Attention Senator Florez: if concerns about your upcoming election for Lieutenant Governor are in any way influencing your statement that you don’t see the Senate you’re in charge of confirming Schwarzenegger’s appointment of Abel Maldonado to that same seat, I just want to say:

Don’t worry, be happy!

See, I can understand that you might be concerned that facing someone who could now put his title as “appointed incumbent” might make a general election campaign more difficult, but the likelihood is that you wouldn’t be facing him anyway.  You might, after all, recall the story about Maldonado’s last run for statewide office, as reported by Robert Cruickshank.  If you don’t, I’ll just reprint it in full.

State Sen. Abel Maldonado, the deciding vote in the big state budget morass, came to see me last week with a very interesting story about his fellow Republicans.

I was telling him what a good name he has, because no one can figure out if it is Spanish, Italian or Portuguese.

He proceeded to tell me that when he was running for state controller in 2006, he commissioned a poll to gauge the feelings of Republican voters in Orange County.

The poll came back showing him losing to the Democrat by almost 2-1.

“This is impossible,” Maldonado said. “Orange County is loaded with Republicans.”

They did the poll again and the results were the same – the Democrat won.

So Maldonado ran a little test. He had the pollster go back and give voters the same information as before – his age, that he’s a rancher and the like – but this time, he said, tell them the candidate’s name is Smith.

The result: Smith came out ahead.

So he ran another poll, a Republican named Garcia vs. a Democrat named Smith.

Smith won again, even among Republicans.

At that point, Maldonado said, “We’re not spending another nickel – there ain’t no way that anyone with a Spanish name is going to win anything in a Republican primary in this state.”

He was right, in his case at least – he lost the primary to Tony Strickland.

Keep in mind, of course, that this was in 2006–a few years before the inmates took over the asylum that is the Republican Party.  And keep in mind, I’m not just talking about the racial aspect.  I’m also specifically referring to the difficulty that moderate Republicans of any ethnicity will have in winning a primary against a more conservative opponent, especially in light of the fact that RNC is in fact on the verge of imposing a purity test that would be pretty hard for Maldonado to meet, compared to a potential primary opponent.

Bottom line: Dean Florez and the rest of the Democrats in the Senate should be licking their chops in anticipation of getting a chance at this seat.