Snoozer Tuesday: The Real Action Is Down Ballot
Plus: The House candidates destined to cause problems.
Super Tuesday is here, and voters across the country are at the polls to resolve more than a dozen state primaries. Many of them are casting ballots for their party’s presidential nomination. Will Joe Biden and Donald Trump come out on top in their respective contests? Only time will tell. Just kidding! They’ve got it in the bag, obviously.
But down the ballot, far more interesting races are taking place, including the one for the Senate seat in California occupied for decades by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. California races are magnets for weirdos and celebrities. In this case, the only odd candidate is Republican Steve Garvey, a former Los Angeles Dodger who has a spotted electoral history you won’t find on Ballotpedia: He’s repeatedly failed to receive sufficient votes to be named to the Baseball Hall of Fame. If Garvey turns his fortunes around to secure a top-two finish, he will most likely face off this fall against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.
A quick refresher: California has a jungle primary system, which means that the top two finishers will be the only two options on the ballot in November, regardless of which party they come from. When a Republican snags a top-two position in a California primary, it typically means that the race is practically over because the state’s overwhelmingly liberal population will pick the Democrat. For example, in 2022, Alex Padilla walloped his low-profile Republican opponent Mark Meuser by millions of votes. (Dem-vs-Dem contests can be similarly lopsided, of course: Padilla’s predecessor, Kamala Harris, won the seat in 2016 with a large margin over then-Rep. Loretta Sanchez, whom she’d already beaten once that year in the Democratic primary.)
You may have seen some of the misleading headlines about Garvey being in a “statistical tie” with Schiff going into today’s race. For those unfamiliar with the California primary system, this could give the impression that Garvey and Schiff are headed for a cut-and-thrust. But the Berkeley poll that shows Garvey’s 27 percent to Schiff’s 25 also includes two other Democrats, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, whose combined 27 percent would likely all go to the Democratic nominee. Still other polls indicate that Porter could still eke out a second place finish behind Schiff, which would put the seat back in the Democrats’ column before the general election.
If you speak to California Republicans, it’s clear they strongly dislike Schiff. It’s understandable: He rose to prominence as the lead manager for Donald Trump’s first impeachment, which charged the then-president with trying to withhold aid to Ukraine unless they helped his re-election effort. And because Trump hates Schiff, all Republicans are required to hate him, too.
But voting for Garvey—a political rando with no chance of winning a general election—is tantamount to voting for Schiff, who would almost certainly be elected in November. What Garvey gets out of his quixotic bid is the ability to put “former Republican nominee for Senate” on his resume and the opportunity to separate a bunch of Republican donors from their hard-earned money. What Schiff gains, meanwhile, is a smooth and mostly headache-free path to victory. Schiff knows this too, which is why his campaign has deliberately tried to elevate Garvey over his Democratic rivals throughout the primary season. Schiff’s campaign and his allies have shelled out millions of dollars to boost Garvey’s bid and box out the other Democrats. That’s politics.
Schiff has been able to do this by courting the most sought-after allies in the state. The California Democratic Party establishment has deep coffers. With celebrities down south and tech moguls up north, there are plenty of characters who can provide a financial windfall to the state’s candidates. An example: Actor Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) sent out fundraising emails on Schiff’s behalf. The Trump-battling representative has accepted donations from comedy director Judd Apatow and EGOT winner Barbra Streisand, among others.
In addition to courting California’s best-known creatives, Schiff has also received the backing of top politicians in the Golden State, Nancy Pelosi chief among them. He enjoys the endorsement of 80 percent of the Democratic congressional delegation from California.
Porter hasn’t managed to draw away many of Schiff’s backers, and neither has the most left-wing candidate, Barbara Lee. While either would be able to mount a more meaningful challenge to Schiff in a general election than the Republican Garvey, the uncelebrated baseballer is on track to go with Schiff into the two-person arena this fall after polls close this evening.
With a Schiff win, California will have gone from being the first state with two concurrently serving women senators—their joint tenure lasted almost three decades from 1993 to 2021—to being just another state sending two dudes to the upper chamber. It will also tip the balance of power away from Northern Californians like Feinstein, Boxer, and Harris and toward senators with SoCal roots1. Republicans will also have to deal with one of Trump’s great antagonists attaining an elevated position beyond the reach of partisan retaliation, which neutralized him in the House this past year.
Tired of winning
A handful of other Super Tuesday races could provide indications of how things are going for down-ballot Republicans heading into the fall. Here are three that stick out.
In North Carolina, Bo Hines, who lost a swing district seat in 2022 after being endorsed by Trump, is running again. Today, he’s facing a tougher path to the nomination, as Republican challengers include former Rep. Mark Walker and health insurance industry lobbyist-turned-rancher cosplayer Addison McDowell, the latter of whom received Trump’s endorsement this time around.
Also in North Carolina, Republicans have had trouble winning in the 1st district. Perhaps that’s because they’ve continued nominating the same candidate the past two cycles and are poised to do it again. Sandy Smith was the nominee in 2020 and again in 2022; she lost both general elections. She is running again against fellow GOP challenger Laurie Buckhout. Smith isn’t endorsed by Trump, but you’d be forgiven for thinking she is: The former president’s name appears eight times on her campaign’s endorsements page, and her homepage greets visitors with a photo of her posing with Trump, both giving the camera a stiff thumbs-up. Her pinned tweet is her own endorsement of Trump for president. Smith’s perennial electoral troubles have included accusations of domestic violence. She is alleged to have attacked her daughter, threatened an ex-husband with a frying pan, and driven her car at him in a fit of rage.
In Texas, Dinesh D’Souza’s son-in-law is running to replace longtime Rep. Michael Burgess in an open primary. In addition to being legally related to the convicted criminal and conspiracy theory–boosting filmmaker, Brandon Gill, age 29, is also backed by Trump. The most prominent candidate opposing Gill is Southlake Mayor John Huffman, but the large field includes Scott Armey, the son of former Rep. Dick Armey, and Luisa Del Rosal, a former chief of staff to Rep. Tony Gonzalez.
These outlandish campaigns typify Republican electoral behavior in recent years, with extreme, morally complicated, or downright weird candidates winning primaries but losing general elections that would be easy pickups for more traditional Republican candidates. Maybe that’s what they want, though. Actual governing, it turns out, can be a bit of a drag.
Supreme control, alt, delete
The Supreme Court’s 9–0 decision to keep Trump on the ballot in Colorado effectively ended the effort to use the Fourteenth Amendment to preclude him from being a candidate. Careful readers of the decision found that the decision might be a bit—or eight bits—more complicated than it first appeared.
According to Slate’s Mark Stern:
The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to keep Donald Trump on Colorado’s ballot was styled as a unanimous one without any dissents. But the metadata tells a different story. On the page, a separate opinion by the liberal justices is styled as a concurrence in the judgment, authored jointly by the trio. In the metadata of the link to the opinion posted by the court, however, this opinion is styled as an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, authored not by all three justices but by Sonia Sotomayor alone. Even a techphobic reader can discern this incongruity through careful copying and pasting, piercing the facade of unanimity that the conservative justices sought to present.
What happened? Most obviously, the Supreme Court rushed out this opinion and forgot to check the metadata. The court, after all, scheduled the opinion’s release only one day earlier, on Sunday afternoon, evidently to hand it down before Tuesday’s Colorado primary. Moreover, the justices did not take the bench to announce the opinion, as they usually do—probably because they had not all planned to be in D.C.—further proving that it was a last-minute release. The deeper question remains, of course: Why was an opinion originally authored by a lone justice as a partial dissent transformed into a concurrence authored by all three liberals together?
All this really means is that both senators are Dodgers instead of Giants fans, which is arguably the worst thing to come from this race.
“Supreme control, alt, delete” is the most perfect heading I’ve seen in ages.
The more down-ballot fiascoes the Rs suffer in the primaries, the greater the chance of a blue wave sweeping over all three elective parts of the government in the general. And since that would probably not occur, or at least not be so dramatic, if TFG were not supporting the looniest of those singing his tune, the analogy to Jonestown becomes stronger. TFG gives them the Koolaid they crave and winds up with a form of mass suicide.