Good morning FR readers! Wow, what a primary night. First and foremost, I want to extend a very big THANK YOU to FR’s frequent Guest Editor, Nick Romero, for getting up really early this morning to put together our comprehensive main page compendium of today’s political news stories! If you will recall, my ‘day job’ is working for Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona — a great conservative who was up for re-election yesterday. Well, we didn’t get the unofficial final results until after 3am, but my boss was re-elected to a new four year term over three opponents with 50.9% of the vote! Congratulations Sheriff Carona and to your entire campaign team! The immediate benefit to FR readers throughout the fall will be that I will be a bit less distracted since I won’t be worrying about a run-off for my boss, and will be able to put much more time into the website! Yeah!
Anyways, I thought I would take a few minutes and make some general observations about election night:
- The ulta-low turnout across-the-board created a very unique and unpredictable election night.
- Even with a turnout model statewide that favored Democrats, Rob Reiner’s tax initiative got walluped in the polls, losing 39% to 61%. This anti-tax vote doesn’t bode well for Democrats in November.
- It is clear that if there was a normal turn-out amongst Democratic voters, they would have nominated Steve Westly last night. Instead, because of the small turnout, Angelides was able to eek out the nomination from ultra-liberal, core Democrat voters. Angelides is the idea candidate for Arnold Schwarzenegger to campaign against because he is such an advocate for higher taxes and for expanding the size and scope of state government.
- Everyone was saying that the articulate and presentable State Senator Jacque Speier would be running against GOP State Senator Tom McClintock this November. Her unique story about being a victim of senseless violence back in the day, when she and her former Congressman boss were stricken at the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana (her former boss was killed there) would have given her an interesting platform. But even using that story, she was defeated in the low-turnout primary by Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi. This will be a fun race to watch, as the contrast is even greater between these two candidates than the differences in the Governor’s race.
- Statewide in GOP primaries, clients of the consulting firm of Wayne Johnson and Tim Clark fared well — conservative Tony Strickland bested moderate GOPer Abel Maldonado to claim the GOP nomination for Controller, and in a battle between two friends of the FlashReport, Michelle Steel & Ray Haynes, Steel narrowly one the race for the 3rd District Board of Equalization seat.
- "Mr. Open Primary" Assemblyman Keith Richman is the latest victim of the bizarre and hard-to-figure-out Claude Parrish. This enigmatic and odd character, who was termed out of the State Board of Equalization, easily bested Richman to become the GOP nominee against the VERY formidale Attorney General Bill Lockyer this fall, in the race for State Treasurer. This is probably a testament to the success of slate-cards in down-ticket races.
- Steve Poizner, the GOP nominee for Insurance Commissioner had a great night. Why was it so great for the unopposed GOP nominee? His opponent all along was going to be Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante. But it was a very BIG SIGN of Bustamante’s weak position within his own party that an unknown challenger in his Democratic primary took nearly a third of the vote!
- Jerry Brown’s coronation by Democrat voters sets up a sharp contrast- campaign against the popular, law and order favorite – Republican Chuck Poochigian. Brown’s high name-ID will make it challenging for Pooch — but he is up for the challenge!
- Last night was a big night for conservatives AND liberals — moderates, by and large, were the losers. Most of the "Prop. 198 Open Primary" moderates were replaced in the legislature were replaced by conservatives (in GOP seats) and liberals (in Dem seats). There were a few notable exceptions, like moderate Lou Correa besting liberal Tom Umberg for the Democratic nomination for State Senate in Orange County. Correa will face moderate GOPer Lynn Daucher in a November moderate food-fight.
- On the GOP side of the aisle, a slew of conservatives won their Republican Assembly primaries – starting with two conservative incumbents, Audra Strickland and Sharon Runner, easily beating back moderate primary challenges. Also winning were conservatives Ted Gaines (AD 4), Tom Berryhill (AD 25), Danny Gilmore (AD 30 – one of a handful of competitive seats), Cameron Smyth (AD 38), FR friend Anthony Adams (AD 59), Paul Cook (AD 65), another FR friend Kevin Jeffries (AD 66), Jim Silva (AD 67), Mike Duvall (AD 72) and finally two more good friend of the FR Martin Garrick (AD 74) and Joel Anderson (AD 77)! The only place were a moderate won a primary in a safe GOP seat is Jean Fuller (AD 32 – Bakersfield, the "Thomas Machine" candidate).
- Two conservative Congressmen from northern California, good FR friends John Doolittle and Richard Pombo, sailed into their party’s nominations despite their opponents benefitting from lots of help from the Main Stream Media!
- The lopsided huge victory for Orange County Treasurer John Moorlach in his run for County Supervisor was huge. This was the only race in California that was waged purely on the issue of out-of-control public employee pensions. Public employee unions plowed hundreds of thousands of dollars into a highly-negative campaign against Moorlach, who still STOMPED his opponent. This will hopefully start a statewide trend as we need to start standing up to unions locally and statewide. (Another JohnsonClark client.)
- In San Bernardino County, in a high-profile assault against the incumbent county assessor in a sprawling county, Supervisor Bill Postmus (a great friend) really socked it to the incumbent. Unfortunately the presence of two also-rans made it statistically impossible to close the deal in the primary. But going into the run-off, the incumbent already has lost to Postmus by double-digits. No incumbent has ever survived a run-off in SB county.
- After all of the noise (much of it from this website), federal lobbyiest Brian Bilbray will be able to retire his lobbyist I.D. and put back on his Congressional pin, after winning last night’s special election. It took over $5 million bucks to get the moderate elected, with less than 50% of the final vote. Bilbray also convincingly won the regular primary ballot. In what can only be looked at as an embarrassment to a good guy, businessman Bill Hauf, despite putting out NINE pieces of voter-contact mail over the past few weeks, he was out-polled on election day by Eric Roach, who did not campaign in that race at all! Bilbray and Busby will face each other again in November, but look for this to be a much less high-profile race when it is not a special election. We’ll all be watching Bilbray as our newest GOP Congressman, to see whether he, in fact, will be the conservative that so many assured this publisher, now that he is representing a rock-solid district. Congrats to Bilbray consultant FR friend Dave Gilliard for finally grinding this one out!
- Finally, in a stunning victory, FR Publisher Jon Fleischman was handily re-elected to the Orange County GOP Central Committee! Yay! LOL.
Anyways, look for more analysis throughout the days ahead!
Jon
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