Right On Daily Blog

Well gheez. Let me summarize for those of you with short attention spans. Pro-Life Conservatives romped all over the country. In California, the selected / preferred candidates were not Conservatives. Doug Ose, Jeff Gorrell, Brian Nestande and the extreme leftist Carl DiMaio were the preferred nominees for Congress.

Granted, I warmed up to the point of personally endorsing Doug Ose, and I also liked Jeff Gorrell a lot as well. But, all four of them lost.

I spoke to a Republican Consultant with connections all over the Country who told me that the big money was staying out of California or was withdrawing from California. This conversation was in Mid-September. The money people made a conscious decision to withdraw from California.

In addition – many of these moderate candidates for various reasons were not able to unify their base. Doug Ose, Jeff Gorrell and Carl DiMaio received millions in support. They all lost – Ose by the slimmest of margins.

However, four Conservatives running in races that were not regarded as top-tier did almost as well as the leading moderates did (all out performed DiMaio) with little or no funding! These would be Chris Mitchum, Dan Logue, Tony Amador and Paul Chabot. All four were unabashed social conservatives and all performed as well as other socially liberal candidates who were fully funded.

Let’s separate out Carl DiMaio – he was a disaster from the word go. It appears from people I have spoken to that he decided to run and was not recruited. However, the attention he got was absurd considering that the opposition research file on him is hundreds of pages and appears to lay out a pattern of sexual deviance. DiMaio was so far left on so many issues that a wide-range of people got sick to their stomachs and stayed home – this before the ghastly details of his behavior came out.

Brian Nestande in CA-36 was favored over Paul Chabot in CA-31. Nestande, a tax-raising liberal Republican got hammered. The DCCC / Pelosi PAC spent $2 million attacking Chabot and still only got a marginal victory for their man. The NRCC moved their HQ out of Chabot’s district to Nestande’s. As of the writing of this blog – Chabot is within 4 points.

Jeff Gorrell was an excellent candidate and the democrats ran a successful campaign against him using the flaws of another candidate on the ballot in order to suppress voter turnout among seniors. Again, however – there was a vicious and brutal primary in the accompanying assembly district that the wounds were not healed from. It took Gorrell down as well.

Doug Ose had a very liberal record when he served in Congress. He won a spirited primary against Igor Birman (who I supported). In this case – Doug Ose did reach out to groups hostile to him in the primary. The CRA took the unusual move of Post-Primary endorsing Doug Ose as a sign of party unity. However, many tea parties refused to return Ose’s phone calls and many organized an effort to sabotage Doug Ose’s campaign. As of the writing of this blog – there are about 6500 under-votes in the CA-07 race, suggesting that the Tea Party effort succeeded in re-electing liberal democrat Ami Bera. (Ose is losing by roughly 700 votes and will likely lose by about 1500 when the count is complete)

For various reasons – the Conservatives were thrown to the wolves. It was the prevailing wisdom that CA-03 (Dan Logue) was un-reachable because of the 10 point spread – now go explain Johnny Tacherra in CA-16… pro-life, pro-prop-8 and got within a couple hundred votes of entrenched incumbent Jim Costa in a -15 dem district? Tacherra was on no one’s radar. He is an unabashed conservative – endorsed pre-primary by the CRA.

Paul Chabot in CA-31 was given up for dead when he beat lobbyist and Washington DC insider Lesli Gooch in the CA-31 Primary. The DCCC hammered Chabot with Radio, TV and by Chabot’s count 26 pieces of mail. Chabot, a hard-core conservative came within 4 points.

Chris Mitchum and Tony Amador won contested primaries in CA-24 and CA-09 respectively – both came within 5 points of their dem incumbent opponents. In the case of Mitchum, the DCCC actually spent money against him!

No one gave Logue, Mitchum, Amador, Tacherra or Chabot the time of day – and their performance in the absence of funding indicates they would have won even with token amounts of help.

The big money people wrote off California.

The reasons why are not what many will say on the surface. The powers to be in California did not take a thorough enough look at the candidates and districts. I do not have enough data to suggest that GOP leadership discriminated against Conservatives.

Wealthy Financier Charles Munger did in state races. But, he is not the GOP leadership – despite the claims of some. Munger did not play IE’s in any congressional races in 2014 in California. Mr Munger lost roughly 80% of the races he spent in – but two key wins in dem-leaning districts he contributed significant IE’s to.

Congressional Races are more of a national flavor – people vote based on the direction of the country. This is the dynamic that IMO, the CA GOP leadership missed when picking their targets. All over the nation – Pro-Life and Pro-Family Conservatives destroyed their opponents.

I’d also be remiss if I did not mention that the “fit the district” argument is something that many in CA GOP leadership overuse. I believe that the candidate themself is far more important than the social issue demagoguery that sometimes happens in a campaign.

Look at NV-04. Right-Wing Conservative Rancher Crescent Hardy Took out Stephen Horsford a first term congressman that was a former speaker of the Nevada House. The district? -14 dem.

Instead, in California – we had some seriously flawed candidates who appear to have been poorly vetted by a shallow set of qualifications. Ugh. Or, worse, we had to react and deal with whomever ran…

Meanwhile – Paul Chabot, Johnny Tacherra, Chris Mitchum, Tony Amador and to a lesser extent Dan Logue all got left in the lerch and all could have won where their more moderate, more favored counterparts lost.

Ugh.

As of the time I am writing this post, the election results are stunning. But, if you think it through, not really.

In 2012 – the story was the wealthy GOP Financier Charles Munger and his limitless resources catapulting Moderate Republicans Frank Bigelow and Rocky Chavez in to safe, Conservative GOP seats. The same was also true of Congressman Paul Cook in CA-08, a very conservative desert seat.

A closer look at those races shows that the more conservative opponents in all three seats were terribly flawed candidates, and when juxtaposed with results in 2014 – those flawed candidates likely had more to do with the success of the more moderate winners.

Fast forward to 2014. In AD-73, Bill Brough was outspent 7-1 by Anna Bryson who benefited from $500k in outside money. Brough finished first, Bryson 5th in that Primary. Brough is trouncing his dem opponent in the general.

In AD-44, Conservative Pastor Rob McCoy defeated a more moderate and very well funded opponent. But, similar to the above three Conservatives in 2012, McCoy appeared to have similar baggage and is trailing by 3%. I seriously doubt that his 26 year old primary opponent would have done better against the Democrat.

In AD-74 – we have an R vs R runoff that pitted underfunded CRA-Endorsed Conservative Matthew Harper against Keith Curry. Curry had the full support of GOP leadership and hundreds of thousands of dollars in his warchest. He also was the beneficiary of massive Independent expenditures. Harper is leading by 18% with the count nearly complete.

In SD-28 and CA-25, both R vs R runoffs – Flawed Conservative Jeff Stone is leading Bonnie Garcia despite being put through a meat grinder. Stone narrowly missed a CRA endorsement while Bonnie received no support from CRA due to her lifetime 61% CRA Score. Garcia may still win – but based on other races I have observed, it does not look likely.

CA-25 – pitted Tony Strickland, endorsed by Kevin McCarthy and the establishment against CRA-Endorsed Steve Knight. As of the writing of this blog, Knight leads 8.6% with 63.7% in.

The shocker that no one paid much attention to is in AD-26. This is the seat of former permanent minority leader Connie Conway. The Mark Abernathy establishment had lined up Rudy Mendoza to be the heir apparent. Not so fast – a longshot conservative military veteran slipped in to the runoff. With 97% of the vote in, Devon Mathis is scoring an astounding 10.6% victory.

The lesson here about Prop 14 is that effective Conservative Candidates are nearly unbeatable regardless of the money spent against them. Some may point to the reduced turnout, but the pattern is irrefutable. The stated goal of Prop 14 was to moderate politics. It has only succeeded in making races even more expensive and driving voter turnout down – giving the more partisan high-propensity voters an even bigger say.

Look at the horrific vote totals in D vs D races.

Last, but not least is the R vs R runoff in CA-04. The field was cleared enabling challenger Art Moore to challenge Tom McClintock. The papers all endorsed Moore. The storyline was about how extreme McClintock was.

That only succeeded in enabling McClintock to paint his opponent in to a corner, this time, it was the moderate that was underfunded and McClintock crushed Art Moore, leading by 20.4% with 83.9% of the vote in.

The problem is that McClintock is the kind of representative a suburban / rural district wants in Washington… someone who takes a hard line. What ever happened to the famous “fit the district” argument that gets used constantly to justify establishment support of moderates?

When you compare the turnout in CA-04 to neighboring CA-07, one of the top targeted Congressional Seats in America… Art Moore has gotten more votes than Doug Ose who is headed to a likely victory in CA-07 over the democrat (the fraud doctor Ami Bera). Ose is up 3184 votes with 50,000 late absentees left to count.

I believe that the labor unions will take a run at qualifying a ballot measure to repeal prop 14. Prop 14 has proven to be a disaster for the Democrats as the intended result of moderation has hit them in spades.

Example – in SD-06, the more moderate Richard Pan is beating Labor Union Darling Roger Dickinson. This is a really bad beat for the Unions.

There are a ton of other D vs D races – a ton of them where union people have been forced to spend a bank vault to protect their interests. They can’t be happy about this.

I leave you with AD-16, where Moderate Republican Catherine Baker is running in a Bay Area Assembly District with an 8 point dem advantage. She is leading by 5+ points and the lead is creeping up as the updates come in (we are at 72.4% now) – the hypothesis is working in reverse. The unions dumped a ton of money in to the primary to get their guy Tim Sbranti nominated. Sbranti is a deeply flawed candidate known for a hair-trigger temper and an acerbic personality.

Similar to the above mentioned flawed conservatives losing, we have a flawed communist losing what should be a democrat seat.

It is a brave new Prop 14 world and all the Independent Expenditures in the world can’t fix it.