups within the Democratic Party can do to hold the maximum number of voters and motivate an authentic unity effort both before the election and after the inauguration of President Hillary Clinton and the Democratic-majority Congress gives something that Sanders delegates can work on when they go home after the convention.
The message otherwise is, “Screw working within the electoral system.”
It is likely that the Clinton campaign is going to have to honestly come more than half way on some issues, such as $15 per hour minimum wage, Social Security increase, Medicare-for-all, forgiveness of student loan debt, and separation of FICA-insured and investment banking. And possibly some executive-action commitments, such as restrengthening the scientific basis of regulatory action at EPA or stronger enforcement of labor protections at the Department of Labor and the NLRB. Or legislation the puts the FCC into some sort of election regulation, such as shortening the media cycle as a way of taking a whole bunch of money out of elections. I’m listing some of the items I would like to see discussed as an example where there might be common ground that would command popular support and deinstitutionalize corruption.
Problem is that the Clintons don’t honor their commitments to anyone on their left. HRC even welshed on the agreement to a May debate in CA.
Don’t know about you, but I voted for a Democrat in 1992 and not GHWB. If I weren’t so averse to voting for a Republican,, I might have been able to recognize that GHWB was the less destructive choice.
I suggest that one point of discussion between Sanders and Obama be just this issue of how to build a box around a President so that they keep their commitments to those who voted for them. If what we’ve been told is true, Obama should be an expert on how those boxes have been built and how Presidents find themselves bound to honor them.
Your historical interpretation can only be correct if you know who would have succeeded GHWB in 1996. That makes some assumptions of how he would have reacted to the collapse of Mogadishu, the growth of Serbian nationalism threatening another genocide in Europe, and other situations that Clinton had to deal with.
It is in fact largely impossible to predict who is the “lesser of two evils”.
Obama might not know how to build such boxes if his character is such that his word is his bond. Suspect it is with those he makes personal private deals with.
He may have been the one that was put in a box by HRC. If he and his staff didn’t know that HRC was running her own communication network that the administration had no access to, he would have been flying too blind to have challenged her on it a year ago and pushed for a speedy investigation by Justice. Now he’s totally stuck.
GHWB was in office when Bosnia and Croatia was being pummeled by Serbs. So, we have a good idea on that one. Mogadishu didn’t matter. The second WJC term was when the real assault on critical New Deal legislation took place. Impossible that a GOP successor to GHWB could have done more damage than WJC. However, GHWB would have remained on the ropes during a second term and that would have precluded a GOP takeover of Congress in 1994. Then as the Democratic Party hadn’t been fully taken over by the DLC folks and one of their leaders had been defeated in ’92, there Democrats would have had more decent options in ’96 as there were a number of decent and qualified sitting Democrats that would have been ready by 1996. Most importantly, GWB would never have been viable.
You really do have an airtight, unchanging historical narrative. The run-up to 1994 is among the events you misremember, however.
The actions taken by President Clinton and Congress in 1993 and 1994 were be far the most progressive of his Presidency; they included tax increases on wealthy Americans and the failed attempt to push through health care policies which were more liberal than the ACA.
The Republican Party ran hard against this agenda in 1994, and they were enormously successful. The electorate slaughtered the most liberal Congress of Bill’s Presdency and took his House majority away. He and the Democrats did better electorally after they compromised with Republicans. That makes me unhappy, but it’s the actual history.
And let’s not pretend he did whatever Newt Gingrich wanted. Clinton hung tough through a government shutdown, with Medicare policy at stake; he defended it successfully, as he should have and needed to.
I didn’t like a number of the policy and personnel decisions President Clinton made while dealing with divided government, but let’s not claim that those were his first instincts, and let’s not claim that Clinton and Congressional Dems had their worst responses from the electorate after they governed more conservatively. Unfortunately, the opposite was true.
This list implies that the Sanders camp has the power to demand basic capitulation from the Clinton camp. “Hey, Party nominee, you, your campaign staff and supporters, and National and State Party leaders are simply too distasteful for us to truly work with; we’ll just hang out over here and do our own thing with Party money and resources.” That seems off, and doesn’t reflect a good-faith negotiating premise.
Speaking of bad faith, lacking this capitulation, you say “The message otherwise is, “Screw working within the electoral system.”
Well, we would be forever denied our policy wins under that premise. Unimaginably counterproductive.
As far as your list of desirable Policy plank improvements, it’s a good list. I’d want the broad policies that EFCA held (hint: not just card check) to be specifically established as part of the platform.
As someone who has been following what Obama’s Labor Department and NLRB have been doing, I’d like to know where you find their rulings and regulatory decisions lacking, because I’m pretty damn impressed with how hard they’ve been pushing the envelope, up to and including defending many of their actions against lawsuits and occasional blockages by the Judiciary. They’ve been breaking ground for workers particularly effectively since the Senate resolved the NLRB appointment logjam created by maximal GOP intransigence.
Intrigued, but not sure I understand the details of your recommendation that we shorten the media cycle in election campaigns. Please elaborate. Based on what I believe you’re talking about, we would certainly need to place a new SCOTUS Justice or two first.
It should be clear by now that any failures in voting machines and other precinct voting systems during the primaries most likely disfavored Hillary. We can deduce that from the fact that the bigger the primary turnout, the more likely it was that Clinton won and won big.
And yesterday in California, as was true in New York and elsewhere, there was no shown pattern that system or list problems in particular precincts disproportionately created problems for Sanders voters; in fact, the opposite could be shown to be true. Those Sanders supporters sure are tuned into that shitty narrative though, aren’t they? Wonder how that happened.
California is reluctant to enforce conformity of election processes in the 50+ Counties because the State budget would have to fund it. Let’s build political pressure to pay for uniform processes and equipment; I agree it would be better. That would mean other things would lose funding, or we would have to increase taxes and fees. I’m down with the last option; the people have not pressed for this.
I fucking hate unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, particularly ones which undermine faith in democracy. Voter ID laws? Hell, that’s not a conspiracy theory, the GOP lets it leak on a regular basis that their goal is disproportionate voter suppression. This Both Siderism is goddamn appalling.
re:
Sincerely,
–Sanders supporter not “tuned into that shitty narrative”.
Well,by golly, you have the beginnings of a convention platform plank that Sanders supporters might support–for all 50 states. And the issue is less about the expenditures than the tendency of politicians and election officials to try to act “cute”. It is procedural and oversight and public pressure for honest elections more than voting equipment. In fact the most capable voting equipment in the world is a transparent ballot box and hand-marked paper ballots, with already voted voters receiving a purple thumbprint. The vulnerabilities are in counting the ballots and transporting the ballot box, which essentially involves chain-of-custody security under observation of all party workers and independent observers (the Carter Center plays this role outside the US). The last point of vulnerability is the aggregation of the jurisdictional totals of votes for board of election certification. (This was where Waukesha County WI regularly failed.)
Sanders and Clinton supporters might easily come together to pass this plank into the Party platform. However, we might be served by taking a look at the plank that was passed into the platform at the 2012 Convention:
“Voting is the foundation of democracy, a central act of civic engagement, and an expression of equal citizenship. Voting rights are important precisely because they are protective of all other rights. We will call for legislative action that will fully protect & enforce the fundamental Constitutional right of every American to vote-to ensure that the Constitution’s promise is fully realized and that, in disputed elections, every vote is counted fully and fairly. To advance these goals, and to guarantee the integrity of our elections and to increase voter confidence, we will seek action to ensure that voting systems are accessible, independently auditable, accurate, and secure. We will support the full funding of programs to realize this goal. Finally, it is the priority of the Democratic Party to fulfill the promise of election reform, reauthorize the expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and vigorously enforce all voting rights laws. Every vote must count & every vote must be counted.”
So, a lot of the elements we want are already in the National Party platform. It’s easy to see why there is much less pressure on enforcing this plank; electoral law and policy does not have as many advocates and attention as those advocates who seek improvements in other functions of central governments.
You know what could scuttle an improvement in this worthwhile plank? The Sanders delegates loudly and sanctimoniously claiming during the negotiations and at the Convention that this campaign plank is needed to prevent the Democratic Party Establishment from stealing elections from True Liberals in Party primaries.
Because that would be infuriating, divisive bullshit.
>>the South Bay of San Francisco
that’s my district, where we’ll get a rematch of the 2014 Honda-Khanna fight. My state assembly district might also feature two dems, still too close to call between the top repub and the 2nd dem.
Beating Issa would be very sweet.
As for the Senate, blug dog Sánchez might as well be a Republican – I was hoping the GOP guy would come in second, as he would have been landslided a la Fiorina in Nov. Kamala Harris seemed quite brilliant and un-phony in her interview with Chris Hayes. Hopefully she’ll prevail. This is the first dem-on-“dem” race we’ve had out here.
Kamala Harris is not very much to the left of Sanchez, believe me. Neither is all that and a bag of chips. They’re both beholden to the 1% and lean right, just like everyone else in the D party everywhere these days.
JMHO, of course.
That’s flat-out nonsense. Loretta Sanchez is a rank-and-file Democrat, meaning she votes the opposite way from almost every Republican. She’s no progressive thought leader but she is 100% not a Republican.
Why people don’t understand this is beyond me.
A bad Dem is 100-fold better than any Republican.
Yes, we should continue to push for more liberal Dems, but this equivalency business needs to stop.
I agree.
Issa’s district has some pretty conservative areas. Only a blue dog like democratic can preval there for multiple terms. How is that not better than Issa? Maybe some day a true progressive can consistently win, but not now.
And that pattern is repeated all over the country. It’s why purity discussions are fantasy.
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Don’t know that top two is unique. Washington State does the same thing.