Decision time for Jack?
The decision by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom this week to open an exploratory committee for a potential campaign for governor in 2010 puts some pressure on other potential candidates to make their decisions sooner rather than later.
Among them is former Ventura County legislator Jack O'Connell, now the state superintendent of public instruction. O'Connell will be termed out of his current job in 2010 and has publicly said the only other office he is considering is governor.
It would be a long-shot campaign, given that other likely candidates are better known around the state, especially Attorney General Jerry Brown, who served two terms as governor from 1975 to 1982 and is the son of a former governor. Brown has all but declared his intention to run and because of his statewide identity is seen as the early favorite.
To compete with the likes of Brown, O'Connell would need to be confident of his ability to raise millions of dollars for a primary campaign. That will surely be the determining factor in O'Connell's decision. He already has a network of ground-level support in the education community around the state and a proven record as a tireless, effective campaigner. But without sufficient financing, those two assets would not be enough.
Because Newsom formed his committee on July 1 -- the day after the close of the semi-annual campaign finance reporting period -- he will not have to make public his financial contributions until February 2009. Because of that, other candidates will not have the luxury of waiting to see how well Newsome's candidacy is received by donors.
Posted by Timm Herdt at 1:15 PM | Comments (0)
McCain's oil spillover?
Overnight tracking polls for an election more than four months away don't mean much, but California Republican candidates for Congress and the Legislature must have shuddered a bit this week with the release of the first public presidential poll conducted after John McCain's call to lift the moratorium on oil drilling off the California coast.
A Rasmussen poll conducted June 23 showed Barack Obama with an eye-popping 28 percentage-point lead in the state, 58 percent to 30 percent. The advantage was much higher than previous state polls, which showed Obama leads ranging from 7 to 17 points.
It could have been a goofy result, or it could reflect state voters' first-blush reaction to McCain's decision to thumb his nose at what has been a bedrock political position in California. The only two GOP candidates to win statewide office since 1990 -- Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- made opposition to offshore oil a cornerstone of their environmental platforms. And in 2002, the ultra-conservative Bill Simon bragged in his campaign for governor that he was tougher on offshore oil drilling than Democrat Gray Davis.
Nationwide polls show that, politically, McCain's position makes sense because it is supported by a majority of heartland voters who are frustrated over high gas prices.
But somewhere in McCain's calculation must have been the recognition that his reversal on the oil-drilling moratorium would further hurt him in California.
He was likely not going to win the state under any circumstance. But the larger the margin for Obama in the state, the harder it will be for Republicans in tough races -- Congressmen Brian Bilbrae and David Dreier, for instance -- to hold onto their seats.
Posted by Timm Herdt at 8:18 AM | Comments (0)
Results are in: Post office won
Elections officials in Ventura County are down to just a relative handful of votes -- about 1,000 provisional ballots whose validity will be determined within a couple days -- before closing the books on the June 5 election.
The tally shows that two predictions about the Part II primary (presidential primary in February, another for all the other partisan offices in June) proved to be true:
1) Turnout was abysmal, although not quite as bad as many had forecast. Thirty percent of registered voters cast ballots, although their participation rates varied wildly by party affiliation or lack thereof. Thirty-five percent of Republicans voted, 31 percent of Democrats, 25 percent of Libertarians and 19 percent of Greens. Most notable in their absence were unaffiliated voters, those who decline to state a party preference. Of 73,656 voters in that category, slightly less than 10 percent actually voted.
In one respect, that makes sense: Since they don't profess an interest in a party, why should they participate in selecting the parties' nominees? You pick your candidates, these non-voters seem to be saying, and we'll sort them out in the fall. On the other hand, both major parties allowed decline-to-state voters to request a partisan ballot and participate in the nominating process. One would think that more of them would show an interest in helping to pick the candidates.
2) Nearly 60 percent of all those who voted did so by mail. It shows again that the more convenient that government makes the process, the more likely people are to participate.
Finally, there were some interesting numbers to contemplate in the build-up to this fall's huge Senate race in the 19th District, pitting Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson against Republican Tony Strickland.
The total numbers were just about exactly what anyone should have expected. Strickland got 52 percent of all the votes cast districtwide. Given that Republicans have a 2 percentage-point advantage in voter registration and that a higher proportion of GOP voters typically turn out in primaries, a 4 percent margin sounds just about right. No anomalies in that margin to suggest that voters of either party are at this point unhappy with their nominee.
A quick look inside the numbers shows the obvious challenge for both candidates: Strickland won the heaviliy GOP Ventura County portion of the district by 10,000 votes. Jackson won the Democratic-leaning Santa Barbara County portion of the district by 7,000 votes. But -- and here's something to keep in mind come November -- the district also includes a small slice of Los Angeles County -- a Republican stronghold in Santa Clarita in which Strickland got twice as many votes as Jackson. That L.A. County sliver could be decisive in the fall.
Each candidate is going to have to work hardest in the other's territory. And the general election will be decided by two factors: which candidate most of those decline-to-state voters who stayed home for the primary decide to support in November, and which party does the best job of jumping up its voter participation rates in the general election.
Posted by Timm Herdt at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
Over the last 22 presidential elections, Ventura County voters have backed the winner 21 times, or 95 percent of the time. It is one of only a handful of counties in the nation that has been such a predictable bellwether.
The Ventura County Star's Sacramento Bureau Chief Timm Herdt on state issues and politics from Sacramento to Ventura County. He can be contacted at 
