95 percent accurate*
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 therdt@venturacountystar.com.
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 therdt@venturacountystar.com.
I was asked to speak last night to the Conejo Valley Democratic Club, a group that is understandably sensitive about the national and state parties' tendencies to concentrate their political efforts in areas in which Democratic voters dominate. In Thousand Oaks, 47 percent of voters are Republican and 31 percent are Democrats. It's one of the areas that Democratic Party big-wigs tend to ignore.
Just as Howard Dean is seeking to change the Democratic strategy nationally from one that concentrates just on key states to one that has a 50-state strategy, Democrats in Ventura County would like to see the California Democratic Party leadership adopt a 58-county strategy. Interestingly, Dean was in Orange County earlier this week, backing up his vow to try to invigorate Democrats in places where they had often been ignored before.
So I did a little research and came up with a surprising number.
The political calculus in California has always been that Democrats must win big in the San Francisco Bay area and in Los Angeles and hold their own in the Central Valley. For Republicans, the strategy is to keep their losses in L.A. County to a minimum, do well in the Central Valley and then win big in the Southern California counties other than Los Angeles.
As a result, each party's pre-election efforts tend to focus on trying to boost voter turnout in the regions where it expects the strongest support. Democrats in places like Ventura County tend to get ignored, as do Republicans in the Bay area counties.
That strategy is the easiest and perhaps least expensive, but is it the most effective?
Consider these numbers:
-- In the five Southern California red counties — Orange, Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino and Ventura — there are a combined 1,574,939 registered Democratic voters.
-- In the six dark blue counties that touch the San Francisco Bay — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara — there are a combined 1,430,282 Democrats.
Those red county Democrats in the south may be much more dispersed than the Democrats in the north, but there are more of them.
Posted by Timm Herdt at May 11, 2006 1:26 PM