Buck, Loretta and... friendJust over a week ago, we noted that Orange County Blue Dog Loretta Sanchez is, in effect, the Republican in this year's California Senate race. The dysfunctional jungle primary has, technically, thrown up two Democrats, Kamala Harris, a garden variety "liberal" corporate Dem, and the dull-minded, conservative Sanchez. In the primary last month the unexciting establishment-backed Harris won more votes (2,582,591) than Sanchez (943,002) combined with the 4 top Republican vote-getters (1,027,697). Sanchez's unlikely path to victory is to win over Republicans and galvanize Hispanic voters behind her, quite a task to do simultaneously... especially with the hated Trump as the face of the Republican Party. Today's Washington Post looked at her chances of doing so, pointing out that former L.A. mayor, Richard Riordan, a Republican, has already endorsed her.Sanchez’s chief strategist, Bill Carrick, told The Post that she will not change her "values or ideology" in an effort to appeal to Republican voters, pointing out that his dumbbell client (too stupid to be trusted to do an L.A. Times interview, is clearly left of center on certain issues such as abortion rights and that "many things about her are progressive... It would be ridiculous for her to all of a sudden start sounding like a Republican," he said. "That’s not going to happen." She doesn't have to change a thing and she's far from progressive. To appeal to Republicans she can just wave her voting record around-- long a moderate Republican or Republican-lite voting record. She's mainstream on most social issues and conservative on fiscal issues. In 1996, when she first beat far right Republican Bob Dornan for the Orange County congressional seat she now holds, it was believed one had to be pretty conservative to be elected and re-elected. She was. But the district, like California, has changed dramatically since then. By 2008 Obama beat McCain 59-39% and 4 years later, he gutted Romney in the formerly red district, 61-36%. The once lily-white is now 67.4% Latino and 11.3% Asian. Only 18% of the population is white. Democrats don't need a conservative porto-republican to win seats like CA-46 anymore.Carrick, though, attempted to fool the easily fooled Post reporter. "She comes from Orange County, and overall the county is Republican," he twisted and turned. Sanchez isn't from that [rapidly dwindling] part of Orange County. In 2012, Romney was pulverized in northern Orange County but overall he managed to beat Obama county-wide, 541,592 (53%) to 457,077 (45%). But those Republican voters don't embrace Sanchez as one of their own. To them, she's just a Democrat-- and a Hispanic. These are Darrell Issa voters, who won his part of southern Orange County with 66% of the vote, and Dana Rohrabacher voters who won his wealthy coastal enclaves with 61%.
Republicans make up 27 percent of California voters. In a Field Poll survey a week before the primary, Republicans were split when asked which Democrat they would vote for in November-- 26 percent Harris and 25 percent said Sanchez. Thirty percent of GOP voters volunteered that they would vote for neither. The poll showed Harris leading Sanchez 40 percent to 26 percent overall in a general-election contest.Both women are aiming to make history and are attracting national attention: Harris, who is Asian American and black, could become the only African American female senator. Sanchez, who is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, could be one of the first Latinas in the Senate. (Another Latina, Catherine Cortez Masto, is running for the retiring Harry Reid’s Senate seat in Nevada).Sanchez, 56, is seen as something of the underdog, fighting to mobilize the state’s Latino population after upsetting then-Rep. Bob Dornan (R-Calif.) in 1996 in a vastly changing district.She starts the general election with less name recognition and organizational support than her opponent, who has won two statewide contests. Sanchez has the support of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s BOLD PAC and some California labor groups, but she will not have the organizational support of a major political party or the state’s big labor unions. Harris has the backing of the California Democratic Party and labor giants such as the Service Employees International Union.Sanchez also has struggled to raise money. According to campaign finance reports filed three weeks before the primary, Sanchez had $1.3 million on hand out of $3.5 million raised during the past year. Harris had $4.7 million left over from $11 million raised for the primary.“Fundraising was a challenge, and we have to double down and work harder and do a better job in California and outside of California raising money,” Carrick said....“Loretta knows how to work with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. She is the leader we need in the U.S. Senate,” Riordan said last week in his endorsement statement.Sanchez might find an opening with independents, who make up 23 percent of registered voters in the Golden State. While the Field Poll showed them favoring Harris 40 to 26 percent in a general election, 28 percent said they were undecided....Harris’s pollster, in a conference call with reporters the day after the primary, questioned the strategy of a winning coalition made up of Latinos and Republicans supporting presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.“In all my years of doing California politics, I’ve never seen a coalition of Republicans and Latinos come together to support a candidate,” David Binder said. “And given this GOP nominee, with his insults toward Mexican Americans, it’s very difficult to see Latinos support candidates supported by Republicans going into November.”Luis Alvarado, a Republican strategist who also is Hispanic, said he is not supporting Trump, but he plans to vote for Sanchez in the general election.“Republicans will find Loretta to be the most conservative of the choices and most open to work with Republican leaders in the state,” Alvarado said this week. “Where AG Kamala Harris is seen to be an extension of the liberal movement in San Francisco, Loretta has proven to be an independent thinker who stands by her policy positions independently.”Kaitlyn MacGregor, spokeswoman for the California Republican Party, said she had “no comment on Republicans who choose to engage” in the Senate race, adding it was not a priority for the state or the national party. No Republican has been elected to statewide office since 2006.The campaign office for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) did not respond to a request for comment on the Senate race.Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, a Republican who left the House last year after more than 20 years representing parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, said he had “a great working relationship” with Sanchez.McKeon chaired the Armed Services Committee. “I’d watch her during votes, and she’d come over and be working our side on some issues,” he said. “She didn’t just come and sit down-- she’s moving all the time, so I respect that.”He said that he hasn’t followed the Senate race closely but that “people have told me her opponent is left of Boxer, and that would be enough for me.”“If I lived in California, I’d be voting for Loretta,” said McKeon, who now resides in Arlington, Va.
McKeon, who was long one of the most crooked conservatives in Congress while he served as the Rep. from the Santa Clarita Valley, is widely despised by California Democrats, who remember him as a racist as well as a self-serving careerist. (He cashed in on his work on the House Armed Services Committee and is now an unscrupulous arms lobbyist.) Loretta will have a tough time keeping that kind of foul stench from Republicans like McKeon from making her toxic to whatever Democratic supporters she may have.
