Louise Stewardson waving the flag for civil rights accomplishments — the 1967 Supreme Court decision barring laws against interracial marriage and the 1968 Civil Rights Act — at the Huntington Beach 4th of July parade.
Louise Stewardson is running for State Senate in Tuesday’s election — as a write-in candidate. Judging from the relative lack of chatter about her race among online Democratic circles, the perfunctory Democratic Party support for her will not lead to the rank-and-file going out to have her back. I was going to say that that’s a shame, but it’s worse than that. It’s a humiliation. Louise is putting herself forward to rescue the party from humiliation after a boneheaded error — and for the party not to pull out the stops to support her is humiliating for all
In other words, Louise has tried to do Dems a big favor — and DEMOCRATS HAD BETTER COME OUT TOMORROW AND WRITE IN HER NAME! Otherwise, we’ll look like ingrates or worse. Louise says that she decided to run on her own accord when she realized that she’d otherwise have no Democrat to support in the race, but I tend to doubt that that’s how it happened. I suspect that she was asked to run, after the deadline had passed — and that she was a good enough sport to comply. And it does require her being a good sport: it wasn’t her error that created the situation — but only she will have her name next to the vote total.
If she would have asked me, as someone who has run three times against candidates who would have otherwise been unopposed, I would have told her not to do it. Running a write-in campaign is hard enough without a campaign budget or a functioning GOTV apparatus behind you.
(Hey out there — are you a Democrat, and find yourself reading this and getting pissed at the “bearer of bad news” author? Good! If you want to spite me, get people out to vote for Louise. I’d love to be shown up by her doing well!)
Louise is one of the more delightful people in the Democratic Party of Orange County — one of the few leaders who, without her being double-faced or gaming the system, people on all sides of the divides within the party generally like. She has also been a good sport, someone who could be called upon to volunteer her time and do both thankless jobs and treacherous ones. (She clearly didn’t want to serve as Western Regional Vice-Chair for another term in 2013 — but she answered the call to do so, even though she after that she didn’t attend many of the meetings. She headed the politically contentious (in the “office politics” sense) annual dinner committee for a couple of years even though it put a target on her back. She is informed on the issues, especially ones involving the environment and health care and she’s smart, generous, hard-working, and unfailingly polite.
She’d be a wonderful State Senator. But she never should have run — at least not this way.
Let me clarify that: if Louise had filed on time to be on the ballot, then she should have run. (Or, if one Republican were running unopposed, then running as a write-in is fine, just as a way of registering a at least a weak protest.) Her presence on the ballot might have stopped the public safety unions — it’s not public employee unions generally, as is often loosely stated — from dumping tons of cash into Don Wagner’s campaign. They hope that he would be a less principled opponent than his own principal opponent John Moorlach to excessive public safety hiring and high pensions — but they might have been hard-pressed to go against a popular Democrat. (Or they might not have — they’re largely Republican, after all.) If Louise had then picked up 15-25% of the vote — beyond that would be difficult — then she would thrown the race into disarray. She might have made the runoff — although probably not — and in any event she would have pretty much guaranteed that there would be one.
But, she didn’t file in time to get onto the ballot. The Democratic Party flat-out blew it. Two people used to keep the DPOC informed for the past few years about these sorts of races and their deadlines — me as Northern Regional Vice-Chair and Nick Anas as Executive Director — and now we’re both gone. Not being in North County it wouldn’t have been “on my plate” — but had I been part of party leadership I’d have ensured that we had a candidate running, as I’d helped do many times before this decade. (Among other things, this involves arranging a backup if someone backed out. Frequent candidate Christina Avalos would probably have done it, but she’s considered too left-wing by some. Can’t have that!)
Once she was not going to the ballot, she should have never gotten into the race. Better that the Democrats be thought weak in SD-37 than to go out and prove it. While the boneheaded Chumley has pointed to Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski as proof that one can win as a write-in, the differences between being an incumbent Senator with tons of money from a prominent political family in a small state — versus being an unknown non-politician from minority party without any money to spend, in a district that has about 25% more population than the State of Alaska — was apparently lost on him. (That, or his PR instincts told him to ignore it. Seriously, this is the sort of thing I have to put up with as an OC Democrat.)
For the Democrats to put up a candidate would make sense if — as happened in the 2014 Assessor’s Race — it could push the race into a runoff between two non-Democrats. But here, Democrats didn’t have to do that. Shockingly, a a third Republican candidate, Naz Namazi, had entered the race on the last day and saved our bacon. Namazi is conservative, a Rohrabacher staffer, whose only appeal to Democrats (aside from seeming like a strong woman of color) would be that she was neither one of the better-run front-runners. But that’s good enough — forcing a runoff is the closest thing we’ll get here to a Democratic win. Democrats could have essentially adopted her campaign and used it as a platform from which to bash the two leading Republicans — and then had fun with their staggering towards the finish line in the May runoff, probably furtively looking for Democratic votes.
I spoke to the DPOC about this at our January meeting, the Monday after the Friday filing deadline. I told them that I planned on promoting an independent expenditure campaign supporting Namazi that could be used as a platform to attack the leading Republicans and to force a runoff where Democrats would clearly have the deciding votes. That was as good as we could get. It got a pretty good reception, as I recall — I was a little meaner than I’m being here — and I continued making plans to actually go out and do this useful PR stunt that could perhaps wangle concessions in the runoff. I found some interest in the concept. And then, suddenly, came the news that Louise was going to run her write-in campaign, to give Democrats someone to vote for. A nice sentiment — but pointless as a write-in against two Republicans, and arguably counterproductive against three of them.
Here’s what happened next: I dropped my plans to do a “Democrats for Namazi” independent campaign against the other two candidates while (by default) supporting Namazi. I had no problem running such a campaign against Moorlach and Wagner — especially Wagner, given what has been the predictably awful tenor of his campaign — but I wasn’t going to try to raise money from people to run against Louise as well. Instead, I decided to be a good Dem and created the public service announcement — not an ad, by the way — announcing Louise’s candidacy that you now see at right (and on the upper right slot on our home page if you read this before the election is over), I posted and shared the right Facebook stories, left the write snarky comments on political sites, told my friends and family in the district to write in Louise, and so on. But, as a non-retiree who has plenty of work to do, I’m not going to put in call time or walk time for this — the only benefit of which would be my putting in face time for other committee members to see me working so hard.
I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’ll bet that there would have been more votes against Wagner and Moorlach had Democrats fallen into line behind a doomed Republican in a “Democrats and Independents for Namazi” campaign you’ll see now. Leaving her to her own devices hasn’t done so well — and there’s no reason to think that she’s made any inroads among Democrats and independents. Meanwhile, I don’t hear anything suggesting that many Democrats even know that Louise is out there, ready to take their enthusiastic votes. One reasonably effective campaign (and given some of the people who were interested in it, that seemed achievable) is going to do better that one that’s invisible in the mailbox and one that’s invisible in both the mailbox and the polling booth.
So the decision for Democrats on Tuesday is: do we stand up for someone who volunteered to take a hit on our behalf — or do we not? It’s really simple: YES WE DO.
Are we doing so? NO WE AREN’T!
Now are we going to fix that or not?
Thanks for the seemingly tongue-in-cheek post. I am disappointed there wasn’t one Democrat that DPOC could put forth for people like me, who want to vote for a candidate I feel cares about/will represent my interests/values.
Not really tongue-in-cheek: Louise is running as a write-in, and if you’re a Democrat (or oriented in that direction), you should write in her name.
Some people try to pretend that putting up a Dem as a write-in is nearly as good as having a Dem on the ballot. It isn’t. But, it’s what you have to work with, so if you can vote today then write down her name and write it in. If you lose the slip of paper, thenvote for Naz Namazi.
In addition to myself, I got three others to write her in, including one who had planned not to vote. Not huge, but neither was the turnout. Your argument makes sense but I’m glad she ran just so I could cast my vote for someone decent.
Thanks for the comment, Jenny. I first want to reiterate that none of what I’ve had to say should be taken as criticism of Louise, who is both service-oriented and a good sport.
My criticism is of party leadership, which blew the filing deadline that would have certainly led this race into a (more expensive for Republicans) runoff. They would like everyone to focus on “look, we got Louise to run, and she got 2% of the vote as a write-in, isn’t that great?” rather than on the fact that they never should have felt the need to resort to this.
That Louise ran and picked up over 1,300 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 Democratic 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 5.5% she and Louise would both have received — 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 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 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.