Don Wagner’s Amazing Invisible Candidate Statement

As you may know, we at the Orange Juice like to follow elections, especially among the hardcore right.

One interesting twist can be to look at the rightwingers’ candidate statements. Lo and behold, Allan Mansoor has become the bipartisan candidate of moderation after having been a rigid doctrinaire Republican for his entire career, Costa Mesa’s biggest-ever basher of immigrants and unions.

Then there’s Don Wagner, who boasted that he was the most conservative candidate, and received the support of the extremists from Joe Arpaio to Michelle Malkin. Would he now tack to the center for the general election?

So we looked for his candidate statement after the filing deadline. Nothing there. One of our intrepid reporters called the Registrar and they said that all of the candidate statements had been posted online.

So we were a little surprised over the weekend when we were doing our final fact check to see that the Registrar’s website showed that Don Wagner had a Candidate statement. But when we clicked on the link, it looked just like this:

What’s all that about?

So one of our operatives actually paid a visit to the Orange County Registrar of Voters this morning and asked to see Don Wagner’s candidate  statement. After a round of frustration (“Well sir, you can look that up on our website”) it turned out that Don Wagner had never filed a candidate statement for the general election.

Which leads us to some questions for Mr. Neal Kelly. Why does it look like Don Wagner filed a candidate statement when he didn’t? Who put that broken link up there, and who instructed them to do that?  Why is it still up there?

And then there are some questions for Don Wagner. Does he really have such contempt for the voters in the district that he only needs to communicate with Republican primary voters?  Does he think that getting 32% of the Republican primary vote, only 5.4% of all the registered voters in the district, is all he has to do? Is he that arrogant?  Is he too broke to spend another $4,000 filing a candidate statement to communicate with all voters after lending himself $100,000 for the primary? Just incompetent ? Or did his contract with his consultant only  go through the primary?

It’s just a lot of questions.  Maybe we should let his opponent Melissa Fox have the last word, from the opening of HER candidate statement:

Are you tired of sending representatives to Sacramento who just play political games and never fight to bring our tax dollars back to Orange County?




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"Admin" is just editors Vern Nelson, Greg Diamond, or Ryan Cantor sharing something that they mostly didn't write themselves, but think you should see. Before December 2010, "Admin" may have been former blog owner Art Pedroza.