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.

This doesn’t make much sense. A $68 billion project with no serious prospects for long-term funding — a project that won’t come close to meeting a dozen promises made to state voters to win $9.95 billion in bond seed money in 2008 — should face near-universal skepticism.

The claim that opposing such a hugely flawed initiative is based on partisan motivations, as many project defenders have alleged, doesn’t make sense just based on known, uncontested baseline facts.

One liberal who often makes this point with energy and clarity is Kevin Drum, a writer for the very liberal Mother Jones magazine and website.  Here’s a sampling of the Irvine resident’s bullet train coverage from early 2012:

Unrealistic cost projections have never been the only reason to be dubious. There were also unrealistic ridership projections, along with unrealistic estimates of what the alternatives to high-speed rail would cost. …  check this out:

‘The rail authority has relied heavily on New York-based Parsons Brinkerhoff, a contractor that helped fund the political campaign for the $9.9-billion bond measure passed by voters in 2008….In October, Parsons submitted the analysis that came up with the $171 billion, a number that initially appeared in the authority’s draft business plan released Nov. 1. In the study, Parsons first estimated how much passenger capacity the system would have at completion in 2033 and then calculated the cost for providing the same airport and highway capacity.

“Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with 1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year. The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average.”

This is just jaw-droppingly shameless. There’s not even a pretense here of providing a reasonable, real-world traffic estimate that could be used to project the cost of alternative infrastructure. A high school sophomore who turned in work like this would get an F.

We are rapidly exiting the realm of rose-colored glasses and entering the realm of pure fantasy here. If liberals keep pushing this project forward in the face of plain evidence that its official justifications are brazenly preposterous, conservatives are going to be able to pound us year after year for wasting taxpayer money while we retreat to ever more ridiculous and self-serving defenses that make us laughingstocks in the public eye.

The not-so-high-speed rail project

Here’s Drum writing earlier this year:

Here is today’s round of non-shocking news:

“Regularly scheduled service on California’s bullet train system will not meet anticipated trip times of two hours and 40 minutes between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and are likely to take nearly a half-hour longer, a state Senate committee was told Thursday. ….

“Louis Thompson, chairman of the High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group, a state-sanctioned panel of outside experts, testified that ‘real world engineering issues’ will cause schedules for regular service to exceed the target of two hours and 40 minutes. The state might be able to demonstrate a train that could make the trip that fast, but not on scheduled service, he told lawmakers.”

And remember: not a single mile of track has been laid yet. In the space of a few years, based solely on planning documents that are almost certainly still too rosy, the cost of the project has already doubled; travel times have blown past the statutory goal; ridership estimates have been halved; and every plausible funding source has disappeared. Just imagine what will happen once they start building this thing and begin running into real-world problems.

Somebody put a stake through this project. Please. LA to San Francisco is just not a good showcase for high-speed rail. Even the true believers have to be getting cold feet by now.

If only that were true. Now let’s contrast Drum’s sober analysis with the take of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board.

It’s a gamble, and not one to be taken lightly. But gasoline isn’t going to get any cheaper in the future and the freeways aren’t going to get less clogged. We think California can find a way to get the train built. We think it can. We think it can….

Yes, the L.A. Times actually invoked “The Little Engine That Could” in defending this project. Not just dumb. Embarrassing.