California Senate 2024 - Schiff (D) vs Garvey (R)

[Хahar 🤔]

Ever since the introduction of the top-two system after the 2010 election, California has not had competitive statewide elections. For much of the last decade we got plenty of statewide elections between two Democrats, but that has ended also as Gavin Newsom has taken firm control of the state Democratic party. Typically nowadays there is only one candidate, the Newsom candidate, and everyone else is totally locked out of the money needed to run a real campaign unless they can self-fund.

Things should be different for the 2024 Senate election. I don't expect Dianne Feinstein to run for reelection (her declining the office of president pro tempore is a sign that even her people realize now that she's no longer fit to hold office) and even if she were to run I doubt that she would win. Normally when an officeholder changes for a statewide elected position, Gavin Newsom finds a way to appoint one of his people to fill it and then run for a full term essentially uncontested, but it doesn't seem likely that that'll happen this time. This means that we'll get a real election where we might even have multiple candidates with a shot. (None of those candidates will be Republicans.)

The last two D vs. D Senate elections in California featured a San Francisco politician with the backing of the establishment (Harris, Feinstein) against a no-hope Southern California candidate (Sánchez, de León). Both of the latter two candidates were doomed because they lacked both name recognition and access to money. There are very few politicians in California who have both, which limits the potential field quite a bit. There are two candidates who seem to me to definitely have both the ability and the ambition to mount a serious campaign this time around.

The first is Ro Khanna, who represents the Asian district around San Jose. Khanna is in tight with Gavin Newsom (who endorsed his congressional campaigns against Mike Honda), he has proximity to tech money, and he had a leading role in the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020 as it won California. The second is Katie Porter of Orange County. My sense is that she doesn't have any real Sacramento connections, which ordinarily would make raising money difficult, but her profile among resistance liberals is such that she can probably raise an unlimited sum from small donors. (The only concern here is whether small donors would be interested in funding a campaign against another Democrat.)

In the event of a general election between Khanna and Porter, one would think that Republican voters would naturally become a key constituency. (They weren't in the race between Harris and Sánchez, and their support for de León against Feinstein didn't matter, but in neither of these cases did anyone seriously think that the result of the election was in question.) Khanna's personality is such that he genuinely believes that he should be able to appeal to everyone and get everyone to agree with him, which you can see in the way that he talks about his friendships with Republicans. Based on this, I would expect him to make real efforts to ingratiate himself to Republican voters. This could work and give him a big victory, but it could also backfire spectacularly. I'd be really interested in seeing how this campaign would turn out.

[Хahar 🤔]

I would say two things: first, this is going to be a very interesting race. Second, I just hope the next Senator from California isn't Ro Khanna

What's wrong with Khanna in your mind? He's a pretty standard Democrat from what I know.

Well before he had anything to say about the Russian invasion, a large number of red avatars on this forum have intensely disliked Ro Khanna dating back to his campaigns against Mike Honda. I think that this has to do with his presentation, which feels New Democrat even though his actual positions don't fit that. Personally I like him better than I like most members of Congress. Among other things, it would be nice to have someone in the Senate who was seriously opposed to Hindu nationalism.

SF is in a rough place politically because most of the state still associates it with urban chaos, while leftists in California associate it with wealth inequality.

I'm surprised that you would say this, so I'm curious as to whether you've seen anything to indicate it. I'm confused at the idea that most of the state "still" associates San Francisco with urban chaos, because this wasn't something I was aware was happening in a politically relevant way. "San Francisco values" is of course a classic right-wing dogwhistle, but I can't think of a single candidate in the last twenty years who has been hurt by being from San Francisco. The current politician most associated with San Francisco was just reelected in another landslide.

I think Linda Sanchez would be a great candidate, even though no one else seems to think so.

How would she be different than her sister?

[Хahar 🤔]

Barbara Lee being talked about as a serious candidate is...surprising. She's 76 now and she'd be 78 at the time of the election, which would make her the oldest elected freshman in history. I'd vote for her if she were to run, I suppose, but her running doesn't really make any sense except from a pure identity politics perspective.

Isn't California currently experiencing a massive and rare natural disaster? Seems like this launch could and should have been delayed.

I don't really think so? It's been raining hard and I guess it's raining hard in the south too, but it's not clear to me that this is worse than the last big storm, which was in October 2021.

[Хahar 🤔]

To answer your above question, with all due respect you are really selling short Barbara Lee. She's not just some Black Congresswoman. She's an icon on the left, an AOC long before anyone like that was in Congress, the sole voice of reason in the lead up to our failed and $2 trillion invasion of Afghanistan, one of the only Reps to vote against the train strike being unlawfully ended.

Porter's poll is probably underestimating Barbara Lee. Ultimately, I doubt she gets in because of her age. But it is upsetting to see how she's getting treated by the media and party. She is what Katie Porter pretends to be, and yes she also happens to be a Black woman.

Yeah, fair enough. Like I said, I'd vote for her, but I can't see how she'd have enough support to win except on the principle that that one of the senatorial seats has to belong to a black woman. This is, basically, what Gavin Newsom's approach to politics is, and it was in that sense that she was mentioned as a candidate for Kamala Harris's seat a couple years ago. It's tokenistic and unfair, but I don't think that there are any politicians in statewide office who are allowed to be anything but tokens of their particular identity group except Gavin Newsom.

[Хahar 🤔]

This is still *extremely* unlikely, but what would happen if somehow too many Ds try to run for this seat, all split the primary vote, and allow for a R v R GE matchup. In a Trump state Senate District, the reversed happened and ultimately Ds won the seat; just looking at the State Senate results it seems so out of place lol.

There are a couple reasons that this won't happen. The first is that it's hard to imagine that two different Republicans will have enough name recognition to get somewhere and that they'll split the vote in an exactly optimal way. The second is that the California Democratic Party is disciplined and this would be the dooomsday scenario. It's come close to happening once (the 2014 election for controller) and there hasn't been any chance of it happening for any statewide election since and I don't expect that to change. The fact that there'll be substantial out-of-state money coming in (I expect Katie Porter in particular to be able to raise basically unlimited money from small donors) changes the calculation a little bit, but you may notice that in California statewide election, the Democratic field really narrows as the election draws near. Non-viable candidates won't have a chance.

[Хahar 🤔]

It's Adam Schiff, setting up the CAGOP for a real Sophie's Choice of a general election if its Schiff v Porter or Schiff v Lee, as I expect it will be.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this. Lee is obviously the furthest left candidate, but she's not a contemporary cable news celebrity the way the other two are, so Republicans don't have an active reason to hate her. Obviously the undervote would be massive, but would Republicans vote for Barbara Lee? Given the alternative, I think they might.

[Хahar 🤔]

Thanks to the posters who know California (especially Sestak and coloradocowboi) who have been doing good work in this thread refuting misconceptions. This thread isn't nearly this bad right now, but I'm reminded of the summer of 2021 when the California recall thread on this forum was filled with endless commentary on the Caitlyn Jenner campaign. Focus on what matters and use your common sense to ignore what doesn't. It feels like people throw out all their intuition about political campaigns (intuition that would steer them in the right direction) when it comes to California. I can't explain why.

That being said, it's difficult for me to imagine Sacramento sitting this election out, and so it behooves us to understand what connections the candidates have to Sacramento. Katie Porter, as best as I can tell, has none; her first involvement in partisan politics was being elected to Congress. If she didn't have access to an army of small donors, this would be an insurmountable obstacle, and even as it is it's a real challenge for her. Schiff and Lee were both in the state legislature in the '90s before being elected to Congress, but Lee was in Sacramento longer and I think still has closer ties now. She was in the Assembly back when Willie Brown ran it and obviously she had a long-standing personal relationship with Ron Dellums. That she endorsed the Kamala Harris presidential campaign is an indication of her relationships with bigwigs in the California Democratic Party. My assumption is that these things do matter. (I'm not mentioning Ro Khanna here because it doesn't seem like he's going to run.)

A runoff between Schiff and Porter seems quite unlikely to me. Partly that's because they're both from the Los Angeles area, but it's not just about geography. Neither of them obviously have the sort of institutional support that candidates who win in California normally have. There's a lot of room in the race for a Democrat who's unlike either of them, and Barbara Lee seems to want to be that Democrat.

Schiff and Lee are my top choices. Porter is far back.

IMO NorCal always wins for some reason, and with Porter and Schiff split the southern California vote we could get Lee/Porter or Lee/Schiff. On the other hand, Porter might split the progressive vote with Lee while Schiff consolidates the establishment. It probably evens out to each of them having the same chance at making the runoff.

Historically that was true because that’s where the largest and wealthiest democratic base was. Not to mention that most of the SoCal vote was minorities. Recently however SoCal has become a massive democratic base in its own right and minority candidates can and have been winning state wide. The political center has been shifting south

This seems instinctively like it should be true, because that part of the state really is so much more Democratic than it used to be, but if you actually look for southern Democrats who have won statewide elections (primary or general) against serious northern Democratic candidates without having the benefit of incumbency, you find that the examples are few and far between. There's not much evidence that southern Democrats are more competitive in statewide elections than they used to be. To the extent that more statewide officeholders are from the southern part of the state now, it's because Gavin Newsom has had the ability to fill so many positions by appointment.

[Хahar 🤔]

While we're here, I do want to address this:

Not to mention that most of the SoCal vote was minorities.

The unjustified notion that the Bay Area is white is a topic that has come up time and time again:

San Francisco is whiter than its suburbs, it's true, but it's still only 39% non-Hispanic white. This is not meant as an indictment of you, but this demonstrates the problem with discourse about California in general and the Bay Area in particular. People talk based on the idea they have of the place, which often bears little relationship to what the place is actually like. In particular, people constantly seem to assume that the Bay Area is largely white, which is not at all the case. I'm not sure there's a metropolitan area of anywhere near similar size whose demographics are consistently mischaracterized in this way.

If we compare 2020 Census data for the nine-county Bay Area and the greater Los Angeles area (here defined as Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, and Riverside), this is what we get:

Region	White	Hispanic	Asian	Black
Bay Area	35.8%	24.4%	27.7%	5.6%
Greater LA	29.4%	46.3%	13.8%	6.1%

It's true that the population of greater Los Angeles is mostly non-white, but the same is true of the Bay Area, so that alone can't be it. It seems fanciful to attribute the difference in the political fortunes of the two areas to the Bay Area being six and a half percentage points whiter.

[Хahar 🤔]

Do you think this is likely to change? If so, when? What would cause it? And would that be a good thing?

At some point things will change because everything changes, but I think it's fair to say that the dramatic changes that people thought might occur when the top-two system was approved have not taken place.

One of the issues that I think people have with California is that they map New York onto California. New York and California do have some similarities, but they're not the same at all. In particular, you see people in this thread trying to explain a distinction between "establishment" and "progressives" that really doesn't exist, at least not the way they're suggesting it does. Ro Khanna is clearly "establishment" and yet he was the most prominent Bernie Sanders supporter in the state. You would never see the New York Democratic apparatus support someone like Barbara Lee, but that could very well happen in California.

I suspect that this is partly because of the volume of issues that get sent directly to the voters at each election. The California initiative process is unusual compared to most states in that legislators are not involved at all: an outside group circulates a petition, it gets enough signatures to be approved, and then it gets sent to the ballot. If it is approved then legislators cannot amend it without voter approval. This means that many potentially controversial issues are not subject to the normal political process. Affirmative action, for example, is popular among activists but deeply unpopular among California voters. In a different state, this could cause tension, but in California, affirmative action is simply submitted to the electorate, which then rejects it. Having to hold a statewide vote on everything is bad from the standpoint of good government, but it's probably good from the standpoint of maintaining the cohesion of the Democratic Party.

An obvious way that things could change would be if state politics were to become more ideological. I don't think that this would be a good thing if it meant that we got a New York-style split between "the establishment" and "the left": certainly nobody would look at New York as a model. At the moment, legislative Democrats have shown support for increasing housing supply (as shown by the enactment of SB 35) and have opposed homeowners trying to use environmental laws to stop universities from increasing enrollment. It's possible that more ideological politics would result in better housing legislation, but it seems more likely to me that it'd result in entrenched interests opposing what we already have.

[Хahar 🤔]

I'm actually really curious to see how Latinos and Asians achieve more political power in NorCal moving forward. A bunch of white, unremarkable Dems are sitting on v diverse seats in the house that will be very competitive when they open up (and tbh would be for a brave progressive of color now): Swalwell, Lofgren, Thompson, Garamendi, and DeSaulnier all come to mind--although the latter two probably have the progressive street cred to quash a challenge. Garamendi has gotta either retire or die soon tho he has been in California politics forever.

In the state legislature, where term limits ensure turnover, you do see this process taking place. Interstate 880, along which the largest part of the Bay Area's Asian population lives, is represented in the Assembly from south to north by Evan Low, Ash Kalra, Alex Lee, Liz Ortega, and Mia Bonta. The Senate delegation is a lot whiter, but it's still a big difference from the way things were when I got into politics fifteen years ago. I think that that'll filter up as people do retire.

As someone who grew up and lives in a mixed Indian/Chinese community, the ethnic breakdown of Asian officeholders is interesting to me. The most nationally prominent Asian politician from the Bay Area is Indian, of course, but aside from Khanna there aren't a lot of notable names that are Indian. (I suppose there's a chance that someday Rishi Kumar's congressional campaigns accomplish something other than providing volunteer experience for local teens looking to burnish their college applications, but I'm not counting on it.) Local government tends to have a lot more Chinese than Indian officeholders. In any case, as of yet neither community of recent immigrants is meaningfully politically organized. (The old Cantonese community of San Francisco is a different story.) If a strong Chinese or Indian political network were to develop, it would have serious consequences in the Bay Area.

[Хahar 🤔]

Plus a massive number of current and former reps, including a large number of progressives.

https://twitter.com/latseema/status/1621144920009625600?s=46&t=vesBqt1FzrDmE...

The ritual obeisance to Dianne Feinstein is distasteful, but nobody would be saying any of these things if they actually thought she was going to run again or would actually support her. Hopefully we can get that out of the way now and move on to the stuff of substance.

I'm not necessarily saying this is the same thing or will end in the same way, but I'm reminded of Pelosi's endorsement of Joe Kennedy, which had more to do with House dynamics than anything happening on the ground in the state in question. What this list of followers indicates to me is that these are the members of Congress who are aligned with Pelosi first and foremost. Looking at the names, what stands out is how white a list it is. Schiff being a southerner won't do him any good if he can't get the Mexican vote.

The other interesting thing this confirms is something we could have suspected, that Katie Porter does not have a lot of friends in Washington. I don't think that she has a lot of friends in Sacramento, either, but she has a lot of small donors who will probably be motivated to write her checks. Given that no money will be coming into this race with the aim of keeping the seat out of Republican hands, it could mean a lot for Porter to have donors who specifically believe in her as a person.

Newsom and company appear to be keeping their powder dry and waiting for the race to develop. Presumably Khanna will endorse Lee as soon as she declares. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else does; in particular, I'd like to see what kind of institutional support she can get in Los Angeles.

Who the hell are Republicans even going to run? I think this'll end up being a D vs D lockout.

Most likely the answer is nobody. I've seen people make fanciful suggestions that the split Democratic vote could lead to two Republicans making the general election and more realistic suggestions that the split Democratic vote could lead to one Republican making the general election. The former is obviously not going to happen, but even the latter is quite unlikely to me. In both 2016 and 2018, there were multiple Democrats in the primary and no serious Republicans, and in both cases the top Republican got under 10% of the vote. That will not be enough to advance to the general election even if the Democratic vote is split three ways.

Feinstein still a possibility? Heck, I almost want her to run at this point just to see how she gets embarrassed in a fifth or sixth place finish.

If Feinstein runs I think she’ll become the de facto Republican candidate should no big names jump in.

Didn't Republicans hate her with passion for some reason for several years?

Probably? But between her and Schiff or Porter she’s the most conservative and probably has the least hate among republicans. Porter is despised as a “young” progressive woman and Warren protege, Schiff was the tip of the spear during the trump impeachment so he’s a persona non grata. Feinstein is the least objectionable

Leaving aside the Feinstein business, her being "more conservative" has nothing to do with the way that California Republicans vote in elections between two Democrats. There have been two senatorial elections in California between two Democrats, and in both cases Republican areas overwhelmingly voted for the Democrat running the more left-wing campaign. As I've mentioned on this thread previously, Schiff and Porter each could face serious difficulty attracting Republican votes, but that is because they are both cable news personalities. Ideology is not relevant here.

[Хahar 🤔]

Schiff will win. See Nadler, Jerry.

Case in point!

One of the issues that I think people have with California is that they map New York onto California. New York and California do have some similarities, but they're not the same at all.

Hopefully people stop doing this in this thread, but I'm not holding out hope. A challenge I'm going to make to the posters of this forum is to stop ever comparing California to New York. You can make comparisons to any other elections or any other politicians in any other state, but just don't use New York. Give it a try! If nothing else, it'll make people's analogies more creative.

[Хahar 🤔]

comparing Biden's 2020 run with Barbara Lee's senate run is not an apt one...Dems didn't have many alternatives in 2020 and Biden was polling the best vs Trump among all possible Dem candidates. That's just not the case here...even worst possible Dem candidate will win the California Sen race.

And if that seat MUST be held by a WOC, why not London Breed and not somebody who’s almost 80 years old and would probably only serve a single term?

Here's a good example of a phenomenon I observed recently:

This forum has always been fascinated with the idea of London Breed winning higher office, but there doesn't seem to be any reason there except that she's a black woman and I guess not everyone here can name other black female politicians in California.

[Хahar 🤔]

comparing Biden's 2020 run with Barbara Lee's senate run is not an apt one...Dems didn't have many alternatives in 2020 and Biden was polling the best vs Trump among all possible Dem candidates. That's just not the case here...even worst possible Dem candidate will win the California Sen race.

And if that seat MUST be held by a WOC, why not London Breed and not somebody who’s almost 80 years old and would probably only serve a single term?

Here's a good example of a phenomenon I observed recently:

This forum has always been fascinated with the idea of London Breed winning higher office, but there doesn't seem to be any reason there except that she's a black woman and I guess not everyone here can name other black female politicians in California.

I think it's perfectly defensible to support Breed. Of course, she isn't going to appeal to the vast majority of the group of people supporting Barbara Lee (especially non-black voters supporting Barbara Lee), and pretending they are comparable candidate just because they are both black women is inappropriate (though it might be relevant in a state where the black vote overall mattered more as that is the one area where there would be some overlap in support).

"Nobody wants Breed" is not true simply because "progressives don't want Breed" is true.

In any case it's irrelevant as the establishment has already lined up behind Schiff so there is no lane for Breed.

You're missing the point, which is that nobody wants Breed because nobody anywhere is talking about her running for anything except another term as mayor. It's a concept that exists exclusively on this forum. If you want to make an alternate history concept about that, go for it, but it doesn't have any relation to observable reality, and that's what I at least would like to deal with. Barbara Lee is going to be a candidate for this seat in real life.

As many people have posted here repeatedly, "the establishment" has not lined up behind anyone. I think Lee is the likeliest candidate to get the support of Sacramento.

[Хahar 🤔]

Still time to implement IRV. A contested primary makes a dem lockout a slightly larger possibility. Seriously guys, change the law before you get burned. 

The current law was enacted by 2010's Proposition 14, a ballot initiative. Consequently it is not possible to amend the law except through another ballot initiative being approved by voters.

[Хahar 🤔]

I think this is why people right now think of Porter as the Bay candidate even though she isn't from the Bay Area and Lee is: Porter harmonizes better with the electorate.

Nobody here has yet said this, but it would be really stupid if they did. This only makes sense if you make up a fictional Bay Area that is a white homeland. It has no relationship to the actual Bay Area electorate.

In the actually existing Bay Area, these were the 2020 Democratic primary results:

Sanders 32.7%
Biden 26.9%
Warren 16.6%
Bloomberg 13.6%
Buttigieg 4.3%
Klobuchar 2.5%

Warren finishing with a sixth of the vote does not exactly suggest that real-life Bay Area voters flocked to her, as opposed to voters in the make-believe Bay Area that people like to imagine where the population is 80% white liberals. Maybe "wine moms" would be the predominant demographic there.

Don't expect Khanna to endorse anyone. Expect him to get in lol. His combination of consistently peculiar positions, attraction to the limelight, and silicon valley backers will make the possibility to tempting to resist - even though not many people actually like him.

This would make sense if not for anything that has happened since last November. Khanna has been directly quoted as saying that "my biggest factor will be looking at what Barbara Lee does." The obvious conclusion is that he plans to support Barbara Lee.

[Хahar 🤔]

Don't expect Khanna to endorse anyone. Expect him to get in lol. His combination of consistently peculiar positions, attraction to the limelight, and silicon valley backers will make the possibility to tempting to resist - even though not many people actually like him.

This would make sense if not for anything that's happened since last November. Khanna has been directly quoted as saying that "my biggest factor will be looking at what Barbara Lee does." The obvious conclusion is the he plans to support Barbara Lee.

Do you really trust Khanna? I don't believe anything he does until he does it. The dude is to paradoxically quixotic. I mean this is the guy with this internet meme that seemingly keeps appearing every time he opens his mouth:

My position is that Ro Khanna is a rational actor who will not contest this election because the statements that he has made would not be helpful if he were running for this office and would be very helpful if he wanted support for a different office in a future election. Your position is that Ro Khanna is an irrational actor who will contest this election because he's wacky. I'm comfortable with my position here.

[Хahar 🤔]

Interesting list of endorsements for Lee, a combination of black politicians of various ideological orientations (Lucy McBath and London Breed both endorsed Michael Bloomberg) and left-wing politicians of various ethnicities. For the most part the current big names aren't here, but there's Tony Thurmond and Mia Bonta (whose support is tantamount to her husband's) and Willie Brown. I think that provides an indication of who's getting the establishment support.

[Хahar 🤔]

What would a Lee vs Porter map look like?

Dems would probably split north-south, and Republicans would favour Lee.

No. Just no.

Over Schiff, I think this is possible because he is so toxic to a lot of Rs.

As I mentioned before, I think it's entirely reasonable to think that Lee could win among Republicans against either Schiff or Porter. In elections between two Democrats, California Republicans have not shown any particular inclination to vote based on ideology, and I think it's quite possible that Porter would scan as obnoxious to Republicans in a similar way as Schiff.

All of this is what makes this race interesting. Obviously the difference between Barbara Lee and Adam Schiff would be minuscule compared to the difference between, say, Ruben Gallego and Kari Lake, but in that race we pretty well know what the possibilities are. Here it feels like anything could happen.

[Хahar 🤔]

Does Lee win wine aunts from Riverside???

I know this is a joke, but this is a v Republican demo anyway.

Where would Barbara Lee do well in Southern California (if she does well in any SoCal region)?

She will do extremely well in L.A. City, and very well in Long Beach and some of the northern burbs like Pasadena and Burbank. San Diego is a gigantic question mark amidst all of this, and is being LA-ified as we speak.

Would Orange County (largely white, Hispanic, and Asian) go to Porter or Schiff?

I assume a Republican will win OC on the first ballot, given how the Dems are gonna split the vote and how OC isn't really democratic anyway. Could see Porter winning if their main candidate is some clown like Larry Elder though

I'd assume OC goes blue on the first ballot. The GOP might be even more split than the Dems. For instance, Dahle, who was the only Republican with significant support going into the 2022 primary, won 22.2% on the first ballot. Dahle is pretty prominent in CA GOP politics too, so if no one notable Republican enters the best Republican could be getting something like 7% statewide.

We can look to the past for a hint as to this question. In both 2016 and 2018, the top Republican got less than half the vote share of the top Democrat in Orange County in the senatorial primary election. (In 2016, only Kern and three northern counties had a Republican top the poll in the first round; in 2018, no county was won outright by a Republican, although Dianne Feinstein did tie for first place with a Republican in Modoc County.) The Democratic vote looks to be split three ways this time instead of two, but assuming that no Republican runs a real campaign (which would be my expectation), I find it very unlikely that a Republican will slip into first place in Orange County.

[Хahar 🤔]

Does anyone have a sense or prediction for which Republicans will run?

There has not been a serious Republican campaign for Senate in California since 2010. When I say "serious" I don't just mean that there hasn't been a candidate with any chance to win since then, although that's true; I mean that 2010 was the last time that a Republican whom anyone would have heard of at all decided to mount a campaign. Chuck DeVore, the assemblyman from Orange County who finished in third place in the 2010 Republican primary, was far more credible a candidate than any Republican to have run since.

I have not heard any indication that there will be anything but the same gadflies as usual. Maybe there'll be a guy who was in the state legislature fifteen years ago.

[Хahar 🤔]

The Veep's network appears to be for Lee here (Barankin being a longtime statewide Harris aide, incl. as her 2016-19 CoS & then outside presidential PAC operator thereafter)

It's not surprising that the Kamala Harris network would also be the Barbara Lee network, even if Harris herself hasn't made a formal endorsement. It's another point for the notion that the real establishment candidate in this race is Barbara Lee, not Adam Schiff.

Meanwhile, hot off Karen Bass's endorsement of Lee, the Schiff campaign has decided to remember some guys:

https://twitter.com/Elex_Michaelson/status/1631152484516511744

The most exciting name on this list to me is Aaron Peskin, who is more or less a Republican caricature of a San Francisco politician. He would be by far the most malign influence on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors if not for Dean Preston. Some other names that veteran California observers might know include Darrell Steinberg (former state senate president pro tem and current Sacramento mayor), John Chiang (holder of multiple statewide elected offices, finished fifth in the 2018 gubernatorial primary), and Janice Hahn (former congresswoman, current Los Angeles County supervisor, brother of the former Los Angeles mayor).

I don't think that any of these names move the needle in any appreciable way, although the Peskin endorsement is really funny. What remains striking is the lack of support from Hispanic politicians with any sort of profile. Any candidate who can convincingly win the Southern California Mexican vote will certainly get through to the general election, and at the moment there's no indication if anyone can do it.

[Хahar 🤔]

Schiff has the advantage now

No, actually. Assuming he makes it to the general, he has no base. Republicans won't vote for him and Porter and Lee already have the left of center vote locked up.

Schiff is the candidate of wealthy establishment liberals. He’d crush Lee in SoCal as she’s too economically left for a lot of those voters, and so is Porter in Silicon Valley.

In keeping with what I've said in this thread in the past, it's absolutely inscrutable what "establishment" means here. People should stop using "establishment" to mean "economically right-wing" and just say that. Those terms might be synonymous in New York but they're very much not here.

With regard to any actual establishment, at most what you can say is that Schiff is one of two candidates to have gotten significant support from elected officials. As has been brought up repeatedly in this thread, there has been absolutely no indication that the California Democratic Party establishment supports Schiff over Lee. It's annoying to have to keep repeating this.

As for the rest of the post, it's helpful to remember that Bernie Sanders won 47 out of 53 congressional districts in the state of California in the 2020 primary. Although he won nearly everywhere, Sanders's best districts were in the Los Angeles area, where he received at least 49% of the vote in five different districts. There is just no evidence that an "economically left" candidate would get "crushed" by the Democratic primary electorate in California.

If you're referring to the California electorate in a general election, I'll quote what I've already said:

[Feinstein] being "more conservative" has nothing to do with the way that California Republicans vote in elections between two Democrats. There have been two senatorial elections in California between two Democrats, and in both cases Republican areas overwhelmingly voted for the Democrat running the more left-wing campaign. As I've mentioned on this thread previously, Schiff and Porter each could face serious difficulty attracting Republican votes, but that is because they are both cable news personalities. Ideology is not relevant here.

[Хahar 🤔]

Khanna looks like he'll announce he's running today.

I wish people would pay attention to the posts I make in this thread, all of which have been correct!

Don't expect Khanna to endorse anyone. Expect him to get in lol. His combination of consistently peculiar positions, attraction to the limelight, and silicon valley backers will make the possibility to tempting to resist - even though not many people actually like him.

This would make sense if not for anything that's happened since last November. Khanna has been directly quoted as saying that "my biggest factor will be looking at what Barbara Lee does." The obvious conclusion is the he plans to support Barbara Lee.

Do you really trust Khanna? I don't believe anything he does until he does it. The dude is to paradoxically quixotic. I mean this is the guy with this internet meme that seemingly keeps appearing every time he opens his mouth:

My position is that Ro Khanna is a rational actor who will not contest this election because the statements that he has made would not be helpful if he were running for this office and would be very helpful if he wanted support for a different office in a future election. Your position is that Ro Khanna is an irrational actor who will contest this election because he's wacky. I'm comfortable with my position here.

[Хahar 🤔]

It's very weird because there are a lot of examples of aging senators (in seats with competitive races coming up) who simply get replaced by some random lawyer, campaign officer or state party official who the Governor appoints.

This is not Gavin Newsom's style. All of the appointments that he has made (and there have been many) were of people who subsequently ran for reelection and won. He looks to place his people in positions for which they will then be indebted to him.

Newsom's past declaration that he would appoint a black woman here is an intriguing factor here. When he said this, people on this forum took that to mean London Breed because they were unaware that there are multiple black women who live in California. Maybe they know now. My thought at the time was that appointing Barbara Lee would make a lot of sense, and it still does, but now there's the complication of the fact that the primary campaign has already started. Lee would be very difficult to beat if she were the incumbent, and everyone knows it, and I think that there'll be a lot of people who would like Newsom to appoint someone else for that reason.

If the circumstances were different, I think that Shirley Weber would make a lot of sense, not least because it would enable Newsom to fill yet another statewide elective office by appointment. But Weber was just elected to a four-year term as secretary of state and it's unclear that she'd give that up for a year and a half in the Senate.