CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2016, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2016, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“THERE SHOULD BE NO WAITING AROUND BY SANCHEZ”
Once California’s primary election
season ends in early June, most candidates go into a sort of stasis for almost
three months, until just before the traditional Labor Day start of the fall
political season.
But if Loretta Sanchez is smart – and
no one ever suggested she’s not – she will not wait months before resuming an
aggressive campaign for the U.S. Senate. Sanchez on Election Night in June eased
into a November runoff against state Attorney General Kamala Harris, beating
out five Republicans who split the GOP vote while Democrats – already more
numerous – were only divided two ways.
There’s every reason to believe that
if Sanchez slacks off over summer vacation, she’ll put herself out of politics
indefinitely. Every post-primary poll has shown she lags far behind Harris.
Just such slacking off is a California
political tradition. To keep campaigning means keeping up the spending and
energy levels of the primary season. Just a month before the June 7 primary,
Sanchez had raised slightly over $2 million, a paltry sum compared with the
usual $30 million to $40 million that’s spent on successful top-of-ticket
California races.
The best historical lesson about what
can be accomplished by staying active on the campaign trail was taught in 1978
by current Gov. Jerry Brown, when he sought reelection to a second term during
his first gubernatorial era.
When the primary ended that year,
incumbent Brown trailed his upcoming Republican challenger, the popular state
Attorney General Evelle Younger, a former district attorney of Los Angeles
County, in all polls. California was not yet a safe Democratic stronghold state
in that era.
But Younger took the traditional path.
Just after the primary, he left for Maui and stayed on vacation almost a month,
figuring no one would heed politics until summer’s end. But that year was
volatile, just like 2016. In the June vote, Californians had passed the
landmark Proposition 13 property tax limits over Brown’s objection, so there
was plenty to talk about.
And Brown did. Overnight, he pivoted
from the Jarvis-Gann Initiative’s leading opponent to its foremost enabler. He
traveled up and down the state, campaigning not merely for himself but also
discussing how the new property tax law could be codified and made to work
smoothly without destroying public education, parks and other services the
initiative’s opponents had worried about.
Brown put up two series of television
commercials that summer, too. He was seemingly everywhere, campaigning far
harder than his current older incarnation ever has.
All this buried Younger, who became a
sure loser in the fall, and was finished politically.
Observed Brown later, “You get some
results when you advertise prolifically and no one else is on the air.” For
him, that was a vast understatement.
No one has needed even to consider this
kind of summer campaigning in recent years, when incumbents like Brown, Arnold
Schwarzenegger and U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have not felt
seriously threatened after the primary. Partly, that’s been because California
became a “safe” Democratic state and partly that’s because none of their
opposition was either well-funded or determined enough to go on a summer
offensive.
Helping make summertime campaigning
effective is the reality, documented in a broad body of psychological research
going back to World War II, that the more often people hear positive messages
about a person they have only recently begun to like, the more solid that
feeling becomes.
This could make a post-primary offensive
from Sanchez extremely effective, especially because even though Harris has
been in office six years and has vast poll leads, she’s somewhat lesser-known
than many other public officials of similar status.
It also means, of course, that Harris,
could conduct a summer offensive of her own, especially since she had far more
money on hand than Sanchez at the last reporting date. But a radical departure
from traditional politics seems more up the Sanchez alley, since she’s by far
the more outspoken of the two.
That’s a quality she’ll need to take
advantage of, because she starts the runoff as a distinct underdog, just as she
did in the primary season.
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
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