We’ve been needing an open thread, AND a post-primary piece, so here it is: The biggest winners AND biggest spenders in OC’s and California’s 2026 primaries were two crypto billionaires funneling their money as “Grow California”, allied with “California Leads,” a front for Meta and Google.
As Politico reports, these tech interests spent RECORD MILLIONS on downballot Cali legislative races, and won themselves 11 races out of 12. Here in the OC, they’ve saddled our most Democratic region with their trustworthy “moderates” while crushing two progressives (yes, Ada was at least progressive.) What could big tech / A.I. be expecting from this great expenditure & victory? We can only imagine.
David & Mark, ready to go to work for their new bosses Chris Larsen & Tim Draper!
All the great grassroots enthusiasm behind Jessie Lopez was no match for the $4 million in vicious attack ads from these two tech PACs (along with other greedy destructive interests) and David P sprinted past Jessie (accompanied by Republican Mayra who’ll go on to lose this heavily Dem district, but at least kept Jessie out.) As we warned, David is bad on nearly every major issue, out of step with regular folks on nearly everything he’ll be voting on, but we kept running into voters who’d say “Wasn’t there something dirty about Jessie Lopez? I don’t remember what it was.”
So the people lost what would have been a champion of rent control, universal healthcare, police accountability, and the environment; and instead got a servant of Big Tech, Big Oil, corporate landlords, and the charter school industry. The saddest part, maybe, was that the Democratic Party of OC and California was ten toes down on the wrong side. The big money side. I guess that’s what we can expect for now, the Party versus the People.
It was a little more complicated in AD 67, but for every TV ad we saw trashing Jessie, there were just as many pro-Pulido ads trashing Ada Briceno put out by the exact same special interests (mainly Big Tech.) That they trashed Ada as ruthlessly as Jessie almost made you want to back Ada, despite all the things she did as DPOC chief. But now that district is stuck with a truly dismal choice between Big Tech Pulido and the even worse Republican Paulo Morales. Sucks to be us.
Two Rare Rays of Light
Somehow through this unprecedented rampage of Big Money, a couple of honest progressives managed to squeeze through: Supervisor Vince Sarmiento (re-elected at a whopping 63%), and Jane Kim for Insurance Commissioner. Did they do something especially smart, or did the special interests just neglect to crush them? Well, for now, let’s just congratulate Vince and Jane, rare rays of light in this dismal primary!
Is anything really gonna change in the coming weeks?
Sometimes it seems we’re just kept in suspense, in distended hope, for no reason, by folks who find that in their interest. I highly doubt at this point:
- That Steyer will make it into second place so we can have a D-on-D gubernatorial election. That’d mean him picking up 6 points. All my Becerra-loving friends should be happy. The guy who “put in his time” and “whose turn it is” will be sitting in the Governor’s mansion for the next eight years. I just hope he distinguishes himself somehow, and stands up to special interests when he should.
- That Ada can still make up 5 points and take Pulido’s place against Morales. That Katrina can pick up 4.4 points to avoid a runoff with the useless Diane Dixon. That our preferred equalizer Cody Petterson can make up 3 points to get back in that race. That Karen Bass’ progressive challenger for LA Mayor can pick up 6 points to knock the MAGA clown Spencer Pratt out of that race. [UPDATE 6/8 on THAT race – Raman DID make it – wow!] All of that seems very unlikely but I would love to be wrong.
Looks like we’re left with two rotten candidates for Lt. Governor – crooked Democrat Fiona Ma and former Dem / charter school zealot Gloria Romero. I hate to see either of those ladies get that nice foot-in-the-door post, good thing Lt Gov doesn’t really do much. (Greg thinks Fiona’s triumph is my fault for not re-posting all our old negative material about her, especially her being Gerry Serrano’s pension-padding tool. Like that woulda made a difference.)
Down in barbarian land, Chris Kluwe remains our progressive hope for November. And I’m not feeling too inspired to write right now, but we do need an open thread. I gotta get back out there and get more signatures for rent control in Anaheim, we’ve got till the end of July…
There is some chatter in Irvine amongst a faction of DGI members supporting Katie Porker for a mayoral run in Irvine.
She got less votes in the county than foreign agent Farrah did when she lost to Wagner for the D3 supe seat. Will someone put her back in the barn already.
Huh. She might be an okay Irvine mayor I guess. I bet she’s too vain to take on something that modest though.
And on second thought a Mayor should have better interpersonal skills.
What? You didn’t like my flash forward post about Bari Weiss?
Didn’t see it
That time I called Rabbi Dicky a genocide denier – at his last meeting of the OC Human Relations Commission on account of him stepping down – and neither he nor his colleagues denied it.
https://ceo.oc.gov/human-relations-commission#docaccess-36882bbf592a8129b0403b144aa8f328
https://ceo.oc.gov/sites/ceo/files/2026-05/05-14-26_HRC_audio.mp3 (Queue to 19:09)
I hope and pray that the most important job of the California governor over the next four years is to send the same message over and over again from multiple numbers, even after I tell them to stop, because Xavier Becerra is EXCELLENT at that job.
Those anti-Jesse Lopez ads were thoroughly nasty. I wasn’t surprised to see many of them citing Cunningham’s OC “Independent” as a source.
And it looks like Connor Traut is going to pull it out in the 4th District. Enabling OC’s next Jordan Brandman-esque pol is the price we have to pay to keep Tim Shaw off of the BoC, I guess. Whoever wins, we all lose.
Although I’ve been saying that Connor, Fred, or even Tim (maybe) are better than Doug Chaffee. OK take it back, Connor or Fred is.
The slow count and late progressive turnout are still causing friends of mine to hold out hope, even for AD 68… and at least one of the races I mentioned, for LA Mayor, has borne out that hope – progressive Raman has edged out Trumpy Spencer Pratt for second place, to take on establishment disappointment Karen Bass!
For AD 68, Lopez is now within 800 votes of the second-place Republican — we may be in for five more months of “JESSIE LOPEZ IS A THIEVING THIEF WHO GAVE HERSELF A RAISE!!!!1!!” mailers yet!
Was Pulido the one who spoke at the Anaheim D*ms Cl*b meeting last year? The one who had ties to the Lowenthal crew? I thought that he was quite impressive. I don’t recall his being a tech bro. Is he one?
I won’t be able to check on much until President Bukele lets me out of CECOT, but my guess is that most if not all of the negative ads against Ada were Independent Expenditures via PACs. These must be uncoordinated. Unless you see Pulido muttering like a Mafioso that he really wishes that someone would run an ad accusing Ada of aggravated whatever, not only does he have nothing to do with them, but he literally CAN’T STOP THEM; they are acts is *someone else’s* freedom of political speech, per Citizen’s United, not of his.
I’ve spent countless hours trying to explain this to Steyer supporters and they either can’t understand it intellectually or for tactical reasons pretend that they can’t. These ads were all about Steyer, nothing about Becerra. Steyer has no apparent sense of how legislation gets made — and more importantly, how it gets BLOCKED, in the California Legislature. But having spent years watching the likes of Correa and Solorio block good reform legislation in a hundred different ways, I know how difficult it is and how much you need an experienced and polished legislator involved from the start to craft legislation that will pass through both highly compromised chambers. (Speaker Rivas just gave us an example of how it’s done.) Steyer’s intention to go in like Leroy Jenkins and shoot the place up willy-nilly is what earned him that reaction. The sad truth is that plenty of politicians get the max direct contributions from all sorts of interest groups, and it doesn’t make them “bought,” though it generally will mean that they will take lobbyists’ phone calls. Given a compromised legislature, that’s not a bad thing: someone like Becerra can use those calls to work out various compromises that will get those interests to call off their digs.
As for whether the story of bisexual poster girl Fiona Ma getting naked and climbing into the bed of her female subordinate (worse than what that one Councilwoman lost your support for doing, Vern) which led to a huge taxpayer-funded settlement — might have had a larger impact when when combined with the corruption scandal of her clearing the path to spike the SAPOA head’s pension after receiving a nice-sized contribution he doled out on his organization’s supposed behalf is something we’ll never know. But I can say that it’s a bigger pair of scandals than almost anything I’ve seen this year, and I think that she’d have been dead in the water. If I could have found the articles so that I could have written the story from here, I could have managed them myself — but even I repeatedly asked you for the links I didn’t receive them.
That may, ironically — if she ascends to the Governorship — turn out to be one of the most consequential things you’ve done in your political life.
“the story of bisexual poster girl Fiona Ma getting naked and climbing into the bed of her female subordinate (worse than what that one Councilwoman lost your support for doing, Vern)”
Huh? What Councilwoman? Don’t know to whom or what you refer.
And I didn’t get any messages from you asking for “links.” I did get one asking me to repost Duane’s old stories about Serrano and Ma, but didn’t have time to do it. Really, you think our reposting those would have changed the election? I have vastly underestimated our power!
The google machine can be your friend, Greg – try “Fiona Ma sex scandal” for many links.