Candidate	Support
Dem Primary
Brown	47 (26)
Newsom	27 (16)
Undecided	26 (58)
With DiFi
Feinstein	40 (38)
Brown	27 (16)
Newsom	16 (10)
Undecided	17 (36)
Republican Primary
Whitman	22 (21)
Campbell	20 (18)
Poizner	9 (7)
Undecided	49 (54)

The newest Field Poll is out and it shows one consistent thing: Jerry Brown’s quest for a third term is looking pretty good, with just over 12 months to go to the November 2010 election:

October 2009 (March 2009) —–>

And Field decided to, just for the hell of it, throw DiFi in and see how it affected the Dem primary race: —–>

Whereas Brown has significantly improved his position since March, there has been comparatively little change on the GOP side in what’s still a wide-open race:

And the November 2010 matchups:

Republican/Democrat	Whitman	Poizner	Campbell
Data Format: Rep-Dem-Undecided
Brown	29-50-21	25-50-25	27-48-25
Newsom	31-40-29	30-39-31	33-38-29

Let’s look more deeply at these numbers. There are big divides regionally, generationally, and along gender lines between support for Brown and Newsom. Southern California is breaking 50-19 for Brown, but NorCal shows a much closer race, 43-38. Newsom not only has to raise his profile in SoCal, but has to deal with a 10 point unfavorable margin (30-40).

The generational divide is also pretty stark. Those of us with no memories of Governor Brown, voters age 18-39, back Newsom 41-32. But for those age groups that do remember Governor Brown (even if they were young), Brown leads by 30 points among voters 40-64, and a massive 45 points among voters over 65.

The gender gap is also stark – men support Brown 56-22, compared to 40-31 among women.

So what all does this mean for the race? Newsom hasn’t had a good 2009. He has slipped further behind Brown, and has been unable to turn his numbers around in SoCal. He hasn’t been able to overturn his unfavorables, and as I wrote earlier his inability to offer a clear vision to Californians has meant that the older generations are sticking to their (flawed, in my view) belief that Brown is progressive enough to support for a third term.

In the general election matchups, it’s all about the decline-to-states. Newsom polls about 10 points weaker among Dems than does Brown in the head-to-head matchups, and about 5-10 points weaker among DTS voters. But, crucially, both Democrats have a lead among the DTS voters that will help decide this election.

So as we read the tea leaves on these polls, the bigger picture is starting to become clear: Californians want their next governor to be a Democrat.

As disappointed as I am in both Dem candidates, that does give me hope going into the 2010 cycle.

Notes by Brian: Californians Want A Democratic Governor

To me, what is interesting is the data for Newsom.  He is down ten points in favorability (30% favorable to 40% unfavorable) yet he is still beating all of the Republican candidates. In all likelihood, he is the Democrat with the highest unfavorables in the state, or at least amongst candidates who could seriously challenge for the Democratic nomination. In other words, put in any random Democrat, and these numbers are probably your baseline.  That is very good data for the Democratic nominee is, whether it is one of the two candidates in play now or if it is a late entrant.

Also interesting is Tom Campbell’s relative strength. He is running his campaign on a shoestring in comparison with the megalithic operations of his two opponents. I’m really not sure what to make of it. Is there really a desire for a relative “moderate” in the GOP electorate? Or is it something more about a “serious” candidate with policy and politics street cred.  I think we’ll get better data in future polls to see if Campbell can really maintain these numbers.

Assembly Member Tom Ammiano is a San Francisco Treasure. Always has been and always will be. But Tom Ammiano is special. He’s hilarious. He’s passionate. He’s progressive. He’s just Tom Ammiano.

And this brings me to the San Francisco Democratic Party annual gala, or the nerd prom as my friend Beth Spotswood likes to call it. All was going well, a smidge boring, but Former Assembly Speaker/Da Mayor Willie Brown got up on stage to really take it up a notch.  Brown let the crowd know that he had another offer on the same night for the President’s Cup dinner, a PGA event, that featured Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton and the Governor. The event just so happened to be in the same hotel.

The remark about the Governor being in the building brought a smattering of boos, as you might expect from a Democratic audience.  But the event continued on as expected, dinner was served. And as people were just finishing dinner, we began to notice something of a commotion.

And there he was, the Governator.  On our turf. In the San Francisco Democratic Party event. This wasn’t the Assembly Chamber. This was a raucous Democratic Party event.

He was talking with Willie Brown and his entourage for a while. And then, former SF Board of Supes President Aaron Peskin brought him up on the stage.  As he began to talk, Asm. Ammiano yelled out “You LIE.”

The Governor began to say a few words about how he heard that the Democratic Party event was in the same hotel as a chorus of boos and other random hissing noises rained down upon him.  I, of course, was taking pictures with my cell phone.  Apparently the Governor felt that he should visit the Democratic event because he “sleeps with one every night.”  And then proceeded to tell the room that he was “post-partisan” and that he didn’t care whether you were a Republican or a Democrat.

And as he continued, Asm. Ammiano still couldn’t believe this man was up on the stage at a Democratic event.  The San Francisco Assembly Member yelled something to the effect of “kiss my gay ass” as he left the room.

But the more interesting part was when Tom Ammiano accepted an award, the SF DCCC Trailblazer Award, from Willie Brown. Ammiano began by praising Brown’s excellent record on LGBT issues. And then continued by hinting at their differences in the past.  And then he proceeded to bludgeon the Governor’s record. He questioned why he was holding bills hostage to get a bad water deal. He questioned why a Governor who has vetoed the Harvey Milk Day bill would stand up in front of a room that was at least 25% LGBT. He politely asked Mayor Brown to send a message to the governor to sign the bills already.

And finally, Senator Mark Leno closed the proceedings for the evening.  Leno took a different tack than Ammiano’s passion. He simply stated the facts. He said that the events of this evening were all funny and stuff, but the fact is that this Governor had cut state workers salaries by 15% with the furloughs. This Governor wanted to cut IHSS salaries to minimum wage. This Governor illegally used the line item veto to slash funding for domestic violence shelters. And that he, and the Senate Democrats, were going to fight him tooth and nail.

And to a loud applause, Leno stepped off the stage and the crowd began to thin.  And everybody was saying, “um, wow.”

I’m still trying to collect my thoughts from the evening, so I apologize if the order is slightly skewed or I missed an important point. Feel free to add anything in the comments if you were there.

On Monday, Mayor Sam reported some rumors that were floating around the political world, that Garry South had told Gavin to raise $5 million by the end of the year or drop out.

Today, CalBuzz got the story from the horse’s mouth, and boy, is it an angry mouth.  

“This is complete, utter bullshit, and I categorically deny it.  “Mayor Sam” never talked to me to pass any of these hearsay assertions by me, and he is just picking up and disseminating intentional disinformation from the Brown camp – including Brown himself, who’s too busy “doing his job as AG” to debate, but has time to hang on the phone in his Oakland loft starting and spreading rumors about Newsom.  I don’t give my candidates ultimatums of any sort.” (CalBuzz 10/07/09)

Mayor Sam responded this morning to South’s rant.

The thrust of our piece Monday was that Newsom has had such major trouble collecting any real campaign jack the San Francisco Mayor had to throw a hail mary pass and roll out a way earlier than usual endorsement of a former POTUS – Bill “BJ” Clinton in an LA photo opp at a green college building earlier this week. (Mayor Sam 10/07/09)

In the end, I sort of believe South on this one. It just doesn’t seem like South to tell a paying client to drop out of a race. And, as he pointed out, he did stay with some rather big underdogs in the form of Gray Davis and Steve Westly when they were polling quite low.  That being said, Davis was a pretty good fundraiser and Westly could self-fund.

I would be very surprised to see Newsom drop out of the race early, nor do I think it would be good for the state.  A vigorous exchange of ideas (not mud) is critical to ensure that the Democratic nominee supports, or at least understands, the goals of the progressive grassroots.  

In an email sent out to their list, Gavin Newsom’s campaign manager Nick Clemons attacks Jerry Brown on the story that David Dayen broke over the weekend, Brown’s headlining of a Republican DA Mike Ramos Fundraiser.

We were astonished to learn from The San Bernardino Sun and Calitics.com that Attorney General Jerry Brown last week was the guest of honor at a fundraiser for San Bernardino District Attorney Mike Ramos, a right-wing Republican, that raised almost $100,000 for the DA’s re-election campaign.

In a real irony, this was the same week that Mayor Gavin Newsom headlined a fundraising event in Dallas for the Human Rights Campaign.

In his introductory remarks for Ramos, Brown called the Republican incumbent, “a real fighter.” But exactly whom has Ramos been fighting for?

Ramos has a “colorful” record, including an ongoing investigation of his office “assistance of investigation” into other officeholders who accuse Ramos of bias by, um, the Attorney General. (This is the point that the SB Sun address.)It will be interesting to see how this whole thing plays out with the Democratic primary electorate and the press.  

Some statements are facts. Some are opinions.  And some are harder to place in between.  Take this Meg Whitman quote pulled from George Skelton’s column this morning:

Every year, we pay more to sustain an out-of-control state bureaucracy — a wasteful bureaucracy, out of touch with the needs of Californians. And a selfish and arrogant bureaucracy, unwilling to give an inch even in the toughest of economic times.(LAT 10/05/09)

Now, Skelton does a pretty good job of pinning this on Whitman, the column is actually titled “The arrogance may be Whitman’s.”  Now, I think I would change “may be” to “is”, but that’s very newspaper-y. Wouldn’t want to leave yourself without some weasel room in case she wins, and all.

Nonetheless, can it be said that there was a more arrogant statement than this? About a group that has taken pay cuts of between 10-20% from salaries which, despite the right-wing rhetoric to the contrary, really never were that high in the first place.

And to further undercut her point, just take a look at the union negotiations.  SEIU Local 1000 agreed to some pretty big sacrifices in their latest deal with the Governor, only to have the deal blocked by Whitman’s ideological cronies, the Senate Republicans.

And then looking at the general frame of her point, that the bureaucracy is out of touch. First, may I remind her that the boogeyman of the day, the bureaucracy is actually made up of thousands of real, living, breathing Californians. Californians who fight fires, Californians who staff prisons, Californians that help the disabled and educate our youth. Yes, those arrogant, arrogant, firefighters. How dare they want to be compensated for risking their lives for us?  And this from a CEO who made millions off of slave labor at Mattel, and then leveraged that into billions at eBay, warts and all.  I’m sure she was cutting her salary at every opportunity there. After all, to do otherwise would be “selfish and arrogant.” And to just prove that she is the one out of touch with Californians, she hasn’t bothered to vote in 20 years.

The fact is that Meg Whitman is knowingly lying, while at the same time showing just how ill-informed an unprepared she is for the job.  She is knowingly lying when she says that state workers haven’t given anything back. But when you dig deeper into the rhetoric, you see the emperor really has no clothes. When asked how she would cut the state workforce by 200,000, she simply states that she would blue pencil appropriations for which she doesn’t have authority over until they cut staff.

So the tech CEO wants to cut higher education until professors are fired.  She wants to cut courts until trials are unconstitutionally slow. She’s just going to cut and slash her way through what is left, so that we will pine for the days of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Pretty scary huh?

There’s a way to sort of excuse Jerry Brown for joining the partisan witch hunt and investigating ACORN, on the grounds that he is also looking into whether the two wingnut-welfare dress-up clowns who filmed the employees broke the law by taping without mutual consent.  It’s somewhat harder to spin away Brown’s attendance at a fundraiser for Republican District Attorney Mike Ramos.

California Attorney General Edmund Brown, Jr. was the guest of honor and introduced District Attorney Mike Ramos at his campaign fundraiser tonight in Ontario. In introducing Ramos, Attorney General Brown said, “Mike Ramos is one of the best prosecutors in California, we served on the statewide Gang and Violent Crime Task Force together … he’s a real fighter.”

It is actually against the bylaws of the Democratic State Central Committee to endorse a Republican in a partisan race.  Some members of the DSCC who want to support Republicans actually resign from the party.  I’m trying without success to determine whether the DA race in San Bernardino County is a non-partisan race; typically, that is the case.

But there are lots of other reasons that a Democrat running in a primary would not necessarily want to endorse a Republican like Mike Ramos.  Beyond the obvious reasons, Ramos has been accused of sexual harrassment by a woman who works in the DA’s office.  Ramos has called it an effort to derail a series of investigations against public officials in the county.  Ramos has also received $30,000 in donations over the years from the business of Mark Leggio, who was indicted on charges of laundering over-the-limit campaign donations to various other candidates for office.  Ramos recused himself from the investigation.  Leggio pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in prison.  There’s quite a bit of smoke here.

Between this and partying with the Lincoln Club of San Diego, the point is that Jerry Brown has started to run the general election, appealing to the center-right electorate that he feels wins elections.  That may have been true in 1978, but maybe not so much now, given the demographic changes in the state.  What’s more, it’s incredibly disrespectful to a Democratic primary electorate that is really being told they have nowhere else to go.

Gavin Newsom did what people commonly expect someone behind in the polls in a campaign to do – challenge the front-runner to a series of debates.  From his press release:

“Our state is in need of real reform-we have a broken system that must be fixed,” said Newsom. “And now that there are two candidates for governor, we owe the Democratic voters of California an opportunity to compare our visions and platforms side-by-side.”

Mayor Newsom faxed a letter to the Brown campaign with a list of suggested ground rules. The memo suggests 11 debates in total-one in each media market in California. Ten debates would focus on one specific issue each, while the final debate would be open to all relevant issues. Newsom for California also made the following format suggestions:

• 90 minutes in length

• Opening and closing statements

• Moderated, town hall-style debates with direct audience participation

• Segments with moderator questions, public questions, and candidate-to-candidate questions

• An opportunity for candidates to respond directly to any assertions made about their record

I’m sure the hard-bitten cynics in the dwindling press corps will see this as a transparent ploy for attention from a trailing candidate.  Nevertheless, my immediate reaction was: “A series of debates.  Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Phil Angelides and Steve Westly held a series of joint appearances and debates in the 2006 primary, and while that primary was in no way a model, it did help to clarify the positions of the candidates on various issues.  The same for the nearly endless series of debates around the 2008 Presidential primary.  I wouldn’t call them all helpful, depending on the peccadilloes of the moderators and the laziness of the questioning.  But in a large state predicated on TV ads and soundbites, 90-minute forums can at least offer a glimpse into the thinking of Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown.

By contrast, our recent statewide gubernatorial elections have been characterized by almost no debates between the major candidates.  In 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Phil Angelides held only one debate.  During the recall, Arnold deigned to attend one debate during the recall, despite the other candidates holding several, and he neglected to debate Gray Davis, who asked for debates in the final weeks.  One could hardly sympathize with Davis, as he only held one debate with Bill Simon during their general election in 2002.  As California’s political media has shrunk, so have the opportunities for gubernatorial candidates to offer an unfiltered perspective on their plans for the state.

So while there are political reasons behind this, why not?  I know I have some curiosity about how Brown and Newsom see their roles and what kind of leadership they can offer, and so should everyone.  Fortunately, Brown has responded favorably if enigmatically to this request: “If Attorney General Brown decides to declare his candidacy for Governor, I’m sure he would support the notion of holding debates under terms to be mutually agreed upon by the candidates.”

(Attorney General Brown formally filed to open an exploratory committee for Governor today.)

With the Rasmussen poll numbers filtering through the traditional media, the idea of Jerry Brown being the favorite at this moment to return to the Governor’s mansion is taking hold outside of California. Talking Points Memo has a piece marveling at how strange it is to see the “colorful” Brown back in this position, recalling the time-worn stories about Linda Ronstadt and “Governor Moonbeam,” although they do acknowledge that “this all contributed to a somewhat inaccurate caricature of him as a left-winger.”  Indeed, the TPM profile notes that Brown was a fiscal conservative in office and ran on the flat tax in 1992.  Clearly, the author was informed by Joe Mathews’ cover story in this month’s American Prospect, which delves further into Brown’s un-campaign for Governor and the puzzling question of what in the heck he’s planning to do once he gets there:

But a little talk about the big picture is in order. Outside Brown’s news conferences, California is coming undone. This summer, unemployment reached 11.9 percent. Tens of billions of dollars have been cut from the budget in the past year. Thousands of teachers have been laid off. State offices are now closed three Fridays a month. University tuition has been hiked. Thousands of elderly and disabled people are losing their state-provided health insurance.

The crisis is so profound that it may present an opportunity for California to fix its badly broken government. Coalitions on the left and in the center (the right is sitting on the sidelines, enjoying the Armageddon) are drafting plans to change the way the state is governed. They hope to get several measures on the 2010 ballot that would reshape the state budget, call a state constitutional convention, and perhaps unwind much of Proposition 13, the 1978 initiative that severely limited the government’s ability to raise taxes — a major contributing factor to the budget hole California finds itself in today.

If any candidate should be talking about this, it’s Jerry Brown. After all, Prop. 13 passed during his governorship. But Brown has yet to engage the would-be reformers. In the rare moments when he’s asked how the state might be fixed, he talks vaguely of the need to forge compromise and invokes older, better times in California, when he and his father, former Gov. Pat Brown, were in power. “We can talk about ‘restoring the dream,'” he told a union conference in Palo Alto during an explicitly political appearance this summer. “Well, I was around when the dream was here.”

This is a dodge — not only of the present questions about what he might do as governor but also of lasting concerns about Brown’s own role in diminishing the California dream. Pat Brown was a great builder of the highways and waterways and schools that made the state prosperous, but his son Jerry announced “an era of limits.” Since that declaration 33 years ago, the state’s population has grown from 22 million to more than 38 million. The state government has not kept up. If Brown has specific ideas on what to do about all of this, he is keeping them to himself.

Brown clearly has a blueprint for winning the election – say as little as humanly possible about the problems that grip the state, and hope that tangerine dreams of the halcyon 70s push him to victory.  You cannot blame him – it’s a winning formula.  With a pathetically thin state political media, it’s fairly difficult to run on any issues to begin with, at least ones beyond the bumper-sticker variety.  Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected by saying pretty much nothing that wouldn’t fit as a movie slogan, and a celebrity-obsessed media let him get away with it.  So I don’t begrudge Brown the lack of specifics.  That’s the way the game has been played in recent years.

Indeed, I don’t worry about what we don’t know about Brown, but what we do know.

Progressives, both then and now, argue that Brown’s brand of anti-government liberalism fueled the Prop. 13 fire. If government isn’t all that important, what does it matter if you cut taxes? Brown had frozen highway construction, criticized funding for adult education and food stamps, and slashed social services. “I am going to starve the schools financially until I get some educational reforms,” he said in one encounter with reporters.

What reforms, governor?

“I don’t know yet.” […]

Brown, in the midst of running for re-election, called himself a “born-again tax cutter” and immediately reinvented himself as Prop. 13’s champion. (He maintains now that he had to support 13 after its victory because of his oath to defend the state constitution.) Brown went so far as to befriend the legislation’s co-sponsor, the anti-tax crusader Howard Jarvis. “It seemed like he went over to Jarvis’ house frequently,” says Joel Fox, who would later serve as an aide to Jarvis. “Mrs. Jarvis would tell stories about serving lunch to the governor with Howard in his pajamas. Howard voted for him for re-election because Jerry convinced him he would implement Prop. 13 in the right spirit.”

As it happens, the only thing worse than Prop. 13 itself was its implementation. Brown and the legislature bailed out cities and counties that lost revenues under the law — and thus established the dysfunctional system of budgeting that plagues California to this day. Tax and spending decisions once made by city councils and school boards were centralized in Sacramento. The state Capitol became a giant piggy bank, with interests on the right and left using lobbying muscle — and the initiative process — to carve out special protections for their funds, leaving less for broad public investments. At the rare moments when Democrats tried to make such investments, Prop. 13’s two-thirds requirement for taxes allowed Republicans, even when they were in the minority, to block them.

Indeed, the Jerry Brown of recent public comments shows no sign of understanding the present state of the state.  He has supported the current Governor in various accounting tricks and tough-on-crime stances that have blown a hole in the deficit.  He has stated an unwillingness to take a leadership position on any even remotely controversial issue.  He hasn’t strayed from that “born-again tax-cutter” mantra.  As our own Robert Cruickshank says in this very good article:

“The problem with Brown is that I’m not convinced he’s moved past 1978,” says Robert Cruickshank, who works for the progressive 700,000-member network Courage Campaign and is a frequent contributor to the blog Calitics. “The lesson he drew from that is that he has to adapt to a more conservative reality. … I’m concerned that it’s not going to be the kind of governorship where you see significant changes in the way California operates.”

If this is the Jerry Brown we can expect to “lead” in 2010, I know that progressives will have far better outlets for their advocacy, be it the Lakoff Initiative or the Constitutional convention.  As I’ve said many times, you could elect Noam Chomsky governor and he would still be constrained by the same structural factors that resist true democracy and responsible governance.  And Jerry Brown is most certainly no Noam Chomsky.