The conventional wisdom in the Attorney General Race went something like this. Cooley wins; he has been elected three times as District Attorney in a large Democratic county. On top of that Harris is an extreme liberal. Cooley wins.
As of this writing Cooley is down by less than 14,000 votes as final returns are coming in. What happened?
To be fair Cooley is the top vote getter in Los Angeles County on the GOP ticket. Whitman lost by 30 points. Cooley is losing by 14 points. Obviously he did better. But the GOP experts thought he would do much better than a 14 pt. loss and secure an easy win.
Cooley’s first election as District Attorney was in 2000.Remember Y2K, the CSI premiere and Ja Ja Binks. In 2000 he got in a run off with incumbent Gil Garcetti. Garcetti was punished by Los Angeles voters over his office’s handling of some high profile cases and Cooley got over 1.4 million votes and over 63% of the vote. If you remember Robert Blake and the O.J. (not the orange juice) trial you know what I mean.
If you remember back that far. That is my point. That is a decade ago. That was the last time Cooley appeared on a general election ballot.
In 2004 he dispatched Nick Pacheco and four others in the March Primary. In 2008 he won handily in the June Primary over two challengers.
Only once did Cooley face the kind of electorate we saw in November 2010. And that was ten years earlier. A look at the numbers shows the problem. In 2008 the total votes cast for Los Angeles District Attorney was 616,921. As of right now Cooley secured 822,859 votes in his 14 pt. loss. Four years earlier the total votes cast were 1,008,610. Right now Harris had 1,104,134.
Cooley was facing a completely different electorate than the last two wins. The collapse of the Whitman campaign and its turnout operation only compounded the fact that the GOP was relying on Cooley’s past electoral victories in LA County. Victories that didn’t happen on the same battlefield as this election.
November 15th, 2010 at 12:00 am
Is the DA a non-partisan office?
In 2000, 2004 & 2008, the voters weren’t choosing a Dem or GOP. They chose a DA. Once they saw Cooley was GOP, it didn’t matter. They voted for the Dem. It didn’t matter that he was the DA. If he was GOP, they went straight to Dem.
November 19th, 2010 at 12:00 am
I can’t live off $150k a year and I will take my retirement, too. I almost voted for someone else after that comment.
It only took around 10,000 people changing votes to change the outcome.
It was also great to have the leadership of the republican Party supporting the ticket so strongly.
When will the “leaders” of the party understand? Or is being the minority party the goal?