AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Berman
On Tuesday, voters in seven states (California, Iowa, Montana, Mississippi, New Mexico, New Jersey, and South Dakota) went to the polls to cast ballots in primaries. Primary turnout is not a definitive predictor of general election results, but it is a good indicator of the relative motivation on each side. Last month, more voters in Pennsylvania cast ballots in the Republican primary than the Democratic one for the first time in modern history. The trend of falling Democratic turnout continued to varying degrees in Iowa, Montana, and New Mexico, with highly touted Democratic Senate recruit in Iowa, former Congresswoman Abby Finkenauer, losing her primary by 15% to a retired admiral. California, however, provided a particularly important test. California, like Washington, does not have partisan primaries. Candidates from both parties run against each other in a single primary election, with the top two regardless of party advancing to the general election in November. That means that the California results not only measure turnout, but provide a preview of the November election in every congressional and legislative seat. That preview paints a worrying picture for Democrats – a picture made even more ominous by voter revolts in two of the state’s most Democratic cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
At the statewide level, with around half the vote counted, incumbent Governor Gavin Newsom has 56.3% of the vote, while his Republican rival received a bit under 17%. The race is not expected to be competitive, so the relevant comparison is not whether Newsom is likely to lose, but how Newsom’s performance this year compares to his 2021 recall election, where he received 62% of the vote. The combined Democratic vote looks set to end up around 3-4% below that total, reflecting a loss of support for both Democrats and Joe Biden since September of 2021.
That is good news for Republican congressional candidates in California, both incumbents and challengers. Newsom’s own performance with 62% last year was already below Joe Biden’s 64% in 2020. This week, Republican candidates did well, and given the tendency for Republican voters to be more likely to show up on Election Day, the results are probably going to grow only more favorable over the next week. There are ten districts where Republican incumbents are running for reelection, and in nine of them Republicans won a majority of the vote counted so far. In the 27th district, incumbent Republican Mike Garcia has 49.6% of the vote and will likely be over 50% when outstanding ballots are counted. He leads his nearest rival, former state assemblywoman Christy Clark, who he beat twice already by almost 14%.
In total, Republicans currently are winning with more than 50% of the vote in eleven seats, the same number they currently hold. If that alone is repeated in November, Democrats will suffer a net loss of one congressional seat, as the state will have only 52 this decade, not 53. Yet there are an additional four seats where Democrats are likely to poll at less than 53% in the primary. While Democrats have historically improved slightly between June and November, the average margin by which they have improved for much of the last decade was around 2%. But this phenomenon largely vanished in 2020, and there is reason to believe it may even reverse itself in 2022. The cause of the shift has traditionally been the presence of low-propensity blue-collar Hispanic voters who are more likely to turn out in November than for the June primaries. Yet with blue-collar Hispanics voting increasingly Republican, this shift may work against Democrats this year.
The results in two of California’s major cities further indicate that non-white voters, especially Asian Americans, are revolting against progressive and woke policies. Ground zero for this revolt was the capital of the American far left, San Francisco itself. As one of America’s most left-leaning cities, Republicans have not been a factor there for decades. The partisan divide is instead between “moderates,” including the female, African American Mayor London Breed who was assailed during her campaign by a white critic for being “supported by rich, white men” and radical progressives. The San Francisco School Committee, dominated by progressives, famously chose to prioritize renaming a building named for the “racist” Abraham Lincoln over reopening schools, prompting a recall vote in which nearly 70% voted to oust all three members back in February.
Last night it was the turn of San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin to face the wrath of voters. His background reads almost like a caricature of a far-left activist: effectively orphaned before his first birthday when his parents, both members of the Weather Underground, took part in an armed robbery which saw the murder of two police officers, for which they received 25 and 76 year sentences respectively; raised by Weather Underground activist and one-time Obama mentor Bill Ayers; educated at Yale Law School, after which he moved to Venezuela, where he worked as a translator for the dictator Hugo Chavez; elected on a platform of turning the focus of his office away from prosecuting criminals and toward the true villains, cops.
Throughout his tenure, Boudin was as good as his word, letting multiple repeat offenders go free to commit future crimes, especially against the Asian American community. Drug enforcement all but ceased, and it became a running joke that it was hard to find a street which was not covered in broken glass from a smashed car window. It was the failure to even pretend to respond to a spate of attacks on Asian businesses which helped doom Boudin. Asian voters, especially parents, played a key role in mobilizing against the progressive school committee when it moved to end merit admissions at San Francisco’s leading magnet school because too many Asian students were being admitted, and Boudin’s allies were happy to attack the entire Asian community as racist in response. This week they, and the working-class people of San Francisco, got their revenge. Boudin was recalled from office by a 60-40 margin.
What is striking about the result is the demographic makeup of who voted to recall him. Boudin won most of the heavily white, hipster neighborhoods, including the famous Castro, the center of gay life in San Francisco. By contrast, he was crushed in immigrant, working-class, and Asian areas.
It was a pattern which was repeated in Los Angeles, where liberal Congresswoman Karen Bass faced billionaire developer Rick Caruso in the mayoral race. Caruso was the target of attacks from liberals pointing out that he was a registered Republican until 2011 and from 2016 to 2019, and registered as a Democrat for the first time in 2022 in order to run for Mayor. Despite being tarred as a “closet Republican,” Caruso, who ran on a platform of expanding the police department and running the housing department like his real estate firm, and was endorsed by Elon Musk and the Police Union, came in first with 42% of the vote, leading Bass by 5%. CNN compared his campaign to that of Rudy Giuliani, whose former police chief, Will Bratton, endorsed Caruso.
Even in Democratic California, crime, inflation, and education are proving a millstone around the necks of Democrats. In nonpartisan races in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Democrats cannot even count on party loyalty, the trickle of defections is rapidly turning into a flood. Even if Gavin Newsom is favored for reelection, he is likely to face a California electorate which may be far less forgiving of his failures.
Daniel Berman is a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He also writes as Daniel Roman.