While maintaining a marked edge in legislative representation across the state, California Democrats notched a different but familiar distinction against Republicans in the 2016 election cycle, new data showed. Consistent with the results of previous races since the implementation of the so-called “jungle primary” law, Democrats spent far more in intra-party primary races than did GOP candidates. The pattern also held in contests for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

High-cost competition

Under the current primary system, all registered voters can participate in a single “open” primary including all candidates regardless of party identification. The top two vote winners then square off in a general run-off election. Last year, according to tabulations made by Forward Observer, Democrats spent a total of $91,518,355 on 23 same-party races – 11 in the state Assembly, five in the state Senate and seven in the House, for an average of $3,979,059 per race. That compared starkly to the $2,784,596 spent by Republicans over four same-party races for state Assembly seats, an average of just $696,149. 

Fundraising among the two parties reflected the lopsided totals. Altogether, the Democrat candidates contending for the 11 Assembly seats “raised $49.4 million including independent expenditures, for an average of approximately $4.5 million per race,” Forward Observer noted. 

Among Democrats vying for one of the five same-party state Senate seats up for grabs last year, “candidates raised $23.3 million including independent expenditures, for an average of approximately $4.6 million per race,” while those pursuing one of the seven same-party races for seats in the House of Representatives “raised $33.9 million including independent expenditures, for an average of $2.7 million per race.” 

Unexpected consequences

For Democrats, therefore, the cost of winning seats has climbed steadily under the nonpartisan blanket primary system passed as Proposition 14 by California voters in 2010 – increasing by about $3 million from 2012 to 2014, then by more than $37 million from 2014 to 2016.

“Since the first implementation of Prop. 14 in the 2012 election cycle, there have been a total of 80 same-party races in California for seats in the state Senate, Assembly and U.S. House of Representatives – 60 races between Democrats and 20 between Republicans,” the Forward Observer report summarized. “In total, Democrats have spent a total of $197.4 million on same-party races since Prop. 14 first went into effect in 2012, compared to $34.5 million spent by Republicans. Democrats have thus spent $5.72 on same-party races for every dollar spent or raised by Republicans.”

Prop. 14 was billed as a way to help ensure greater quality and competition among candidates without regard to party affiliation and, implicitly, with a mitigating effect on large campaign war chests. But for Democrats, the new system has had the more pronounced effect on pitting party members against one another at cost – neither clearing the field for dominant candidates who can win clean or uncontested victories on the cheap, nor giving upstart or insurgent candidates a clear opportunity to shift power away from established or establishment-backed contenders. “In nine of the 28 same-party races in 2012 election cycle, the second-place primary finisher won in the general election,” the report noted. “In six of the 25 races same-party races in the 2014 election cycle, the second primary finisher won.” Showing a similarly disproportionate ratio, second-placers scored general election victories in just six of the 2016 cycle’s 27 same-party races.

In fact, over the past three election cycles, primary winners have fared better and better on the whole against their second-place rivals, whether despite their increased campaign fundraising and spending or because of it. The ratio of victorious second-placers decreased from nearly a third to about a fourth to just over a fifth. 

This year, “Democrats raised or spent a total of $90.8 million on same-party races — a 67 percent increase from 2014 when Democrats spent $54.3 million,” according to the study, citing data from the California Secretary of State, California Fair Political Practices Commission and Federal Election Commission, and issued this week by Forward Observer. “The average budget for a same-party race between Democrats was $3.95 million in the 2016 cycle, up 30.7 percent since 2014,” the last year in the Congressional election cycle. 

That means Democrats are now spending massive sums of money against other Democrats in political races due to the passive of Proposition 14, the California top-two primary law which went into effect in 2012. 

Those figures struck a sharp contrast to spending for similarly situated candidates in the California GOP, which spent far less over the same two-year period. Those state Republicans “raised or spent $2.76 million on same party races in 2016,” Forward Observer observed. “This is a sharp decline (approximately 84 percent) in spending on same-party races since 2014, when Republicans spent $17.2 million.” One key to the big divergence between Democrats and Republicans, the report noted, was the lack of any Republican-on-Republican competition for a seat in the state Senate or the U.S. House of Representatives.  

Jungle primaries

Intraparty fights between Democrats attracted more outside spending this year. $339,000 went “to support Assemblywoman Nora Campos, D-San Jose, who is running against state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, in the 15th Senate District,” as the Sacramento Bee reported earlier this year, while “several hundred thousand dollars” went to “help former Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra or oppose the incumbent, Assemblywoman Patty Lopez, D-San Fernando, in Los Angeles County’s 39th Assembly District.”

“And in the Inland Empire, a campaign committee funded by the grocery workers union has spent $75,000 to support Eloise Gomez Reyes, the Democrat running to unseat Assemblywoman Cheryl Brown, D-San Bernardino, in the 47th Assembly District.”

For Democrats, the shifting political sands have complicated what was seen by some as an implicit advantage in the so-called “jungle primary” system California voters ushered in six years ago through Proposition 14. That initiative inserted a constitutional amendment to afford Californians a single, nonpartisan primary election, pitting the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, against one another in the general election. But instead of making candidates’ lives easier — and the Democratic party’s — Prop. 14 has appeared to have cost them, demanding higher expenditures. “Democrats have spent a total of $194.2 million on same-party races since Prop. 14 first went into effect in 2012,” Forward Observer concluded. “Republicans have spent $34.5 million over the same period. Thus, for every dollar spent or raised by Republicans, $5.64 was raised or spent by Democrats.”

Ideological Fights Within the Democratic Party

Another effect of the new system, harder to quantify but possibly more serious, has been a sharpening differences between the more moderate and more progressive wings of the party, sparking sometimes thorny disagreements that could have been soften had all candidates vying for office run against Republican opponents. In some cases, such as Kamala Harris’ race against Loretta Sanchez, the challenger was too weak to force a bruising battle over political agendas. In others, however, a more moderate non-incumbent drew a clear line on policy and was rewarded at the ballot box. Last year, for instance, Orinda Mayor Steve Glazer — a former aide to Gov. Jerry Brown who pitted himself against the BART strike and won support from Chuck Reed, the ex-San Jose Mayor spearheading public pension reform — bested Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, the far more liberal Democrat who initially had been widely expected to win the race to replace outgoing state Senator Mark DeSaulnier. 

It was just nine months ago that Gov. Jerry Brown basked in the

A Sacramento Bee account laid out how the four-tern governor had come to see the issue as vital to his legacy and considered the conference “the crucial event for the future of the world” because of its potential to inspire much broader efforts to curb the emission of greenhouse gases believed to contribute to global warming.

But back home, Brown’s vision is getting a much tougher reception than it did in France. It’s increasingly unclear whether the governor can even garner enough support in the California Legislature for legislation that would build on AB32. While the measure, SB32, won approval from the Assembly on Tuesday and is likely to be approved by the Senate next week, its implementation is tied to the passage of AB197 by Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella. SB32 can only take effect if AB197 is approved this session.

Garcia’s measure would both increase legislative oversight of the state Air Resources Board and require the air board to put more pressure on local factories and oil refineries to cut their emissions. This, in theory, would respond both to greens’ concerns that the cap-and-trade framework is too passive and to state lawmakers’ anxiety over the air board throwing its weight around in ways that cost local jobs.

Siding with ‘people’ over ‘polar bears’

Such a concern about the effects of environmental laws on local jobs wasn’t raised by many Democrats during 2006 when AB32 was approved. But since California switched to the “jungle primary” in 2012 — in which the top two candidates in the June primary advance, regardless of party — the Legislature has seen a surge in business-friendly Democrats suspicious of the green agenda.

“It’s great to hear about saving polar bears and hugging trees, and making sure we address global warming from a world perspective,” Garcia told the Los Angeles Times. “But how about people?”

Last year, these pro-business Democrats teamed with Republicans to kill Gov. Brown’s and Senate President Kevin de Leon’s push for a 50 percent reduction in gasoline use by vehicles in California by 2030.

Increasingly, it looks like Brown’s best option to build in on his legacy is a 2018 ballot measure extending AB32. Polling shows Californians support even more ambitious climate change policies than AB32.

In 2010, Proposition 23 — a measure to repeal AB32 — was rejected by state voters, 62 percent to 38 percent.

The governor may also try to use executive orders to extend AB32. But few authorities on California’s government believe a current governor can bind the actions of future governors or legislatures.

But that looks like a premature judgment based on the events of the past year. Business interests and the California Chamber of Commerce have had consistent success in working with moderate Democrats in the state Legislature who share their wariness toward far-reaching measures that could hurt the economy or make life more costly in their home districts.

The most prominent example: For the second straight year, a bloc of Democrats are getting in the way of Gov. Jerry Brown’s desire to gain significant environmental legacies.

Last year, they opposed the governor’s call for a law mandating that vehicles on California’s roads and freeways use 50 percent less gasoline by 2030. Brown worked with Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, to enact Senate Bill 350 and establish California as a trailblazer yet again on pioneering environmental legislation.

But the California oil industry’s argument that such a law would be costly and especially painful for poor residents — buttressed by campaign donations to sympathetic lawmakers and TV attack ads — eventually led Brown and his allies to give up on the gasoline provision of the bill, unable to muster majority support in the Assembly. Criticized for being indifferent to the needs of the environment, the moderate bloc fired back. Then-Assemblyman Henry Perea, D-Fresno, said the California Air Resources Board ignored how much its rules would hit the pocketbooks of the poor.

Governor hunting for green policy legacy

Now perhaps the state’s most famous environmental measure of this century — AB32, the sweeping 2006 law requiring a long-term state shift to cleaner but costlier forms of energy — could face a 2020 sunset without an even stronger measure taking its place, as environmentalists have long hoped.

This prospect led Brown to take the extraordinary step of trying to bind future governors and Legislatures to ambitious environmental goals that extended to 2030 — 11 years after he left office. The California Air Resources Board said Brown’s executive order was legal because “AB32 explicitly states the intent to maintain and continue reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases beyond 2020.”

State Senate Minority Leader Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield, asked the Legislature’s legal staff whether this was valid. In April, she got her reply.

“We think the determination of a standard for the statewide (greenhouse gas) emissions limit is a fundamental policy decision that only the Legislature can make,” Legislative Counsel Diane Boyer-Vine wrote. 

Since then, environmentalists — and, behind the scenes, possibly Brown himself — have been lobbying to pass an extension of AB32 and seeking to revive Brown’s push to cut petroleum use as well. As the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters reported recently, they’re not making progress. At least 15 Assembly Democrats could pair with 28 Assembly Republicans to block any bills they consider too hard on poor Californians.

It appears that California is now like the other three megastates — Texas, New York and Florida — in which pro-business Democrats have significant power in their legislatures.

The state senator who changed California politics

This development suggests that former state Sen. Abel Maldonado could end up being a more consequential figure in California politics than many governors. The only reason the jungle primary exists is that the Santa Maria Republican rancher would only provide the final vote needed to enact the state budget in 2009 if the Legislature gave California voters the chance to amend the state Constitution in the June 2010 primary.

Democratic legislative leaders went along both because of their desperation to get a budget in place with temporary tax hikes — and because of their confidence they could defeat the measure in June 2010.

They failed, with voters backing the historic change to a “top two” primary by 54 percent to 46 percent.

Photo courtesy of atlantablackstar.com

The Senate campaign of California Attorney General Kamala Harris has displeased Democratic insiders, who worry that their leading candidate to replace Sen. Barbara Boxer hasn’t run a tight enough ship.

Spokesman Nathan Click recently admitted the operation was “changing campaign managers and making moves to reduce costs,” after what the Sacramento Bee reported was “unusually heavy spending in recent months.”

“Click said the campaign was making spending cuts involving consultants and staff but declined to detail them,” the Bee noted, although the resignation of campaign manager Rory Steele — replaced by senior adviser Juan Rodriguez — was not as easily concealed.

At issue was the campaign’s eyebrow-raising spending, which included repeated, relatively lavish expenditures on Harris’s hotel accommodations. “Cam­paigns typ­ic­ally shell out big bucks on me­dia buys, staff salaries and ex­pens­ive fun­draisers. But spend­ing it on hous­ing, par­tic­u­larly when far cheap­er op­tions are avail­able, is atyp­ic­al, cam­paign vet­er­ans say, and even Har­ris’s fel­low Demo­crats have taken no­tice,” according to National Journal:

“It’s not as if the Cali­for­nia at­tor­ney gen­er­al had money to burn, either. She’s already spent more than 40 per­cent of the $6 mil­lion she’s raised since be­com­ing a can­did­ate in Janu­ary, an alarm­ing burn rate for a can­did­ate who is also on her second cam­paign man­ager and third fin­ance dir­ect­or. In her latest fun­drais­ing re­port, cov­er­ing the peri­od of Ju­ly through Septem­ber, the dis­crep­ancy between money com­ing in and money go­ing out was es­pe­cially acute: $1.8 mil­lion to $1.4 mil­lion.”

Champagne tastes

Compounding the problem, Harris’s taste for high-end living recently landed her in a crisis of a different sort — a state ethics probe involving the Fair Political Practices Commission.

“A $21,000 spruce-up of her San Francisco loft by designer-to-the-stars Ken Fulk wound up putting state Attorney General Kamala Harris under the microscope for possibly accepting an illegal gift,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “The A.G. eventually ended up in the clear — but not before cutting a check for more than $10,000.” After the FPPC made some inquiries, “Harris asked Fulk for an accounting for any money she still owed on the job and sent in a final check for $10,245,” the paper added.

California law bars elected state officials “from receiving a gift or gifts totaling more than $460 in a calendar year,” according to the Los Angeles Times, “with a few exceptions.”

Even with her name cleared by the FPPC, Harris has faced a difficult time turning the page on the broader pattern of conduct underscored by her relationship with Fulk. “Har­ris’s frivol­ous spend­ing on air­fare, lux­ury cars, and ho­tels is highly un­usu­al for a Sen­ate can­did­ate that has a re­l­at­ively com­pet­it­ive race,” one nation­al Demo­crat­ic strategist told National Journal. “And the cam­paign is in the fin­an­cial mess that it’s in be­cause of its de­cision to do those things.”

New vulnerability

The scrutiny directed at Harris would be significant regardless of her position heading toward the state primary election. But with California’s new top-two runoff system, known as the “jungle” primary, her missteps have taken on much greater significance. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who also wants to succeed Boxer, has been running a less polished underdog campaign. But she has begun to expand her base of support beyond Southern California, where it remains very strong. According to the Orange County Register, Sanchez recently roped in Central Valley endorsements from Rep. Jim Costa, D-Frenso, and former Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, and even made inroads in Harris’s San Francisco backyard with a nod from Silicon Valley Rep. Anna Eshoo.

With Republicans divided and the state GOP occasionally willing to simply sit out an election in the hopes of helping control the winning Democrat’s agenda, Harris has looked increasingly vulnerable. “Sanchez is more of an ideological centrist, as shown by her most recent spate of endorsements, and thus would more naturally draw support from business and conservative groups, as well as Republican voters,” Dan Walters noted at the San Jose Mercury News. In addition to wiping out a gender gap, “Sanchez could pull Latino votes away from Harris.” The momentum has California’s Northern California liberal establishment on edge, fearing the specter of the more left-leaning candidate losing out in yet another runoff election.

In a new report issued by Forward Observer, Golden State Democrats were found to drop over $100 million since the 2010 passage of Proposition 14, the initiative that set up the Top Two primary system. The measure created a so-called “jungle” primary system, where the top two candidates square off in the general election, regardless of whether they’re both members of the same party.

In the report, Democrat-on-Democrat spending dwarfed what Republicans shelled out when running against other Republicans. “For every dollar spent or raised by Republicans in these intra-party contests,” Forward Observer concluded, “$3.26 was raised or spent by Democrats.”

The finding struck a significant contrast with provisional conclusions by political analysts that low-information voters didn’t discriminate much among candidates from the same party.

Kevin Drum used that judgment to argue in Mother Jones that “jungle” primaries didn’t much impact California politics:

“In 2012, for example, researchers polled voters using both a traditional ballot and a top-two ballot. There was no difference in the results. One reason is that most voters knew virtually nothing about any of the candidates. Were they moderate? Liberal? Wild-eyed lefties? Meh. Voters weren’t paying enough attention to know.”

In a report drawing similar conclusions from a host of recent studies, the Los Angeles Times determined Californians weren’t any more likely to vote for relatively less ideologically extreme candidates, one of the rationales advanced by “jungle” primary advocates.

Voters “were just as apt to support candidates representing the same partisan poles as they were before the election rules changed — that is, if they even bothered voting,” according to the Times.

“To summarize, our articles find very limited support for the moderating effects associated with the top-two primary,” said Washington University’s Betsy Sinclair, as quoted in the Times, which noted her research summarized six research papers.

A surge of outside money

Further complicating the political narrative for state Democrats, Forward Observer found their outsized intra-party campaign spending came in substantial part from Independent Expenditure committees, or IEs.

Another factor is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which took a permissive approach to outside political spending. Since then, liberals and progressives have worried IEs would throw the balance of electoral power to wealthy private interests and, ostensibly, the Republican Party.

As Silicon Valley critic Andrew Gumbel put it, money-in-politics activists worry most about “the under-the-radar stuff that happens away from the media spotlight, often in smaller jurisdictions or in other states. The advent of super-PACs and unlimited independent expenditures makes it possible for billionaires to play a much longer game and to reap far greater successes as long as they are patient.”

In California, the data have provided a different story, with IEs fueling intra-party competition among Democrats most of all. “IEs raised or spent $30.9 million in Democrat-vs-Democrat campaigns and $10.1 million in Republican-vs-Republican campaigns,” Forward Observer calculated.

Notably, the findings underscored earlier research on the impact of IEs in California’s “jungle” primaries. As CalWatchdog.com previously reported:

“Out of 52 same-party races across elections for California’s state Senate, Assembly and House of Representatives, Democrats faced Democrats in 36 contests, while Republicans went head to head in 16 match-ups. Democrats poured $69 million into those three dozen races, while Republican totals reached just over $20 million, according to information drawn from the offices of the state Fair Political Practices Commission and the Secretary of State’s Office, as well as the Federal Election Commission.”

A consistent pattern

Lest analysts think that IEs have distorted other prevailing trends in campaign spending, Forward Observer’s calculations also revealed that money raised or spent by campaign committees themselves also fit the pattern followed by IEs.

Campaign committees, Forward Observer noted, were responsible for “$72.4 million in Democrat-vs-Democrat campaigns and $21.6 million in Republican-vs-Republican campaigns. This was true across both election cycles and across all three chambers – the California Assembly, Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Since its passage in 2010, the Top Two system still has run through only two election cycles. But so far, it has fulfilled proponents’ prediction that formerly one-party races, in which the November election was a mere formality, would be replaced by tough competition between two candidates from the same party.