The End of (California) History?

Is California liberal? Plenty of people argue that it is, usually along with a pair of corollaries: 1) that conservatives can win neither statewide nor, for the most part, lower-level elections, and 2) that realism dictates accepting the situation and moving on. This election year, the argument takes a specific form: that Republicans have shot themselves in the foot once more, nominating for governor Bill Simon, whose campaign, not to put too fine a point on it, is a waste of time. Pro- life? Pro-gun? He might as well spend the summer and fall on the Moon for all the good his hopeless efforts will do him in California. The Christian Science Monitor stated the argument straight from the formulary June 13: “In the land of Reagan,” the head and sub-head ran, “GOP faces prospect of a shutout: Polls and even Republicans themselves say Democrats look poised to sweep California’s top offices in November.” Monitor staff writer Daniel B. Wood expanded on the theme:

Reflecting a steady demographic shift in race, ethnicity, and income, the state that created the prototypical Republican enclave, Orange County, and launched the country’s most-popular conservative, Ronald Reagan, is tilting more and more Democratic. With the governor’s office, both legislative houses, both Senate seats, and most big-city mayors solidly Democratic, some see even bigger gains ahead and wonder if voters may ever look back.

“I don’t think this is a blip on the screen,” says Larry Berg, founder of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics. He and others recount the rise of Asian and Latino middle classes, the decline of the industrial base of defense-aerospace after the cold war, and the ascendancy of high-tech and entertainment-based wealth are all combining to produce a new kind of voter base with decidedly liberal loyalties. “The makeup of the state just isn’t what it used to be,” says Mr. Berg.

Lots of nearly identical examples could be produced; readers have no doubt seen many themselves. The tone is consistently one of objective analysis, not partisan polemics, as though guided by no more than dispassionate truth-seeking and the spirit of friendly advice to Republicans not yet convinced. But I contend, on the contrary, that the argument is altogether polemical, intended to dodge critical analysis both of liberal ideas and of the voters’ mood. It substitutes a self-serving “inevitability” about liberal triumph that, if accepted, leaves opposition to it, or even criticism of it, futile — i.e., Simon is wasting his time.

My dictionary defines “objective” as: “adj. 1. Of or having to do with a material object as distinguished from a mental concept, idea, or belief. 2. Having actual existence. 3.a. Uninfluenced by emotion or personal prejudice. b. Based on observable phenomena.” I suppose most people, asking themselves whether or not California is “liberal,” would begin by thinking about positions usually thought of as liberal on political issues — taxes, spending, abortion, the environment, race preferences, whatever. Such positions, I would say, qualify as “actually existing” “observable phenomena.” But the Monitor, following standard practice in these matters, contrives a definition of “liberal” not based on issues, but on election results, and on a highly selective set of election results at that.

Ronald Reagan’s repeated landslides are dismissed. They came, we are told, before demographic shifts that have produced “a new kind of voter base with decidedly liberal loyalties.” I will consider these new demographics shortly. Here, I merely comment (a) that if a young Ronald Reagan were running today for his first elective office as he did in 1966, he would certainly blow Gray Davis out of the water even more decisively than he did Pat Brown — anyone who seriously doubts that is welcome to do so — and (b) that if California’s population and economic base today matched that of 1966 in every particular, we would still be told with not one iota less certitude that California is too liberal to elect a conservative (although the supporting arguments would be modified).

In fact, of course, universal conventional wisdom in 1966, and, for that matter, in 1976 and 1980 when he ran for president, was that Reagan could not be elected. One day a few weeks before the ’76 GOP primary in Indiana, where I was working in a very minor capacity for the Reagan effort, I happened to find myself on an airplane across the aisle from a pair of Jimmy Carter campaign staffers. We all were wearing our campaign buttons, and you would have thought I was their long, lost wealthy uncle come home to dole out the fortune. They were all over me. These political pros considered the whole Reagan campaign as nothing less than an unofficial arm of the Carter effort. If we Reaganites could just find a way to take the nomination from Gerald Ford, November would be a formality. Reagan winning never crossed their minds. And so it always is: with Pat Brown “helping” Reagan win the ’66 GOP primary over San Francisco Mayor George Christopher and Gray Davis “helping” Bill Simon topple LA Mayor Dick Riordan. As the San Diego Union-Tribune put it recently: “While Davis was wary of going against Riordan in November, he salivated at the prospect of facing Simon.” The supporting rationales come and go, but the certitude never wavers.

And it is evident in post-election analyses, where a simple rule prevails: if a liberal wins or a conservative loses, the people are voting on issues, showing their liberal leanings; if a liberal loses or a conservative wins, some extraneous element not related to issues dominated. Thus, Tom Campbell was a “quirky” candidate who turned voters off personally after his 20-point loss in 2000 to Dianne Feinstein, but Dan Lungren did not lose for being quirky — his 20- point loss to Gray Davis in ’98 was a solid voter repudiation of his conservative, particularly his pro-life, ideas. Analyses of Pete Wilson’s gubernatorial wins stressed his being pro-abortion, quietly ignoring the voters’ rejection of his Democrat opponents’ far more liberal positions on most issues. And, of course, Reagan himself won because of his charm, not his ideas.

This post-election double-standard is only a part of the larger over-simplifying distortion that argues the state is “liberal” because Democrats win. The double-standard and the “liberal” labeling both ignore boatloads of inconvenient facts. After all, a massive event like the 1998 campaign that resulted in Gray Davis’s election involved the spending of tens of millions of dollars in both Parties’ primary and general election campaigns; countless decisions by hundreds of political professionals as to strategy, tactics, and campaign finance; thousands of messages sent out by the campaigns to voters over TV, radio, direct mail, and other means; tens of thousands of print and broadcast news stories, editorial commentaries, letters-to-the-editor, and talk show call-ins; an endless series of news releases, speeches, and off-the-cuff remarks by candidates, press contacts, other staffers, and just plain others somehow associated with a campaign or the election in voters’ minds; an infinite number of voter perceptions, ranging from passing to profound, about those running for office; and, finally, millions of individual voters with infinitely varying reasons — philosophical, emotional, altruistic, self-serving, whatever — for choosing which chad to push through their March and November ballots. The candidates, of course, are more than ideological place holders — full-blown human beings, as a matter of fact, with all the usual variations and complexities of personality, outward appearance, capacity for “connecting” with people, inner strength or weakness of character, and on and on, none of it necessarily having anything to do with their spot on the political spectrum, which itself is probably not fixed, but (as with most of us) moving this way and that as our lives unfold.

Beyond all of these dynamics, there is the much larger world of events, political and otherwise, out of anyone’s — much less any campaign’s — control, heavily influencing voters’ moods, sense of important issues at any given moment, and decision whether or not to vote at all. To take all this, multiply it by hundreds of local, congressional, statewide, and presidential elections over the last decade or so and conclude that it means we now have a new, predominant “voter base with decidedly liberal loyalties” is useless as analysis, though it may make effective polemics.

And why be so round-about anyway? If you want to use election returns to learn something about voters’ political philosophy, a much more straightforward reading is provided by ballot measures with clear, widely-perceived liberal or conservative implications. Consider the huge majorities piled up by the California Civil Rights Initiative (banning race and gender preferences), English for the Children (eliminating most public school bilingual education), and, especially, the Defense of Marriage Act (marriage as a union between a man and a woman). These certainly put a massive dent in the California-as-“liberal” notion. No imaginable policy could more absolutely contradict everything liberal Democrat office holders believe than Prop. 22, yet it passed like the Scotch Express, flattening everything in its path. If the Monitor ran an article at the time noticing a “new voter base with decidedly non- liberal loyalties,” I missed it.

But not everyone has missed these indicators. In a March 2000, post-primary column, Sacramento Bee commentator Dan Walters, not known for any special affinity to Republican or conservative causes, noted the results for the three initiatives just mentioned as well as voter rejection of a measure to lower the requirement to pass local school bonds from two-thirds to a simple majority (a slightly different version of this measure passed later in 2000), passage of “several measures billed as tough on crime, most notably one that will make it easier to treat juvenile offenders as adults,” and voter rejection of “two laws that would have made it easier to sue insurers for ‘bad faith’ handling of claims.” Putting it all together, Walters dismissed the reigning orthodoxy, giving his own verdict on California’s ideological position:

California has a reputation, promulgated by those in the New York- and Washington-based political media, for being a wild and crazily liberal state .... However ingrained this image may be in the Eastern media, it’s not supported by the hard voting data. This week, California’s voters demonstrated once again that on the ideological scale, they continue to reside slightly right of center.

The trouble with all this election-returns- based ideological pigeon-holing of Californians is that lists of election returns could be produced to “prove” just about any conclusion. Californians elected Reagan governor twice, but they also elected Democrats Pat and Jerry Brown just before and after that, and then George Deukmejian, although, the first time, by the thinnest of margins. At that point, having voted Democrat or nearly Democrat in three straight elections, Californians kept Republicans in the governor’s office for 16 years, whereupon they elected Gray Davis in a landslide. But the voters — even his own Democrat rank and file — now regard Davis with dismally low approval. The only diagnosis consistent with this series of ludicrous jigs and jags would perhaps be that the people are schizophrenic ... or, maybe, that they just don’t fit into handy pigeon-holes.

In the 1942 film Road to Morocco, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby argue over whether they are being haunted by Bob’s Aunt Lucy. “The dead have a way of coming back, you know,” says Bob. “Go on,” Bing answers, “when you’re dead, you’re dead.” “Not Aunt Lucy,” says Bob. “She was a Republican” — just showing that the idea that one or the other Party is washed up for good, like the poor, we have always with us. (Republicans, after three defeats by Franklin Roosevelt, were supposed to admit they were dead, and chided for refusing to do so.)

And the idea is usually wrong, though, of course, sometimes political parties do cease to exist: when they cease to represent either one or the other side in the nation’s consistent, underlying political struggle and an alternative arises to represent the position not being served. America’s Whigs disappeared when they proved incapable of representing effectively either side in the emerging issues that led to the Civil War. What’s really silly about the “California is liberal” notion (with “some” wondering “if voters may ever look back” the Monitor says) is that it implies an end has been reached, in this huge political entity, to the battle between humanity’s deepest competing political impulses — that it’s all been settled: the End of History, as some idiot put it.

The actors and the momentary “issues” transmute from the ’60s to the ’80s to the new century, from Vietnam, Cold War, and Great Society to Supply Side economics and missile defense, on to National Health Insurance and a Social Security “Lock Box.” But these are transitory elements, just as are “the rise of Asian and Latino middle classes” and “the decline of the industrial base of defense-aerospace after the cold war.” They are one day’s battle formations in a long-term war. Making a similar mistake, French defeatists saw Hitler’s blitzkrieg as proving final Nazi victory “inevitable.” They called resistance absurd and destructive, only prolonging the suffering as the old world gave way to the new — as if victory in any battle could somehow “settle” the eternal warfare between slavery and freedom. Even had Hitler won, and his empire hung on for a while, it would have changed nothing about the essential issues in the fight. And those issues survived the allied victory: the battle continued, as first Eastern Europe, then the world, learned. It will continue as long as there are people to fight it, through politics and war. “If men were angels ...” James Madison said. Alas, they are not.

One constant is the left’s eternal migration ever further left. Taxes are never quite high enough; government programs and regulations never quite ubiquitous enough, spending never quite lavish enough; guns, boy scouts, Christian symbols, and traditional morality never quite marginalized enough; and education and the law never quite politically correct enough. This dynamic guarantees an endless supply of that supposedly extinct breed: Reagan Democrats. As former Democrat Reagan said, “I did not leave my Party; my Party left me,” as it still leaves millions of voters unwilling to follow its everlasting migration.

Consider the demographic shifts urged as reasons for Republicans to move left. The LA Times’ March 2000 exit poll showed Latinos as the ethnic group most strongly supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, 65 percent “yes” to 35 percent “no.” Second? Blacks, the Times reported: 62 to 38 percent. Asians? Third, at 59 to 41 percent in favor. Fourth, and last, Whites, 58 to 42, which might explain Republican leaders’ reluctance to champion the issue of family with Latinos — Hispanics are too conservative for them! Even Tony Quinn, a “strategist” usually heard urging the GOP to drop its conservative ideas, has noticed a serious Democrat vulnerability here. Last January, he wrote in the Times:

... [S]ometimes Democrats seem biased against, and often contemptuous of, positions of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. This development could provide an opening for Republicans, which could be especially important in California, where the church-going Catholic electorate is increasingly Asian — especially Filipinos and Vietnamese — and Latino.
The Democrats’ problem is the result of a clash between its old Catholic constituency and its newer members, especially feminists and gay- rights activists, in the context of the cultural divide that was so evident in the 2000 election. Bush ran far ahead of the usual GOP vote in rural America and with regular church attendees; he also won among married voters and women who stay at home with children.

Quinn mentioned Davis’s “pro-abortion-rights litmus test for his judicial appointments that goes well beyond being just pro-choice” and that “the Democratic Party strongly opposed Proposition 22 ....” recalling, a little further along, that “Latinos supported it by margins 10 percent higher than any other group.” Quinn also noted the Democrats’ tradition of alienating one voting bloc after another over time:

In the 1980s, Southern evangelical Christians moved away from their historic home in the Democratic Party; in recent elections, Italian and Irish Catholics seem to be doing the same thing. These national trends may not have reached California yet, but what if churchgoing Latinos and Asians begin to sense an anti-Catholic bias among California Democrats? The impact on California politics could be direct and immediate.
Republicans, to be sure, will grasp at any straw in their comeback effort in California, and the Bush administration has zealously courted Latino voters throughout the country. Twice before, in the 1960s with Ronald Reagan and in the 1970s with Proposition 13, Republicans recovered when Democrats alienated their core constituencies. In the 1960s, it was working-class voters; in the 1970s, it was middle-income homeowners. Will Democrats give Republicans a third chance by alienating Catholics?

If Mr. Quinn is asking whether Senator Sheila Kuehl and the Democrats can be expected to “give Republicans” this chance by continuing their full-court press to nullify Proposition 22, and their broad effort to implement the “feminist and gay-rights activist” political agenda in California’s schools and private institutions, the answer, plainly, is yes. They’ve given Republicans the chance already, and not just with regard to Latinos. A 2000 post-primary analysis of more than 20 GOP-targeted legislative districts showed that the “yes” vote for Prop. 22 surpassed the statewide 61 percent total in 18 of the districts. This analysis, prepared for a veteran GOP legislative campaign manager and shown to Republican leaders, detailed pro-22 voting patterns by Latino and blue collar- union households in those 18 (mostly working class, blue collar) districts. It showed that both these categories of traditionally Democrat voters favored 22 in higher percentages than the state had as a whole, offering Republicans a tremendous opportunity to make major inroads on this issue into key Democrat voting blocs.

Anecdotal evidence supported the data. Before the March primary (which was “open” — any voter could choose any candidate regardless of Party registration), a few enterprising GOP candidates, preparing for their regular pre- cinct walks, tried an experiment. Leaving behind their carefully-calculated “high-propensity” voter lists, instead they simply approached any household showing a “Yes on 22” yard sign. (The campaign had invested in hundreds of thousands of yard signs statewide.) One candidate called the experiment the “most rewarding” day of his political life. At the first house he approached, he said to a black man mowing his lawn: “I am a candidate for the California Legislature and I wanted to introduce myself to you because I see you support Proposition 22. I do too.” The man went into his house and returned with his wife and grown daughter. “Never in my life,” he said, “have I voted for a Republican. But this issue is so important, we are all voting for you.” All the candidates making the “experiment” brought back similar stories.

For all that, according to the campaign manager who gave his data to GOP leaders, the Party did nothing with it. Republicans lost seats in November. Opportunity, it seems, is not enough. Democrats, as Mr. Quinn suggests, may well “give” Republicans endless chances to attract alienated Democrats, but it will cost them nothing if Republicans ignore the opportunity.

Writing in the Washington Times last May, Hoover Institution research fellow — and former public affairs director for Governor Pete Wilson — Bill Whalen pointed out that, in California’s 2000 general election, “women accounted for 53 percent of the vote compared to just 14 percent for Hispanics.” He argued that attracting women voters is the critical GOP concern in California. While George W. Bush in 2000 and his father, in 1988, racked up similar numbers among Latino voters, Whalen wrote, “Bush the elder carried 48 percent of the women's vote (a one-point disadvantage) in 1988. In 2000, women, 58 percent to 37 percent, clobbered George W. Bush.” H.W. carried the state by three points over Michael Dukakis while George W. lost California by 12 points. But now it appears Bush may have eliminated this “fem- gap.” Mr. Whalen referred to a Spring 2002 Field Poll showing Bush “defeating Al Gore, 48 percent to 41 percent, in the Golden State, in a hypothetical match-up for 2004.” In this poll, Bush was favored by a majority of California males (52 percent) and, more significantly in this context, by “a plurality of women (49 percent) ....” — a 2-point advantage over Gore.

So much for static analysis fretting about “liberal” California. Unfortunately, Mr. Whalen has trouble seeing the lesson of it all. Reverting to conventional wisdom, he advises Bush to maintain his strong numbers here by consulting “savvy California insiders like the strategist Tony Quinn [!], who maintains that the key to winning California is capturing a swing vote of independent voters whom he defines as an amalgam of Latinos, new economy techies, and upper-income women. According to Mr. Quinn, this bloc is fiscally conservative and socially progressive.” Latinos, of course, are Democrats mainly because of that Party’s championing of Big Government programs — hardly fiscal conservatism. As for attracting them to the Republican banner, Mr. Whalen, meet Mr. Quinn, who has interesting insights to share about Democrats alienating Catholics.

Both Bushes are pro-life, so it seems a bit of a stretch to conclude from all this analysis that the key to attracting women voters is to be “socially progressive,” i.e.: pro-“choice.” By the way, Bill Simon whose private polls show him also leading among women voters, is pro-life. The White House believes the key to the president’s improved numbers among women is his education bill. Education is a major issue with a lot more women, frankly, than is abortion. Another indication that other concerns outweigh the life issue with many women: in early April, CPR’s companion publication, Capitol Watch, reported that “a leading Democrat state Capitol consultant said his Party is ‘underestimating how much people dislike Gray Davis.’ He said Democrat pre-Primary polling showed the governor in deep trouble in his own Party, with ‘no Democrat constituency group — African-Americans, labor, women, Hispanics, enviros — giving [Davis] an approval rating exceeding 50 percent.’ He indicated Davis’s tactic of criticizing Republican Bill Simon’s pro-life and pro-gun positions do not overcome women’s dislike of the Democrat governor.” It seems that, for many voters, their broad impression of a candidate, positive or negative, outweighs the candidate’s position on abortion. As strategist/pollster Arnold Steinberg wrote in CPR after the Lungren debacle, “Pro-choice voters say (in exit polls) abortion is the reason they vote against a Republican. But if they like a pro-life Republican, abortion is not an issue to them.”

California’s politics is fluid, not static. The state is nearly always “in play.” A myth has taken hold, for instance, that “liberal” California was always out of George W. Bush’s reach, which was why Gore could ignore the state. But in July 2000, the Steinberg survey showed W. within three points of Gore here, 37 to 40. With a better campaign, Bush could have won. Steinberg pointed out that a September 25, 2000, Los Angeles Times lead editorial — “Definite Choices on Schools” — all but endorsed Bush over Gore. It questioned the cost of Gore’s “cradle-to-grave” program (“an astonishing $115 billion”) while crediting Bush for his “tenure as an ‘education governor’” with a “more real- world feel for education.” It concluded that “Bush’s leadership quotient in education is more impressive than that of Gore.” Steinberg said the editorial gave Bush “quintessential third-party validation,” and “should be enshrined, immediately, in paid issues advertising .... The Bush campaign needs to drop its beltway formulas and canned advertising and seize the moment ....” Had it done so, California women might have spared us all that excitement in Florida.

California political battles turn on ten thousand variables, few of which are under a campaign’s control or even subject to its influence. Campaign focus has to be on factors it can influence — an obvious point, too often forgotten. Some basics to remember:

1) To thine own self be true (or: trying to be all things to all people is a loser). Following the 1998 election, veteran Democrat campaign operatives said long experience has taught them the one position on abortion that voters will not accept is “on the fence” — because they won’t believe it. These Democrats implied Dan Lungren hurt himself by downplaying his pro-life position as a sort-of artifact of his Catholic upbringing, like wearing green, perhaps, on St. Patrick’s Day. It sounded like political expedience, not conviction, talking. Lungren compounded this perception when he said he opposed the measure to end bilingual ed because it violated the principle of local control of schools. The issue became Lungren’s trustworthiness. He seemed to be telling people what he thought they wanted to hear, not what he believed. Yet that is exactly what Republicans are advised to do by such “stop-fighting-the-new-reality” articles as that in The Christian Science Monitor or as written by Bill Whalen.

2) Polling is of real, but limited, value. Honest, competently-conducted tracking polls can help candidates take advantage of opportunities and avoid pitfalls in day-to-day campaigning. Just remember their limitations. Consider, for instance, all the certitude invested in the routine declaration that the voters are “pro-choice” on abortion.

It turns out to depend on how the question is asked. In 2000, a national Los Angeles Times poll found people inconsistent, to say the least, on the subject. 68 percent said no matter how they felt about it, abortion was ultimately a decision between a woman and her doctor. Okay, but what about the plurality — 46 percent — in the same poll who said abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the mother’s life (which would ban all but a very few abortions)? And the 52 percent who oppose their own daughters having an abortion? And the 57 percent who said it is “murder”? Plainly, a lot of people do not connect the dots, no matter how obvious they are. When they think of the “woman” (the pollsters being careful not to ask about the “mother”) who wants an abortion, and are reminded of America’s principle of personal freedom, and, perhaps, seeing themselves or their mate as potentially in such a circumstance, they favor “choice.” But when they think of the child and are asked about “murder,” they say that that is what abortion is. Adding it all up, about a third of those who say “leave it to the woman and doctor” also say most abortions should be illegal.

Another polling weakness leading to sharply diverging results is disagreement about “likely voters.” Since the primary, Field has put Davis ahead, first by 14, then later, by 7 points. But a series of private Democrat polls and Simon in- house polls has had the race anywhere from a dead heat to Simon 8 points up. It turns out Field is much freer in defining “likely” voters than the other pollsters. Does anyone know what turn-out will be?

The lesson for wise candidates is to use polls to serve your larger ends, take what they tell you with due skepticism, and never listen to your opponent telling you this or that poll “proves” you should abandon your core positions. He is not trying to help you.

3) Good campaigns include an effective “ground game” as well as a clear, effective message. This point, beyond the scope of this article, is considered eloquently and in detail by Senator Ray Haynes in this issue of CPR — See: “The Quiet Re-emergence of California Retail Politics,” page 19.

4) Less well-known candidates — obviously, for instance, Bill Simon — must project, through their campaigns, a clear, powerful, compelling image of themselves and of why they are running. Otherwise, the opposition will fill in the picture for them. November (1998) election exit polls, I am told, indicated that few voters knew GOP U.S. Senate candidate Matt Fong was, for instance, an Air Force Academy graduate. That information would have been a strong plus with many voters. To compound the problem, when the Boxer forces began pounding Fong late in the race on TV, Fong’s people chose to ride it out, hoping his theretofore high poll ratings would last at least until election day. They did not.

Several political professionals I have spoken with say Simon’s greatest vulnerability is that Davis will use his huge war chest for TV spots to fill-in the vague picture millions of voters still have of the Republican candidate in shades as dark as those applied to Matt Fong — unless Simon first fills in his own bright, clear picture.

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