Is this the fight we want or the fight we need?

by Brian Leubitz

By this point, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard about Kevin de León’s entry into the Senate race next year. There have been rumblings for a while, and it seemed that he was going to enter the race whether DiFi was retiring or not. He has his shiny new website all ready to go, while she has, um, a spam site at what would be the most logical website, and a site from 2012 that is apparently selling space for google ads. She may want to have somebody look into that.

There are any number of ways to think about this race, and much of it comes from where you stand. Sen Feinstein was never the progressive California Senator, that was Sen. Boxer and now Sen. Harris. She has always been a champion for gun safety legislation, and a leader as chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee. But she has never been a progressive firebrand. According to 538’s “Trump Score”, she is in the middle of the Democratic pack. But, that’s also 12 points more favorable to Trump than would be expected from a California senator.

On the flip side, there will be no end of Democrats announcing that running against an incumbent will bring ruin and the wasting of resources that could be spent in other states defeating actual Republicans. We will have to see where KdL’s money comes from once we see a report, but given the drama surrounding his candidacy, one would suspect that you won’t see many of the usual suspects on the contribution lists.

Now, Kevin de León has a lot of work in front of him convincing Californians that he will be a more representative (probably not so hard) and more effective (probably much harder) Senator that Sen. Feinstein. But the remaining question is whether the election will be decided in the first election or the second. As of yet, there are no serious Republicans in the race. But, if there are only two Democrats, and only one Republican, might we see another Dem-on-Dem general? Add in a third Democrat (Steyer?) that becomes a lot less likely. Add in a second Republican, and it becomes a lot more likely. Of course, this is one of the problems of the top-2 system. It leaves a lot up to gamesmanship and the sheer number of candidates. (For example, had Top-2 applied in the 2010 AG race, we would have missed a Rep on Rep race by a few thousand votes.)

At any rate, this race will certainly be interesting. How defining it is for the California (and national) Democratic Party is still up in the air.