“Never has so much resulted in so little change.”
Paul Pfingst, the former D.A. and now a local KUSI-TV news analyst, said it about the San Diego mayoral election, in which Democrat Donna Frye could barely muster a higher percentage (46%) than she did in the primary. Yet, the comment would about hit the mark for the statewide special election as well. Over $200 million spent, significantly more when everything is analyzed, and status quo has been achieved.
If someone is looking for the bright side, while grasping at straws, they could say that the statewide unions were forced to spend a third of that money to get exactly what they have now, nothing more. But, of course, nothing more is pretty much political control of the state.
It’s not over until it’s over, a great baseball philosopher once said. This one was over the day the election was called. Plenty of other pundits will get into an in-depth analysis of all the “whys”. Aside from money spent, low turnout, voter fatigue, mixed messages, another special election, yadda, yadda, yadda … lastly, Republicans had no place to hitch their cart. No horse.
Going in, the Governor was expected to be the horse. But, California voters are a capricious bunch. A statewide call for reform and the seating of a new governor, only a brief time ago in the measure of months, was eons ago in a California political timeframe. No one needed a poll to know that Arnold is not nearly as popular as he was on the immediate heels of the recall. What was then viewed as the need for real reform, is now viewed as a personal agenda.
Republicans, currently, simply cannot rely on an above average statewide GOTV effort, not like they can under Scott Baugh in Orange County and Ron Nehring in San Diego. So, where was the issue to drive GOP voter turnout? Where was the clear-cut tax issue, the border issue, or the yet-to-be-identified winning nugget?
The horse was never going to be Prop 73, as there are likely just as many Dems who believe in parental consent as there are Reps who confuse parental responsibility and freedom (the proof may be in the result). Even assuming more GOP than Dem support for the measure, Arnold’s consultants were never going to let him identify with an "abortion" issue, even if it’s about minor children. (Some in support of 73 were even “disallowed” from appearing with him on stage in rallies around the state.)
I’ll leave it, for now, to Arnold, Ackerman, McCarthy and their strategists to come up with the GOP’s needed horse, the Party’s Seattle Slew. But, make no bones, it is needed. The proposition Republicans wanted the most, the one the Democrats fought against with the greatest fervor, the one that even labor rank and file largely supports, is the one that came the closest.
Could Prop 75 have won as a stand alone? Not without the horse. Yet, it’s the one Republicans need first, so as to compete on all the others.
Assemblyman Chuck DeVore reminded us this morning, and he knows it well, that "In politics, defeat is usually a temporary condition." Time to stop licking wounds. Time to get on the horse.