95 percent accurate

Ever since Woodward and Bernstein's heyday, the phrase "follow the money" has become something of a cliche in political reporting. But cliche or not, there is always a clear corelation between the amount of money spent by independent groups in the last few weeks of a campaign and the closeness of the contest.

Independent expenditure committees often have a lot of money to throw around in legislative races, but they are in no rush to just throw it away. They follow polls closely, and spend their money only in campaigns in which they believe it can make a difference.

That said, the contest in the 19th state Senate District between Oxnard Harbor District Commissioner Jason Hodge and former Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson of Santa Barbara, both Democrats, must be fairly close.

On Saturday, another $75,000 was dropped into the race, most of it from a group making its first expense -- one called "California Alliance, a coalition of consumer attorneys and conservationists." That's a significant amount of money for mail, so it probably means two pieces, in support of Jackson.

Meanwhile, the California Professional Firefighers reported spending another $17,700 on mail in support of Hodge, a fellow firefighter,

Hard to say what the private polling is showing -- those poll results are always closely guarded -- but it's safe to say that two big outside players wouldn't be dropping that kind of money into the race this close to Election Day unless they thought the outcome remains in doubt.

Yesterday was a big day for outside expenditures in Ventura County's 26th Congressional District -- which now ranks eighth nationally in the amount of independent expenditures made so far to influence U.S. House races in 2012, with $658,874 having been spent so far.

That total, by the way, excludes the involvement of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Because it is a party committee, it will not have to report its expenditures until later. Based on the number of mailers it has sent opposing independent Linda Parks, it's likely that it has spent at least $150,000 on the race.

The Democrats' House Majority PAC kicked in another $77,000 for a mailer opposing Parks and more TV advertising in support of Democrat Julia Brownley. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that brings the super PAC's total to $417,335 in the 26th District primary.

Brownley also picked up support from a $100,000 expenditure by the League of Conservation Voters, although the report from the Federal Elections Commission is less than specific on how the money was used: "support for IE (independent expenditure) activity -- mailers & phone calls."

Perhaps the most interesting development, however, was the emergence of an outside group calling itself icPurple. The group, founded by billionaire philanthropist Ted Waitt, the co-founder of Gateway, Inc.,announced Friday it will be supporting independent candidates, including Parks and San Diego mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher.

Its FEC report shows a $23,687 expense for "online video production costs" in support of Parks. The online video is the same for Fletcher and Parks, with only the tag line at the end changed. It's unclear whether the video will be used for television advertising, although the fact that it's exactly 30 seconds long suggests it could be.

Less than 20 days 'til Election Day, candidates and their supporters are getting cranky, and more than 6,000 people in Ventura County (about 4 percent of permanent mail-ballot voters) have already turned in their ballots. So lots to write about today in a three-dot blog post...

WHAT MAKES A DEMOCRAT A DEMOCRAT? -- A couple of weeks ago in an interview, 19th Senate District candidate Jason Hodge told me he'd been a Democrat "all my life," and I quoted him as saying so. County Democratic Central Committee vice-chairman David Atkins checked out the claim at the county registrar of voters' office and asserts it's untrue.

In fact, Hodge was from 2002 until 2008 registered as "decline to state" a party affiliation.

Hodge acknowledged that today -- but asserted that doesn't mean he hasn't always been a Democrat in his heart. For example, he said that in primary elections he has always requested a Democratic ballot. A person can be a Democrat, he said, but the voter registration cards give a people an option whether to state or decline to publicly state their party orientation. He chose to decline, he said.

That may be the case. But when you're a candidate and you tell a reporter that you've always been a Democrat, nearly everyone who reads that quote is going to interpret it that you've always been a registered Democrat. It was misleading at best.

SPLITTING THE FIELD? -- With three candidates challenging incumbent First District Supervisor Steve Bennett of Ventura, it is likely that they're fighting among themselves for second place -- but also likely that, combined, they will keep Bennett under the 50 percent-plus one threshold he would need to win re-election outright on June 5.

But, as my colleague Kathleen Wilson notes, opponents of Bennett appear to have some trouble coalescing behind a single challenger. "In a bit of surprise, Christy Weir has won the endorsement of a key business group for the only contested seat on the Ventura County Board of Supervisors," Wilson writes. "The Ventura Chamber of Commerce's political action committee gave the moderate Ventura councilwoman the nod over pro-business candidates Neal Andrews and Bob Roper .

"Roper, the retired county fire chief, has the endorsement of the Ventura County Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business, a 300-member group at odds with Bennett's environmental views."

AN UPSIDE-DOWN WEBSITE -- Opponents of independent congressional candidate Linda Parks (although they don't identify themselves) have created a new website -- lindaparksrepublican.com to further spread the word to Ventura County voters that Parks was a Republican for 16 years before re-registering as an independent just before becoming a candidate for the U.S. House. The wallpaper on the site features the GOP's elephant logo, upside-down.

The site includes an image of Parks' 1996 voter-registration card in which she changed political affiliation from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Above the card, the text reads:

"In case there was any doubt, here's a copy of Linda Parks' Republican voter registration form, proving her Republican registration for sixteen years, from the Newt Gingrich era, through the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Palin era, all the way to today's Romney-Boehner era.

"Note that she used this form to switch from Democrat to Republican in 1996. Which raises the question: what was it about Newt Gingrich and his values that Linda Parks found so much more appealing than Bill Clinton?"

ONE MORE FORUM -- Likely the last chance to hear at least some of the 26th Congressional District candidates will be tomorrow evening (Friday) from 5 to 7 at the Thousand Oaks City Council Chambers. The forum is sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Parks is scheduled to be there, and Democrats Julia Brownley, Jess Herrera, David Cruz Thayne and Albert Goldberg are expected to attend, but Republican Tony Strickland will not be.

OUTSIDE MONEY KEEPS FLOWING -- Another independent expenditure committee, this one called WOMEN VOTE! is making its presence felt in the 26th Congressional District contest. The group today reported a $26,000 mailer it has sent in support of Brownley.

In the days following San Diego Assemblyman and mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher's announcement that he was abandoning the Republican Party to become an independent, Fletcher was predictably pilloried by conservative activists and commentators.

They reaffirmed their support for the Republican Party-endorsed candidate for mayor, Councilman Carl DeMaio, and asserted that Fletcher's decision, far from being an expression of personal principle, was a crass attempt to reinvigorate his sagging campaign. Wrote conservative consultant Tab Berg on Flashreport,org, "I don't know what is in his heart, but I cannot help asking if this was a crisis of conscience or simply raw political opportunism... To me, it screams that he values his personal success more than the ideas all of us have fought for together."

But there was one conservative voice -- someone who is also a blogger on the right-wing Flash Report -- who fired off a post in Fletcher's defense. That individual was Sen. Tony Strickland of Moorpark. On April 6, reaffirming his endorsement of Fletcher, he wrote, "
"It's okay to be sad he left the party, many of us are, but attacking Nathan's character is taking it too far."

Strickland, it should be noted, is not exactly a prolific contributor to the blog. It was just his third post this year, and he has written none since.

After Strickland's blog post was published, I got a call from a leading California conservative activist who was steamed over it -- and who asserted that the only reason Strickland jumped in to defend Fletcher was his own brand of political opportunism. This conservative's reasoning was this: Strickland is running in a congressional race in Ventura County against an independent candidate, Supervisor Linda Parks, and he was desperately trying to position himself as an independent-minded Republican.

I didn't buy that then, but now comes this -- a mailer sent to no-party-preference voters in the 26th Congressional District with a testimonial from Fletcher, under the headline, "From the only registered independent legislator in California." It includes a photo of Strickland and a tag line, "Thoughtful. Independent. For Congress."

The fact is, however, is that there are few more committed partisan Republicans in California than Strickland. He recruits Republican candidates, he is active in state party affairs, he is an acknowledged leader of the state GOP. He is, in every respect, a proud Republican -- except during the months before elections, when he seems to run from the party label and seeks to portray himself as an independent. He did that four years ago, and he's doing it again.

Getting Fletcher in his corner certainly helps.

Under California's former primary election system, Democrats in Ventura County might remember from 2004, a write-in candidate for the Legislature had to receive a minimum of 1 percent of the votes cast in the previous district election to win a spot on the general election ballot.

Democrats pulled that off in 2004, when more than 1,600 of them wrote in the name of Ferial Masry, allowing the party to field a candidate in the 37th Assembly District even though no Democrat had stepped forward to run before the candidate-filing deadline.

When they wrote the rules for the new top-two primary, however, lawmakers did not include a minimum threshold of votes needed by write-in candidates. As a result, it is likely that a write-in candidate will emerge to challenge Democrat Lois Wolk in Northern California's 3rd Senate District.

After the March candidate-filing deadline came and went, it appeared Wolk would be running unopposed in the district that includes such Democratic strongholds as Davis and Napa. But Gary Clift, a Republican who lost to John Garamendi in the 2010 race in the 10th Congressional District, has now completed the paperwork in Solano County to become a qualified write-in candidate against Wolk.

If Clift is officially certified as a write-in candidate on May 25, a spokeswoman at the Secretary of State's Office confirmed today, that means if he receives one vote in the June 5 primary he will qualify for a position on the November ballot. So, if Clift votes for himself (and he wouldn't really have to spell it correctly, as long as his intent is clear), he's in.

"Top two" apparently means exactly that -- the top two candidates advance to the general election even if the June outcome in a race between two qualified candidates is 99.99 percent to 0.01 percent.

Somehow, that doesn't seem quite right. It reveals an oversight in the drafting of the top-two primary rules that ought to be corrected next time around. In this case, it appears Clift is a legitimate Republican candidate -- at least one who ran in and won a contested GOP primary two years ago. But without a minumum vote requirement, the current system creates an opportunity for any kind of crackpot to step forward in any district with an unopposed candidate and win a spot on the general election ballot.

UPDATED AT 5:15 P.M. TO REFLECT NEW LATE INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURE REPORT

Two independent groups over the weekend doubled down on their spending in attempts to influence political races in Ventura County, and a third weighed in for the first time today..

Federal Elections Commission reports show that the Democratic House Majority PAC purchased an additional $141,285 in television advertising supporting Assemblywoman Julia Brownley in the 26th Congressional District, and spent another $22,000 on a mailer opposing independent candidate Supervisor Linda Parks. Those two expenditures bring the Washington, D.C.-based super PAC's spending in the race so far to $341,373.

In reports filed with the California secretary of state, a business group that uses the name "California Senior Advocates League" disclosed a second mailer sent to voters in the west county's 19th state Senate District race. The $21,614 mail piece opposes Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson; an earlier piece supported her Democratic opponent, Jason Hodge. The new mailer brings that group's spending in the race to about $44,000.

Finally, in a disclosure filed this afternoon, the California Professional Firefighters Association IE PAC reported a $17,300 mailer supporting Hodge, a county firefighter who has the backing of firefighter unions around the state.

(UPDATED AT 3 P.M. TO REFLECT PARKS' REMARKS AT MONDAY FORUM)

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has flooded the mailboxes of Ventura County Democratic voters with another cartoonish mailer that seeks to portray independent congressional candidate Linda Parks as a tea party-style Republican extremist.

The first showed Parks' face on campaign buttons paired with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. The cover of this one shows an open closet with GOP paraphernalia, including a cardboard cutout of Palin and a Bush-Cheney placard, spilling out. The implication is that Parks has been trying to keep her true political leanings in the closet. The headline says, "Republican Linda Parks has a secret..."

On the flip side it says that "Washington Republicans and Linda Parks would end Medicare as we know it" and that "a vote for Parks and the national Republicans is a vote for the Tea Pary."

The allegation, to put it charitably, is a stretch. In fact, one of the comments that the DCCC cites to back up its claim is an out-of-context excerpt from a Facebook comment exchange. In that exchange, a user asks Parks whether she supports the budget proposal written by GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, a proposal that includes cuts to Medicare and a plan to offer vouchers to seniors who could choose to use them to purchase private insurance instead of government-administered Medicare insurance.

The DCCC asserts that Parks evaded the question, saying it was "moot" because the Ryan budget stands no chance of passage. But here's the full text of Parks' response: "I am concerned that the Ryan Budget, among other things, would leave vulnerable senior citizens without health care. I also think it is a moot point because the Ryan Budget is dead in the water because it is a one-sided proposal and an example of what you get when you don't have Republicans and Democrats working together."

A fair reading of that response is that Parks does not support the Ryan proposal -- unless one believes that a political candidate is publicly supporting the concept of leaving "vulnerable senior citizens without health care."

Democrats understandably want to point out to their own partisan voters that Parks is not one of them. That's true. Until becoming a candidate, Parks was a registered Republican. She was a Republican throughout the eight years of the Bush administration and during the 2008 McCain-Palin campaign. But the facts of Parks' political behavior make their argument that she is an extremist difficult. Parks has worked in concert with the Democratic majority on the Board of Supervisors, she endorsed Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson over Republican Tony Strickland in their 2008 state Senate campaign, and she made her mark in local politics by being an outspoken advocate for open-space preservation.

Those are decidedly not traits one typically associates with a tea party-affiliated candidate.

Yesterday, Parks called on leading Democratic candidate Julia Brownley to publicly repudiate the DCCC mailers, but that's not going to happen. In an e-mail response to that request, Brownley campaign spokesman Lenny Young wrote me: "Despite her rhetoric, it has been unclear where Linda Parks stands on Medicare because she has been all over the place on the Ryan plan that aims to end it and on whether she'd support the House Republicans who are in lock step behind the plan... She's been a Republican for her entire elected career so I can understand why the voters in Ventura County can't count on her to protect Medicare."

On one hand, the Democrats' frustration over how to associate Parks with Republican policy positions is understandable, because Parks has been less than clear where she stands on a number of issues. Among those had been the question of whether lowered tax rates on wealthy individuals should be allowed to expire at the end of this year. Parks has ducked that question a number of times, but at a forum Monday came very close to saying no. She said: "In these difficult economic times it's hard to say yes I want a tax increase. And I think there are other things that we can do short of a tax increase."

She has also declined to say which party she would caucus with if elected to the House, who would get her vote for Speaker of the House, and even whether she intends to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney for president. Those evasions will likely give partisan Democrats considerable pause.

But if Democrats are to continue to attack Parks (which they surely will), they would be wise to look for a different line of argument. They might, for instance, ask voters to assess whether Parks' approach to her job as Thousand Oaks councilwoman and as a supervisor has demonstrated the kind of temperament and cooperative spirit that would enable her to carry out her promise to "work toward middle ground with both political parties" once in Congress.

Meanwhile, the Parks campaign got a considerable boost today when the Los Angeles Times, in a lengthy editorial, endorsed Parks.

It's not surprising that the Times editorial board would take such a stance -- newspaper editorial boards, after all, always seem to be looking for opportunities to take positions that declare a pox on the houses of both Democrats and Republicans. Still, this particular endorsement was effusive. Here's an excerpt:

"If Parks were unqualified for the job, the novelty of having a nonaligned candidate would wear thin very quickly. But she is in fact very qualified."

With that, perhaps the Democrats' challenge of undermining an independent whose presence in the primary could cost them a spot on the general election ballot just got a little more challenging.

Ever since voters approved the switch to a top-two primary two years ago, political analysts have been predicting that interest groups typically aligned with one party would become more active in the other party's campaigns. The strategy is pragmatic: There are districts in which it is a virtual certainty that either a Democrat or Republican is going to win in November, so the primary presents an opportunity to support a candidate from the other party that the group finds more to its liking.

Fair enough. One could even argue that such a dynamic promotes one of the stated objectives of the top-two primary -- to advantage more moderate candidates from both parties. So if unions support a more moderate Republican running against a more conservative one, or if business groups support a more moderate Democrat against a more liberal one, perhaps that's a healthy thing.

What's unhealthy is when they do it deceptively, when they hide their true identity behind a distorted organizational name, and when they get involved in a primary in a way that is designed to manipulate the rules.

Meet the "California Senior Advocates League PAC." Already this month, it's done all three of those things.

Many voters in Ventura County may have already seen the $22,351 mailer this group sent out in support of Democratic 19th Senate District candidate Jason Hodge of Oxnard. Despite its name, this group has absolutely nothing to do with seniors, has no apparent concern for seniors issues, and uses that deceptive name only to hide its connection with the California Chamber of Commerce, Big Oil and the tobacco industry.

The largest contributor to the "Senior Advocates League PAC" is JOBSPAC, the political arm of the state Chamber of Commerce. Its two largest contributors are Chevron and Philip Morris.

The motivation for the PAC's support of Hodge would appear to be directly connected to the top two primary. Voter registration in the district strongly suggests a Democrat will prevail in November. That's why the chamber-supported PAC is backing Hodge now, rather than taking the more traditional tact of waiting until November to support Republican Mike Stoker.

Although the 19th District mailer is listed as a "support" piece for Hodge, it is just as much an attack on his Democratic opponent, former Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson. It reprises the "Taxin' Jackson" monicker that the campaign of Republican Sen. Tony Strickland sought to pin on her four years ago and describes her as "an offshore drilling consultant."

If that last description were actually true, Chevron would have no interest in spending money in an attempt to defeat her. The facts are that Jackson worked on behalf of the Environmental Defense Center -- one of the most respected environmental groups in Santa Barbara, and one that has effectively fought offshore drilling there for decades. The EDC supported a controversial proposal a few years ago that would have allowed the Texas oil company PXP to drill new wells in exchange for concessions that the environmental group believed would ultimately bring an end to offshore drilling off Santa Barbara -- principally, its agreement to dismantle the onshore processing facility it controlled. It was the EDC's belief, and Jackson's, that the agreement would have spelled the beginning of the end for offshore oil in Santa Barbara. Not every environmental organization agreed. That hardly makes Jackson an "offshore drilling consultant."

It is also interesting to note the "Senior Advocates League's" other activities in state Senate campaigns so far. It spent $32,000 on a mailer supporting former Assemblyman Joe Coto in the San Jose area, another Democrat generally more sympathetic to business special interests than his opponent, Assemblyman Jim Beall.

More cynically, it spent $35,000 on a mailer supporting a Republican candidate in central L.A. who has absolutely no chance of winning and has not even raised enough money for her own campaign to necessitate filing a report with the secretary of state. Republican Charlotte Svolos is running in a three-way primary that includes incumbent Democrat Rod Wright and another Democrat, a marginal candidate named Paul Butterfield.

Voter registration in that 35th District is 60.4 percent Democratic, 15.8 percent Republican -- so Svolos has zero chance of winning in November if she makes it out of the primary. Wright is chairman of the Senate Governmental Organization Committee, which deals with all bills regulating alcoholic beverages, and also a member of the Senate Energy, Utilities and Commerce Committee, which deals with all bills involving energy issues. The only potential threat to Wright's re-election would be if he is opposed by another Democrat on the November ballot.

So why would the Chevron-funded PAC support a token Republican candidate in a Senate race? The only explanation is to help Wright by trying to make sure Svolos gets enough votes in the primary to finish a distant second, but ahead of the other Democrat. The expenditure on Svolos' behalf is cynically manipulative.

Senate candidate Hannah-Beth Jackson has done what some say she should have done in her campaign four years: Do something to directly counter the sophomoric "Taxin' Jackson" nickname that her opponent spent millions to get voters to associate with her.

It was so catchy, that workers in the campaign of her 2008 opponent, Tony Strickland, claim when they precinct walking in Santa Barbara days before the election, on Oct. 31, they encountered a mother walking her little girl out the door about to go trick-or-treating. The mother proudly told them her daughter was customed as Taxin' Jackson.

Four years later, Republican 19th Senate District candidate Mike Stoker is again refering to the former Democratic assemblywoman as "Taxin' Jackson" at every opportunity.

I asked Jackson about that nickname last week, and she insists that it stuck only because "it rhymes and it has a beat." She lamented that it would never have become an issue had she taken the name of her husband, George Eskin, when they married. "I should have listened to my mother," she said.

That's a bell that can't be unrung, however. What can be done is to launch a counterattack, which is what Jackson has done in a new commercial (it's the second one in a two-commercial set). The ad is called "Action Jackson." Although it is very tacky, slowing Jackson in sports attire competing in a race while fighting off "special interests," depicted as gentlemen wearing paper bags over their heads, the ad serves its apparent purpose: It gets another rhyming nickname into the public sphere so that when casual voters won't simply associate her name with the word 'taxin'.'

It is a shame that serious campaigns for serious offices so often come down to silly stuff like this.,

From the outset of the primary campaign, folks at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have said they are agnostic about the Democratic candidates in the June 5 primary in the 26th Congressional District. It appears they've now found religion.

In an email to Democratic donors over the weekend (subject line: "My frield Julia"), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi appealed for contributions to help out Assemblywoman Julia Brownley. From the tone of it -- and, granted, these appeals are always worded in a manner designed to alarm like-minded folks enough to pull out their debit cards -- it appears Pelosi and the Democratic congressional leadership have become seriously concerned about the possibility that independent Linda Parks could finish first or second in the primary.

"Only the top two, regardless of party, get to go on. Julia is running against two well-funded opponents - an extremist Republican, and a Republican-turned-independent.If we don't act, there could be two Republicans and no Democrats on the ballot this fall," the letter reads.

The DCCC has already spent money on the campaign, funding a mailer that attacked Parks. The change in attitude about Brownley -- essentially going public with the not-so-secret detail that they'd like her to be the Democratic candidate -- means that the congressional Democratic leadership may also be spending in the future to promote Brownley. Or perhaps, a more likely scenario: Producing mail that directly contrasts Brownley and Parks.