A Signed Confession of Weak Tea at the Kid’s Table: SD-37 and Democratic Strategy

The online voice of political analysis for the DPOC  has weighed in with his election post-mortem.  He says this:

In an ideal world, Democrat Louise Stewardson would have mustered enough write in votes to win but she still managed a respectable amount to Naz Namazi who was on the ballot.

When you find yourself seeing silver linings in comparing your candidate to Naz Namazi, you are gasping for air at the bottom of the ocean.

I don’t think that “in an ideal world” Louise would have won as a write-in in a massively Republican district, because it would have called forth a hellstorm of an investigation into voting fraud, assuming that those in this ideal world cared about such things.  Let’s not aspire to an “ideal world”; let’s aspire to a reasonably attainable better world.

In a reasonably attainable better world, Democrat Louise Stewardson would have decided to run early enough to be placed onto the ballot.  A lot of Democrats would have voted for her, she would have gotten enough votes to make the Democratic vote the prize for which the Republicans running would have competed in the runoff, and in so doing would have exposed Republicans as willing to do a lot of things that they swear they wouldn’t in order to get Republican votes.

Imagine the possible concessions she might have been able to extract had she been on the ballot as a Democrat and gotten a (perfectly reasonable to aspire to even without a campaign) 15-20% of the vote.  She could have pretty easily gotten John Moorlach to lead on some of the environmental issues that she very much cares about, because they tend to be boondoggles like Poseidon.  What about Don Wagner?  Could she perhaps have extracted some concessions from him regarding state health care law, if he had wanted to court Democratic voters?  Less likely to happen, but again perfectly reasonable to try.  Either one would leaves the Democratic Party and its positions better off.

That’s the game that you play when you’re a minority party in a district (hell, in a whole county) where the “real action” is in the opposite party’s primary, even if that “primary” goes to a general election.  Republicans do it in Democratic areas; in some Republican areas, even Democrats have the chops to pull it off.  (Keep your eye on former Jerry Brown advisor Steve Glazer in SD-07, who will win that seat over Susan Bonilla, if he does, mainly with Republican support.)

But, of course, the first thing that you have to do is to be able to force a runoff.  And, unless the two people are very closely packed, as Webster Guillory and Claude Parrish were in last year’s Assessors race, you’re not going to be able to do it as a write-in.  If Jorge Lopez had run as a Democratic write-in, Guillory would still be our Assessor.  But he got onto the ballot and changed the outcome.

That Louise didn’t get onto the ballot was not, so far as I can tell, her fault.  While she is very friendly with the DPOC  leadership of which she recently a part, she hadn’t been approached to run.  It’s the job of the party leaders to recruit people in this sort of situation — especially in a special election like this when a runoff could be avoided by getting a majority in the primary — and make sure that a Democrat is on the ballot.  The Liberal OC‘s Chumley, who has opined that I did nothing as DPOC Vice Chair, probably has no idea that I did that for the party — within and outside of my district — for the last few cycles.  And if I were still involved in party leadership, despite that this wasn’t my area, we’d have had a candidate and a backup lined up by the last day of filing.  At the legislative level, I never missed one in my region — because such elections are where we “show the flag.”

Chumley has nonetheless found some silver linings in the fact that Louise Stewardson was somehow unable to replicate the success of Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski and win a district larger than Alaska itself.  I’ve just chosen four bullet points from the middle, reordering them slightly, that I think are worthy of comment.

• Louise Stewardson’s write-in campaign did garner attention to her as a candidate for some future office, whether its the Hunting Beach city council or the state assembly seat.  She’s a good person with the right ideals and the DPOC should embrace her next race.
• Moorlach isn’t universally loved by his own party, let alone Democrats; he’ll be seated at the kid’s table and won’t get a lot of support from either party and he won’t have nearly the pull he had while a member of the BoS.
• The finger pointing at Wagner’s consultants has already begun.
• I don’t believe a Democrat has ever held this State Senate seat, so not having a candidate on the ballot is hardly a sin for the DPOC that bitter ex-DPOC vice chair Greg Diamond says it is.

(When you see the words “kids table,” “weak tea,” or “signed confession” in an article in the OC political blogosphere, you know that you’re almost surely either reading Chumley or reading my parody of him.)

Let’s take these pearls of political wisdom one by one:

1. Louise would have been “embraced” by the DPOC in any future race without having run this time just as much as she will be having run.  (In fact, arguably it would be more: not raising money, not campaigning, and getting 2% of the vote are not the things that one looks for in a campaign track record, although her intelligence and good personality are.)  And by “embraced,” I basically mean “endorsed” and getting the customary small maximum number of walkers in a race where one is a sacrificial lamb.  She didn’t need to do anything to “garner attention” as a possible candidate in a future race where no other Democrat was running other than to say “I want to run.”
2. Chumley’s view of Moorlach is laughable.  If he’s going to be “at the kid’s table,” he will be arming himself for a massive food fight — hurling pie and turkey legs and mashed potatoes in a fervor at bipartisan targets whom he believes are overspending — and there won’t be a damn thing that the Republican leadership can do about it because they need his vote.  And I doubt that a Republican will even challenge him in 2016.  He’s not the Mimi Walters type who wants to rise through party leadership; he’s an issues guy, and he’ll have no shortage of them to keep him busy in Sacramento for this term — and two or three others if he wants them.  (As he’s serving less than half of Walters’s term, I think that he may get to run three times for re-election, not just two.)  He’ll have plenty of pull.  In fact, because he may actually be a gettable vote for Democrats on issues where our proposals meet his standards of fiscally soundness, he’ll have more pull than the otherwise uniform Business Republican bloc into which Wagner would have been absorbed.  If anyone is going to convince them Dems that OC needs more tax money, it will be the guy who watches everyone’s expenditures like an obsessive-compulsive hawk.
3. Yes, he’s right on this one.  Some of us have been sounding this gong for days and going after Dishonest Dave Gilliard in particular for years.  Welcome to the party, Chum.
4. “[A] Democrat has [n]ever held this State Senate seat, so not having a candidate on the ballot is hardly a sin.”

Hardly a sin.  “Oh, ma’am, I think we’ve found your problem here.  The wiring in your microphone is frayed.”

Only someone who not only has no idea about politics, but about most of life itself, could write his last bullet point.  I’m going to luxuriate in this one for a while.

First — yes, it’s not “a sin.”  A sin is a moral failure, like not giving a damn about the needy.  This is a bumble, a fumble, a boner, a slip, a clank, an air ball, an own goal, an unforced error.  It speaks not to morality, but competence.

Think about it: what was Louise Stewardson trying to accomplish trying to run for office as a write-in?

• She was trying “to show the flag,” to remind the world that there are Democrats in that part of OC.
• She was giving people the satisfaction of supporting a Democrat where they otherwise would not.  (Chumley has, of course, repeatedly slammed me for going the exact same thing — except that I’ve been on the ballot against pretty rotten Republicans who would otherwise have skated to re-election unopposed.)
• Maybe she had the sort of strategic considerations — making Democrats the deciding voters and thus extracting concessions in the runoff
• (And, perhaps, coming to the aid of her party leader friends who had bumbled, erred, missed the backboard, etc.)

Not a single one of those first three things could not have been done ten times better had her name been on the ballot — because she would have gotten ten times as many votes!

THAT’S what I’m complaining about — incompetence.  I’m glad that people are thanking Louise for having run — she deserves it and I join them in that.  But “wow, 2% of the vote as a write-in is great!” as if we’re talking about a physically  disabled runner completing a race misses the point — which is that it was the job of the party leadership to ask her earlier, when she could still make literally an order of magnitude more difference.  And, because people seem to want to forget that very instructive failure, it falls on me to bring it up, because that’s what really mattered here.  That is where the opportunity was blown.  Focus on what you can improve.

In this case, had anyone been really thinking about strategy, they would have not tried to paper over the error and recruit Louise to run, but they would have followed a completely difference strategy to advance our party’s goals — which is after all the point!  If Naz Namazi were not in the race, then having Louise run would have made some sense.  But because there was a hapless third candidate on the ballot, the smart thing to do would have been: adopt her!

One needn’t agree  with her; I certainly don’t.  But use her as the placeholder to tally up Democratic support.

And — perhaps more toxic to Chumley and his friends than anything else — it could have been lighthearted and fun.  And also, done right, effective.

I left a long comment here earlier today that I’ll adapt into the rest of this piece: what Democrats could have done without Louise Stewardson running a write-in campaign.

That Louise ran and will have picked up more than 1,500 votes is nice — although I’m not sure that we’re better off knowing that a full-on series of email blasts and social media campaign can still muster only that little for our party in a district where we have 28.6% of the registration and over 140,000 registered Democrats. If that’s the limited reach of our power in such a situation, I might have preferred to keep it quiet.

The alternative (which I proposed at the January meeting) would have been to tell Democrats in the area: “OK, we don’t have a Dem on the ballot — but instead we’re going to have some fun!” We could have adopted Naz Namazi, dubbed her as “The Democrats’ Choice” in the election, and used her candidacy to push our own issues. It would have been tons of fun.

We could have done this in clever ways such as “Unlike JOHN MOORLACH, Democrats believe that spending public money to improve people’s lives isn’t a Waste! Or “Unlike DON WAGNER, Democrats believe that people DO have a right to adequate health care!” And I’m sure that you can think of others. Each would be followed by: “Vote for NAZ NAMAZI, the Democrats’ Choice!” It’s the sort of thing that could engage people in different cities and neighborhoods to think up slogans that would fit their own local interests — and as a social media campaign (say, on Facebook) it would not even be that expensive. And people might feel energized rather than merely relieved that they had someone to vote for — and get 2% of the vote.

Naz Namazi might not approve of such a campaign, but that’s too bad — we would not be attributing any specific view to her. And, if we wanted a runoff, this would have been the way to get it. If we created a carnival-like atmosphere, we could get some buzz on the (entirely serious as well as funny) “prank” that we were playing; among other things, that puts people in a mood to contribute. Namazi — even if she disavowed the campaign and said that SHE TOO wanted to see the poor starve and middle-class people go bankrupt for lack of subsidized health care (which would just, once again, have been good publicity for us!) — would have gotten a lot more than 3.5% of the vote, and probably more than the 6% that she and Louise would have received combined — I’d guess at least 10%. And then this race would have gone to a runoff, costing Republican donors even more money.

As I announced to DPOC on January 26, I was getting set to put a “Democrats for Namazi” plan in motion to ensure a runoff. I had spoken to Democrats who were considering funding it just for the laughs — and the PR value. And, not too long after I made that announcement, by Monday Feb. 16 (as I was preparing to formally establish the PAC that we would use), news came that Louise was in the race. And so I immediately set down those plans. I was not going to campaign against Louise, regardless of whether she was formally endorsed. (She wasn’t; it was too late.)

I wrote at the time that a runoff had become more likely — but that would have been dependent on Democrats doing a lot more work on her behalf than happened. (I too informed at least half-a-dozen people to vote for Louise — people not involved with the party — and asked them to pass it on; this in addition to my Facebook posts to my largely not-involved-in-the-Party audience), designing the graphic here, and even trying to whip people up into being angry enough to come out for her, which explains the first part of the title of this post.) Actually, as I explain above, it made it less so — because building buzz for someone on the ballot is, absent extraordinary circumstances and measures, always easier than getting people to write someone in.

As it turns out, I’m glad that it worked out that way. I had expected Wagner, rather than Moorlach, to be the one flirting with victory — and the DPOC’s failure to do much to support any alternative to those two would have been a disaster. With the objectionable but still preferable Moorlach lumbering towards an outright win, I’m glad that I didn’t whip votes for Namazi. But if it were Wagner bobbing just over 50% right now, I’d be furious.

This is part of a continuing dispute I have with the people who now lead the party (and who last year removed me from leadership, though there I’m less angry about the result than avout the kangaroo-court process.) I think that if you’re the minority party in a wealthy area where people have few connections to one another, you had better think outside of the box. The long-term (I exclude the newly elected officers from this) DPOC leadership thinks that one should crawl back inside the box — and seal the air holes.

The forces that dominate the Democratic Party today — despite that the Central Committee membership itself tends to be progressive — are the “Business Democrats” for whom Chumley usually speaks.  They’re generally more concerned about preventing the party from moving to the Left — not the Maoist Left, but even the European Social Democratic Left — than they are with winning.

They’re big on issues of interest to the liberal and well off (which I share with them), such as women’s rights, LGBT issues, the right to die, anti-explicit-racism (although not stances that would put them in close proximity to uncontrollable minorities on the streets, who want to talk about police misconduct and business ripoffs, which gets in the way of the highly profitable positions that attract donations from public safety “unions” and major corporate interests), and environmentalism (at least to the extent that it doesn’t piss off the building trade unions that want a few crumbs from the developers’ pie and the ripoff artists’ plates to prove to their members that they’ve created some JOBS.)

To them, a Democratic blunder that would have put Wagner in the State Senate would have been no big deal.  After all, “what could we do?  Just look at the voter registration totals!”  (They’re probably really pissed off, though, that it’s Moorlach, Enemy of Boondoggles, who benefited.)  If that’s your view, you play it safe, you play to lose with what the winners deem to be grace, and you don’t go out and organize the masses into angry hordes that might be able to knock your own faction in primaries.

I’m glad that it’s Moorlach rather than Wagner winning, but I really wish that if we couldn’t have had anyone on the ballot we would have owned that and found another way to wrench Naz Namazi’s control over her own message, turn it into ours, and create a ruckus.  But that would be very unlike Democratic politics in Orange County — where one is supposed to sit at the kids table and sip weak tea.  Maybe someday we’ll spit it out.