As I re-emerge from my post-mortem, I have been thinking for the past few months about the California June Primary, the low voter turn out and the effects it will have on the November election--which is, by the way, only three months away.
I had the privilege to hear from Secretary of State Bruce McPherson last week in the Capitol and he attributed the low voter turn out to "voter fatigue." He cited the recall election, last year's special elections, a.k.a. the foiled "Year of Reform" initiatives attempted by Governor Schwarzenegger, and the primary as the reasons why California voters had had enough of exercising their civic duty. He may have a point, but of course that wasn't the sole reason why California voters were deterred to vote this past June.
Having helped support the Westly campaign, the negative ads were definitely a detractor. Voters were undoubtedly turned off by the mud-slinging. Having spoken to Westly's Southern California political director last May and discovering from her that 90% of his campaign funds, which if I may remind you Mr. Westly contributed an estimated $30 million from his own personal accounts, were being spent on the media, specifically for the negative ads, I had a feeling from the very beginning I joined the bandwagon, that his campaign was in jeopardy.
I asked her, "What's Steve doing for GOTV?" (For those of you who are campaign novices that's an acronym for "getting out the vote.") She told me that he was doing a bus tour of the state as a last push to get the word out. While I thought that a bus tour was a valiant effort at the time, she failed to really answer my question. In the back of my mind, I was asking myself: Who will be shaking peoples' hands and telling them why Steve would make the better candidate? In fact, my instincts were right all along. The non-direct answer indicated that the campaign didn't have a strategy for GOTV.
With labor's strong support for Phil, I knew that days before the election that the Angelides' camp had mobilized a strong effort for GOTV. The last days leading to the election, I knew we had a slim chance of regaining our lead because our camp did not mobilize such an effort. As I watched the precincts return that evening, I knew we had lost when conservative Orange and San Diego counties chose the more liberal candidate in Angelides. By the morning, it was 48-44 in favor for Phil. Our journey was over.
While I still believe Steve Westly would have made the better Democratic candidate and would have had a more legitimate chance in defeating the incumbent governor, I learned two important lessons from working on the Westly campaign that explained why he was defeated.
1.) Too much money was spent on superfluous consultants who directed him to invest in the media rather than focusing more on GOTV strategies.
2.) More time and energy should have been devoted in Southern California, especially in Orange and San Diego counties. My former graduate professor made it explicitly clear that if a California state-wide candidate fails to win the Los Angeles area, he or she would lose the race. This was true for Westly and Jackie Spier. If these counties swung in favor for Steve Westly, he could have been facing Arnold in November.
So what do I say about the implications of the June debacle on November's election? It favored the current governor. While Westly and Angelides' battled it out, Arnold took a backseat and watched the fight. As the two democratic candidates spent countless millions trying to knock each other out of the race, the governor raised money for his own campaign. The low-voter turn out in June is an indication of how split Califronia Democrats truly are today. At the end of the day in November, mark my words; we will have another four years of the Governator in office.
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