( – promoted by SFBrianCL)

In CA-11, Jerry McNerney took the Democratic nomination.  He will face “Paid-for” Pombo in the general election.  We’ve been following the CA-11 race here at Calitics for a long time, more so recently due to the recent comments of Filson.  I posted a diary both at Calitics and at dKos about the bullshit surrounding the triangulation theories playing out in this race.  I’d like to go through this a little and make the proposition that Jerry McNerney is our Tester, a progressive leader that is simultaneously electable and responsive to his Democratic base.  For more on Tester, check out dKos.

So, a brief background on the race would probably be helpful here.  Jerry McNerney ran a campaign that got a late start in 2004.  He struggled to build a campaign structure for that race, going so far as to mortgage his house in order to run a decent campaign.  In the end, he garnered about 39% of the vote, a respectable figure against a well-funded incumbent.  Of course, at that point Richard Pombo was merely an unremarkable Congressman with a penchant for hyperbole, or outright lying, depending on how you see fit to describe it.  The 11th district isn’t your typical Bay Area district, it has its soul in San Joaquin county.  It previously had more Democrats, but the Democratic heart of Stockton was shifted from what is now the 11th to what is now the 18th.  This was due to the Gary Condit scandal.  Legislative Democrats wanted Condit to retire so that the Democrats could retain his seat in the 18th District, now held by Blue Dog Valleycrat Dennis Cardoza.  Thus, the 11th now has a substantial Republican registration advantage.

There’s lots more on the flip…

Now, Jerry McNerney didn’t give up after 2004.  He knew that Richard Pombo was not the right man to be representing the 11th.  And then came the candidacy of Pete McCloskey, a “moderate” Republican.  (Sidenote: It’s probably just as well McCloskey didn’t win.  The man has had some problems with attacking the Jewish community and a touch of Holocaust denial, specifically saying, “I listened to speeches about the courage of men who have spoken out against the commonly accepted concept of what occurred during the Second World War in the so-called Holocaust.” Yikes!  That’s more than a bit scary.) Whatever McCloskey did or did not say, one thing is clear: he riled up the moderate Republicans who had grown weary of Pombo.  The GOP Ex-Congressman who challenged Pombo in this year’s primary, accused Pombo of a litany of wrongs, including:

Why Retire Pombo?
•  Pombo has been named by non-partisan watchdog groups as:

  •  “One of the 13 most corrupt members of Congress”-COMMITTEE FOR RESPONSIBILITY AND ETHICS IN WASHINGTON (CREW)

  •  “One of the first six inductees to the Congressional Hall of Shame” – PUBLIC CITIZEN

•  Richard Pombo is among the top recipients of money from admitted felon and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates.  (Source: Time)
•  Pombo owes his chairmanship of the House Resources Committee to indicted former majority leader Tom DeLay.  Pombo, who votes in lockstep with DeLay 92% of the time, actively tried to change House Ethics Rules to protect DeLay (House Resolution 5) and donated thousands of dollars to the DeLay legal defense fund.
•  Pombo used his official powers to protect a large donor, Charles Hurwitz, thwarting a Federal investigation in what federal regulators called, “a seamy abuse of the legislative process.” (Source: LA Times 1/8/06) (PeteMcCloskey.com)

These allegations and plenty more were made by a Republican.  It lends credibility that may not have existed if it were only coming from the Democratic candidates.  The Wall Street Journal picked up on the story too:

In one of the year’s most improbable races, the 78-year-old former congressman has jumped back into politics in a long-shot bid to oust House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo here in Tuesday’s Republican primary. Few give Mr. McCloskey much chance of success as he tours the San Joaquin Valley in his red, white and blue van….”The Republican leadership in the House has abandoned ethics, they’ve abandoned the concept of balanced budgets, they’ve abandoned the concept of limited government,” Mr. McCloskey tells his conservative host, Bill Mick. House leaders are “dead wrong” in resisting the recent Justice Department criminal search of one lawmaker’s office, and Congress should begin to pull troops out of Iraq as proposed by his fellow Marine, Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.).
***
Environmentalists, angered by Mr. Pombo’s direction of the Resources Committee, are pouring money into efforts to help the McCloskey campaign, and Democrats hope the challenge will open the door for them against Mr. Pombo in the November election. (WSJ 6/1/06)

And open the door it has.  In a recent Defenders of Wildlife poll, both Democrats were leading Congressman Pombo.  And even Rep. McCloskey has said that he would prefer the Democrat over Pombo.  So, this brings us all back to who do we want to take on Congressman Pombo.  Jerry McNerney worked hard for a long time to restore dignity to the 11th District.  However, once the DCCC discovered that Pombo was vulnerable they brought their own man in:

Democrats are having their own identity crisis in the 11th District. Jerry McNerney, who lost to Mr. Pombo in 2004, still enjoys the support of liberal activists.
But House Democrats want a more moderate face: Steve Filson, a Navy veteran and United Airlines pilot who situated his campaign headquarters in the San Joaquin Valley as a direct challenge to Mr. Pombo’s base.
A Republican-turned-Democrat, Mr. Filson says his politics were changed by United’s labor struggles, and warns that just running against Mr. Pombo isn’t enough. “We have to concentrate on what I offer, too — in addition to what Pombo’s done,” he says. (WSJ 6/1/06)

And Filson continued to run away from progressives where McNerney did not.  McNerney proudly states progressive friendly positions on health care, reproductive freedom, environmental issues (he’s got a background in wind energy) and supports Rep. Murtha’s position on Iraq.  Filson did not have much different stances on the issues, with the exception of some lukewarm support for a more Clinton-esque Iraq strategy.  However, he attempted to go fuzzy moderate, and decided the best way to do that was to bash the left and the grass and netroots.

“We need members of congress… who do not get endorsements from places in Marin County and Sonoma, from extreme and progressive sections of the party.”(Audio file)

Now, that just won’t do, especially when you’re in a tight primary campaign.  That’s essentially when the wheels fell off of Filson’s campaign, and Jerry started gaining strength.  And no amount of Ellen Tauscher’s meddling could make Filson the shoo-in that he thought he was supposed to be.  Like Tester, the party faithful came out to support a proud, principled man who wasn’t afraid of his own beliefs.  That will resonate in the California 11th against Pombo like it will in the Montana Senate Race against Burns.

( – promoted by SFBrianCL)

Francine Busby took the disappointing loss.  However, I think we have no reason to hang our heads in shame.  CA-50 was a seat that was gerrymandered to give the GOP an advantage.  They held a 15% registration advantage, and more importantly outspent us 2 to 1.  The fact is that the NRCC was scared, very scared.  But they won’t be able to pour that kind of money into every seat.  There was low turnout caused by voters who were just angry at their government.  That will show up in the Dem column come November.  And while we may be sick of moral victories, this definitely counts as one.  We are on the right track.  From Chris Bowers at mydd.com:

In 2004, Busby lost the CA-50 by 22.0%. Today, it looks like she will lose by around 4.5%. And that was with the NRCC spending $4.5M on the race. If Republicans want to spin losing 18 points after spending $4.5M of committee money as a good thing, go for it. After all, spin is basically why they spent so much money on this race. By blowing their wad in a solidly Republican district, they wanted to change the media narrative on the election in their favor. It will probably work, given how subservient and generally inaccurate the media tends to be when it comes to Republicans and elections. In reality, for a Republican candidate to pull 49.5% of the vote in a district with 44.5% Republican registration is shocking. Given those numbers, Bilbray probably managed all of 20% of the vote among independents.

No matter what the media says, no Democrat should be mistaken about this result. First, this is a huge, seismic shift in our favor that bodes extremely well for November. If we receive an 18% shift nationwide, we will win the House easily. If Republican candidates are pulling only 20% of the independent vote, the Indycrat realignment is still on.(MyDD 6/7/06)

We did well, but we still have room for improvement.  In future elections, a more refined message will bring us the additional seats that we need.  I think we saw through the Montana Senate Primary (see David Sirota’s opinion on that) that we can have a populist message and succeed.  I look forward to the Congressional midterms; you can’t help but be optimistic.

Well, the polls have closed.The Secretary of State’s Results page is here.  We should start getting some absentee results soon after the polls close at 8pm tonight.

Christine Pelosi is liveblogging from Busby HQ.

10:50: Some interesting early results: Leland Yee and Fiona Ma taking their respective races with fairly large leads.  It looks like Lou Papan might have acted as something of a spoiler for Nevin: or Leland yee’s name recognition is higher.  I think same thing with Fiona Ma: people are used to voting for her in the district.

On the big No leads on the two statewide props (81 and 82): I think there’s a lot of that resulting from the typical conservative skew of absentee votes.  Look for that to narrow.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think 82 can come back, but it will be closer.  81 actually has a chance of passing too.

It looks like Lt. Gov might be going the distance.  If those Alameda votes take all night like expected, we may not know the winner until tomorrow morning.

I stopped by a precinct in my neighborhood.  Strangely it’s the closest one to me, but not my precinct.  But I digress.  I took a look at the roll, and, if I had to guess, about 10% of the people on the rolls had voted by that point (about 11:50).  Keep in mind that this is pretty much the heart of SF’s Castro district, so it likely will skew towards Angelides.  The poll workers said that it’s been slow, but there has been at least one person voting almost all day.  I’ll try to check on a different precinct this afternoon.

That being said, Westly and Angelides were both in the neighborhood today.  The picture is a shot of the Westly people pulling out of town right as a I got there.  Oh well.  He appeared mid-morning at Market and Castro.  Angelides made two stops at the two Mission area BART stops.

On that note, the SF Chron just published an article about low Bay Area turnout:

“I suppose some people call it voter fatigue, and maybe they’re right. There do seem to have been a lot of elections lately,” said Peter Berkowitz, who this morning bicycled to Lafayette Elementary School, where he had the whole place to himself to cast his ballot, using it to support gubernatorial candidate Steve Westly.
***
At the Joe DiMaggio North Beach playground polling station in San Francisco, electioneers John Miller and Susan Sandler were very busy — playing Sudoku, a Japanese numbers game.

From 10 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., just one voter came through, but three puzzles were completed.

“It sure is slow, but this is very interesting,” said Sandler, pointing at the sheet of paper displaying her puzzle. (SF Chron 6/6/06)

Well, at least they got some Soduko in!

The CoCo Times thinks low turnout favors Angelides:

Such a scenario could play to the strengths of Angelides, the state treasurer from Sacramento. Angelides has the backing of the state Democratic Party and countless party-affiliated interest groups — including labor and teachers’ groups — who are expected to help turn out voters with their own get-out-the-vote machinery.

“The conventional wisdom is that not only does Angelides have a stronger ground operation, but because he was endorsed by the party, he’ll get the activists,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, political analyst at the University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning and Development. “And it’s the activists who turn out in low-turnout elections.”

***
Polls show Westly and Angelides in a virtual dead heat, but political observers have said Westly needs to bring in moderate primary voters to win, a less likely scenario with low turnout.(CoCo Times 6/6/06)

It makes sense.  I guess the one caveat I would throw in there is that the high number of absentees will likely favor Westly.  Probably.  But you know with a 25% undecided figure, it’s hard to predict anything.

I’m going through and consolidating election night parties around the state.  If you have any information about other events, post a comment and i’ll try to include it in the main post. I posted a list of a lot more parties on the flip. And for those of you staying at home, Frank of the California Progreess Report (http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/) will be on KPIX-5 digital channel covering the election returns.

Lt. Governor

Liz Figueroa (D)
8 p.m., Vallejo’s Mexican Restaurant
1100 O St., Sacramento
Contact: Alex Reese 510 816 1938

John Garamendi (D)
8 p.m., Sheraton Grand Sacramento,
Tofanelli Room
1230 J St., Sacramento
Contact: Sarah Leonard 515 778 6298.

Jackie Speier (D)
8 p.m., Hotel Vitale
8 Mission St., San Francisco
Contact: Nathan Ballard
415 235 6283

AG

Jerry Brown (D)
6 p.m., Oakland Police Officers Assn.
HQ
555 5th St., Oakland
Contact: Ace Smith 415 516 8373

Rocky Delgadillo (D)
7 p.m., Westin Bonaventure
San Diego Ballroom
404 South Figueroa St., Los Angeles
Contact: Jennifer Wonnacott
916 233 5548

And if you are in SF, The SF Bay Guardian has a good list here

I have a huge list of other parties. If you want to know where a candidate will be this evening, post it in the comments, and I’ll reply.

Dan Walters writes a completely factual article in the SacBee today about the decline in female legislators for the next term:

All of that notwithstanding, the 1991 redistricting deal that aced at least three women out of Senate seats could have a telling effect this year. The California Elected Women’s Association has calculated that with six of the Senate’s 12 women being forced out of the Legislature by term limits and 13 women running in primaries for the 20 Senate seats up this year, a best-case scenario is that the ranks of female senators will remain unchanged while at worst, the 12 female-held seats could drop to seven.

There are 25 women in the 80-member Assembly, and 11 are being forced out by term limits. There are 78 women running for the Assembly in the primary, 31 percent of the 250 Assembly candidates, and the Elected Women’s Association calculates that its optimum outcome would be a gain of four women, two Democrats and two Republicans, while the downside potential ranges to a loss of four female-held seats. (SacBee 6/6/06)

It is a cause for concern. Female legislators bring a different set of skills and better represent the issues of women.  That isn’t to say that  men can’t very competently represent those issues, but having women in the legislature in a substantial number brings a different perspective.  Of course, in a representative democracy determined by geographical districts, it’s hard to get that good balance.  It is often determined by sheer ambition of the politicians.  A parlimentary slate has advantages of offering a slate of officials that suit each other’s strengths.  That is not possible with our government.  However, it would be a shame if we truly reverse course on the progress that we have made in the past.  A more fair balance benefits the entire state, not just women.