Last week Republican Senator Abel Maldonado, SD-15 (Central Coast) broke with his party to vote for the budget. Maldonado has a reputation as a moderate Republican, and he needs it – SD-15, which stretches along some of the most beautiful coastline in the world from Santa Maria to San Jose, has a majority Democratic registration (it’s close, 39.6% D to 37.3% R). Residents here in SD-15 gave 52% of their votes to John Kerry in 2004 and 53% to Boxer. That year, Abel Maldonado was elected to the State Senate with 52% of the vote – the Democratic candidate got 42%, as a Green pulled nearly 7% of the votes cast.
These numbers should all suggest that in a State Senate where we are only 2 votes away from the all-important 2/3 mark, allowing us to avoid crippling budget fights like the one we have now, we should be planning to fight and fight hard to win SD-15 in 2008. It’s a no-brainer, right?
Not so, according to Josiah Greene of the CA Majority Report, who indicates Maldonado will be – and should be – left alone next year. Why I think this is a bad idea, over the flip…
The broader context is absolutely important here. Many of us on Calitics came to blogging from national politics sites like Daily Kos and MyDD. Between 2003 and 2006 we fought hard against the Democratic establishment’s timid campaign strategy of picking just a few districts to focus on in pursuit of a narrow majority. Building on Howard Dean’s call for a 50 state strategy, Democrats at the grassroots, netroots, and more and more from inside the establishment came to realize that if Republicans were to ever be beaten, we had to be competitive in every single state.
This 50 state strategy initially evoked nothing but derision from the DC crowd. Paul Begala memorably denounced it as “hiring people to wander around Utah and Mississippi picking their nose,” a reflection of the unwillingness of many old-school consultants to think boldly and intelligently.
In 2006, as the DCCC seemed intent on repeating its narrow strategy that had failed them in the past, a whole host of campaigns sprouted up in districts across the country – including in California’s Central Valley, where “serious” establishment observers gave Jerry McNerney little chance of unseating the seemingly invincible Richard Pombo.
But it was precisely this shotgun, grassroots approach to the 2006 campaign that returned Democrats to control of Congress. The 30+ seat swing in the House came from all kinds of districts, where moderate and conservative Republicans were beaten in districts where nobody had given Democrats a chance. Even the paragon of moderate Republicanism, Chris Shays, nearly lost his seat.
Surely a national wave of revulsion at Republicans helped make this happen – but to win, you have to show up. Had Dems written off districts like CA-11 we wouldn’t have that majority we now enjoy.
And it also took the realization that no moderate Republican was better than an actual Democrat. Speaker Nancy Pelosi still has her hands full with Blue Dog Democrats, who behave like Republicans – but it’s a far sight better than having a Republican majority. And you can be sure Democrats will not be shy about going after Republicans to help build larger Congressional majorities in 2008.
It would seem sensible, then, that a similar logic should be applied here in California. Abel Maldonado’s district is ripe for the plucking. And despite the CW, Maldonado isn’t that moderate – the Capitol Weekly scorecard rates him at only a 20 (0 is conservative, 100 is progressive) – which is an even lower rating than Tom McClintock! (For the record, Jeff Denham rated only a 5.) On AB 32 – one of the most important pieces of legislation passed by the California legislature in a long time – Maldonado voted NO. How exactly is this someone we want to leave in office?
Greene argues that
Maldonado…is winning kudos across his Senate district for the move….[his] vote will make him palatable to independent voters and Democrats for a future statewide run. Education and labor have elephant-like memories and would be hard-pressed to find reasons to throw millions of dollars in a campaign against Maldonado, given his moderate leanings reflected in the budget vote.
This is the exact kind of thinking that was blown out of the water in 2006 – that we’ve been spending the better part of a decade fighting against. Maldonado is NOT a moderate, and one vote on the budget is by no means enough to suggest we should leave him alone.
Greene may have a point about education and labor, it’s unclear how much they plan to spend on SD-15 (and until the term limits extension initiative is decided on, we’re not going to know who the candidate is). Which brings us to another core element of the new Democratic movement we’ve been building – the need for coordination.
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong put this well in their 2006 book Crashing the Gate, as they documented how the various constituencies of the Democratic Party had too often refused to coordinate their strategies, and placed their trust in moderate Republicans who repeatedly sold them out instead of in Democrats who were FAR more reliable allies. They contrasted that with the experience of Colorado in 2004, where these progressive groups – from environmentalists to labor unions to educators – worked together to put Democrats in charge of that state’s once notoriously right-wing legislature.
We Californians are familiar with a similar success story – in 2005 a progressive alliance brought down a popular governor’s special election agenda. It required a lot of effort – but then, all political victories do.
It’s time we adopted such a strategy for 2008. Our goal MUST be 2/3 majorities in both houses, and we’re only two votes away in the Senate. SD-15 is a district full of Democrats, who don’t want to be betrayed by Sacramento insiders who haven’t yet caught up with the times. We want them to catch up, though – we need their help.
We have our own version of the 50 state strategy – a 58 county strategy. We have a growing netroots, and a broad and deep progressive activist structure that has delivered victories for us in the past. We have momentum on our side, and now a clear need to put more Democrats in office. Now is NOT the time to be letting any Republicans off the hook.
It may not be politic at this time for people affiliated with the Speaker’s office to be calling for the ouster of the one Republican Senator who has backed us up so far. I get that. But nor does that mean we give him a pass next year. Abel Maldonado is a smart man, he knows that his district is a Democratic district and that we’re going to come hard after him in 2008. We welcome his support on this budget – but we who live in his district are going to still work as hard as ever to kick him out of office in 2008 and replace him with an actual Democrat, one we won’t have to beg to vote the right way on a budget, one who won’t vote against global warming action, one who will rate far better than a mere 20 on the scorecard.