California dreamin’
The Golden State primary will elevate the strongest in the Democratic field
IEL SEGUNDO, Calif. n Iowa, they pause for coffee at the Kum & Go convenience stores in crossroads scattered around the state. In New Hampshire, they engage voters in school gymnasiums and on town street corners. Here they appear on television.
They’ve been doing it this way for a third of a century. The greatest insight in modern California political history may have come in 1986, when Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston was fending off a challenge from GOP Rep. Ed Zschau. “A campaign rally in California,” Democratic political strategist Robert Shrum said at the time, “is three people sitting around a television set.”
Today, Mr. Shrum is the director of the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California. Perched in the state that cultivates change — that has made change the enduring characteristic of its culture — he believes little has changed.
Two weeks from now, California and 13 other states hold “Super Tuesday” contests awarding a third of the delegates required to win the Democratic presidential election. Campaigning in the most important primary of the most important campaign day bears no resemblance to what the other candidates did for months in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. The long-running candidates are recalibrating. Michael Bloomberg is watching his ads settle into the consciousness of California.
And though Mr. Bloomberg, reeling from a disastrous performance in the Nevada debate, may be attempting to be up close and personal with his television blitz, he is not doing it at close range and there is nothing personal about it. It isn’t a peculiarity of Mr. Bloomberg. It is a peculiarity of politics here.
“People here don’t go to political rallies,” Mr. Shrum said the other day. “After you fight your way home at night through the traffic, the last thing you want to do is to go out and go to a rally for some politician.”
That explains the Bloomberg campaign, though it doesn’t explain how a California-style campaign conducted without campaigning can be, according to a poll released last week by the respected Public Policy Institute of California, in a tie for fourth place with former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., who was in a virtual tie at the top of the first two contests.
But another factor explains why Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont holds a commanding lead in that poll, with 32% of those surveyed — far more than the 12% that both Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Bloomberg claim.
California, which voted Republican
in six consecutive president elections between 1968 and 1988, has voted Democratic the past seven elections, from Bill Clinton in 1992 to his wife, Hillary Clinton, in 2016. Ms. Clinton defeated Donald Trump by a margin of nearly 2-to-1. Her California bulge accounted for Ms. Clinton’s victory in the popular vote.
Once a bastion of conservative Republicanism, California now is a redoubt of progressivism, and Mr. Sanders suits this state just right.
This strain of modern California politics may not provide the breakthrough Mr. Bloomberg covets.
Politics here is sensitive to the inclinations of women and minorities, who have not found comfort in late-breaking stories about Mr. Bloomberg’s coarseness with women and concerns about his support for “stop-and-frisk” procedures in New York. Mr. Bloomberg has apologized for the latter. The former may still sting him.
Mr. Sanders’ lead is impressive, but more impressive is his 2to-1 lead over former Vice President Joe Biden as the candidate Democratic voters think is most likely to defeat Mr. Trump.
The Sanders support here skews young. More voters 44 and younger support the Vermonter than all the other candidates combined, according to the policy institute poll. A separate survey undertaken for Tufts University’s Tisch College shows Mr. Sanders leading younger voters in Texas, the second-biggest Super Tuesday delegate prize, by a substantial margin. The most intriguing element of the survey: 2 in 5 of these younger Texans plan to vote.
Perhaps. Less than half of those aged 18 to 29 voted in the 2016 general election — the only age group where a majority did not go to the polls. Earlier this month, in New Hampshire, that same demographic accounted for only oneseventh of those who voted.
Another uncertainty: late deciders. About half the New Hampshire electorate made its choice in the final days before the primary. (Mr. Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, of Minnesota, were the principal beneficiaries of those who kept their minds open until the end.)
Jack Kerouac, like this year’s presidential candidates marked by his life on the road, described California in 1957 as “wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.”
In the next two weeks, presidential candidates will come here, in person or on television, to forgather like birds. Most of them will leave broken-down. For Mr. Biden, for Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, almost certainly for Ms. Klobuchar, California is the crucial crucible of this campaign. And it is the great testing ground for Mr. Sanders and for Mr. Bloomberg, two New Yorkers California dreamin’.