San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Candidate’s party switch a big challenge
Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert is the person Republicans would cook up in a laboratory as their perfect candidate for California attorney general.
She’s a career prosecutor who put Joseph DeAngelo, better known as the Golden State Killer, behind bars. She takes a toughoncrime stance at a time when the GOP is trying to pin rising homicide rates on Democrats. She supports the death penalty, in contrast to Attorney General Rob Bonta, a progressive Democrat who is “very vehemently against the death penalty” because of its racist history.
Schubert lumps Bonta with progressive district attorneys like San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles’ George Gascón as prosecutors who “don’t really want to prosecute people.”
“We’re in a state of chaos in the criminal justice system,” Schubert said on The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast. It’s a refrain that has won her praise and endorsements from law enforcement and prosecutor organizations.
That said, Schubert has a big political challenge.
The lifelong Republican is no longer a member of the GOP. She left the party after being reelected to a second term in 2018 and is now registered as a “no party prefer
ence” candidate. Nathan Hochman of Los Angeles, a former assistant U.S. attorney general appointed by President George W. Bush, is the most prominent Republican in the race.
“I felt very strongly that the job of the district attorney and of the attorney general should be a nonpartisan issue,” Schubert said. “Public safety is not an ‘R’ or ‘D’ issue. So that’s why I made the decision to leave,” the party, adding that she had “no problems” with the GOP.
Schubert’s challenge is that nobody has won statewide office in California with an “NPP” next to their name on the ballot. Not only do independent candidates lack a party’s ability to blast their name across the state — and drop a few dollars on their campaigns — but voters almost reflexively vote their party registration. And right now, there are nearly as many registered Democrats as Republicans and NPPers combined.
Running independently will be especially challenging for Schubert, who is not well known outside of Sacramento. It was hard enough for former state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, the last Republican elected to statewide office, along with former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. And that was in 2006.
But when Poizner ran for his old job in 2018 as an independent, he lost to Democrat Ricardo Lara. If a wealthy, former officeholder like Poizner, who sold his GPS company to Qualcomm for $1 billion in 2000, couldn’t win as an independent, who could?
Schubert is unfazed by the prospect of running without the GOP’s imprimatur.
“There’s a reason why people are kind of fed up with politics,” Schubert said. “And I think California is ready to elect somebody that’s not going to allow this partisanship to enter a position that should be nonpartisan. ”
Nevertheless, she will need to win a lot of Republican votes in next year’s June 7 toptwo primary to get into a oneonone matchup, presumably against Bonta. Yet she has made one move that won’t endear her to the GOP grassroots who worship Donald Trump: Schubert told me she didn’t vote for Trump. Twice. (Hochman declined to say whether he voted for Trump.)
“I actually wrote in Condoleezza Rice both times,” Schubert said. “I just respected her.”
Schubert is going to rely on her record rather than Trump obeisance to win over Republicans. Like how she has been a leader in investigating the massive fraud at the state Employment Development Department. Or how she has been a national pioneer in using DNA evidence to solve cases.
But sometimes she veers into hyperbole. Like when she denounces the “rampant theft” going on across California. Crime decreased in the state’s largest cities last year compared with 2019, remaining near a decadeslong low, according to a study by the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.
“People say, ‘Oh, theft is down.’ Just because crime is not reported doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” Schubert countered. “Ask any of the retailers whether or not we’re really reporting all the theft. Ask people that are in San Francisco whose cars are broken into after five minutes of being left alone. Is everybody reporting? Of course not. They know nothing’s happening. They’re fed up.”
Some Californians may find Schubert’s history of police oversight problematic. Her office has reviewed more than 40 cases of police killings of civilians since she was elected in 2014, but has never filed any charges. She faced widespread criticism for not prosecuting two Sacramento officers who killed Stephon Clark, a Black man, in a widely publicized 2018 case. (ThenAttorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, also declined to press charges.)
Asked whether voters should be concerned about her oversight of alleged police misconduct, Schubert said: “I prosecuted the Golden State Killer, who happened to be a cop.” DeAngelo was briefly an officer in the 1970s. She added that her office has “cases pending against officers for using excessive force.”
“I follow the facts and the law. The law is the law,” Schubert said. “I’m not going to politicize it. I’m not going to decide something because, you know, somebody yells at me too much.”
While Bonta notes that he is California’s first attorney general of Filipino descent, Schubert would also make history if she won. She would be California’s first openly gay attorney general — only the fourth ever in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Her campaign doesn’t lead with that fact, but as Schubert said, “I’d be proud to be the first openly gay person as the AG in California, obviously. I don’t wake up every morning and say, ‘I’m a gay prosecutor.’ I wake up and say, ‘I’m a prosecutor and I’m gay.’ I also happen to have two kids and I love my children.”
A side note to that potential historymaking moment is that Schubert’s brother Frank Schubert, was the political mastermind behind Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that banned samesex marriage. Some LGBTQ organizations have opposed Anne Marie Schubert in the past for not speaking up against the ballot measure. She said it would have been inappropriate to take a position on it then when she was preparing to run for a judgeship. She said she did not vote for Prop 8.
In 2012, Frank Schubert told me: “I love my sister deeply, and I love her children. That doesn’t require me to accept that marriages should be redefined because my sister is in a gay relationship with two kids. I worry about anybody who doesn’t have the benefit of a loving, active father in their lives. And those kids won’t have that. I pray for them.”
Anne Marie Schubert said that “what he said in that article was deeply personal to me because I love my children and I think I’m quite capable. Two people, loving parents, no matter what their sex is, can raise very healthy children in this world. And that’s what I strive to do every day with my kids. So while I love my brother, I completely disagree with him on this issue.”