Key race sets off alarm bells for state’s progressive Dems
Democrat Conor Lamb, who shocked the nation with an apparent win in a strongly pro-Trump Pennsylvania congressional district, is anything but the “San Francisco liberal” that Republicans love to scorn.
And that’s one reason why his surprise victory could be bad news for the true progressive Democrats looking to flip GOP seats in California.
Lamb was leading Republican Rick Saccone by a few hundred votes Wednesday with 100 percent of precincts reporting and all the absentee ballots counted from Tuesday’s election. He vowed during the campaign not to support House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said he was personally opposed to abortion and declined to say much about the environment in a district that’s in the heart of steel, coal and natural gas country.
“Let me tell you what kind of Democrat Conor is,” Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said at Lamb’s rally Sunday. “He’s a God-fearing, union-supporting, gun-owning, job-protecting, pension-defending, Social Security-believing, health carecreating, and sending-drugdealers-to-jail Democrat!”
Contrast that resume, care-
fully crafted to appeal to conservative-leaning voters in a district Trump won by 20 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election, with that of Democrat Andy Thorburn, a former teacher and businessman running for the Orange County seat of retiring GOP Rep. Ed Royce.
Thorburn, a first-time candidate, is calling for a statewide ban on fracking, enactment of a “Medicare for All” single-payer health plan, a $15-an-hour minimum wage and tough new gun-control regulations. He has the endorsement of Our Revolution, a progressive group founded by veterans of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and the California Nurses Association, arguably the state’s most liberal labor group.
“Momentum Continues Among Progressives, Activists in Thorburn’s Bid for Congress,” read a news release sent out this week that announced a new round of endorsements.
Thorburn is far from alone among the many Democrats challenging Republican incumbents this year. Singlepayer health care, a much higher minimum wage and pumped-up gun laws are all mainstream proposals for California Democrats and show up on the “issues” list of plenty of those candidates, including the ones running against Orange County Republican incumbents like Mimi Walters and Dana Rohrabacher.
The question, though, is whether those core progressive Democratic stances can hold up in districts that conservative Republicans have held for decades.
While Democrat Hillary Clinton beat Trump in seven of California’s 14 Republican-held congressional districts, in only two of them has any Democrat other than Clinton won a majority of the votes in any election, according to a report Tuesday by Darry Sragow and Rob Pyers of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which reports on state election races.
“In places like San Francisco and Berkeley, candidates can run to the far left and win because the voters share their views,” said Sragow, the book’s publisher. “But in the Central Valley and Orange County, the people who inhabit those districts and cast the votes aren’t ideologues. You’re going to have to have a more nuanced approach.”
While progressives don’t disagree that Democratic candidates need to fit their districts, they argue that those districts — and the ideology of their voters — have changed dramatically in California.
The state — and the Democratic Party — has shifted, said Mac Zilber, a consultant for Thorburn and other California candidates.
“You no longer need someone who’s a ‘Republican lite’ to win those (more conservative) seats,” he said. “It’s not going to be a ‘left versus right’ axis, but a consistent stand on the bread-and-butter issues that appeal to voters.”
Republicans are eager to tag Lamb’s apparent victory as a one-off, a perfect storm of a lousy GOP candidate and a young, telegenic Democrat who basically ran as a Republican.
Speaking to reporters at the weekly GOP leadership news conference Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said the Pennsylvania race was a contest between “two conservatives” and that Lamb ran as a “pro-life, pro-gun, anti-Nancy Pelosi conservative.”
Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, said on Fox News Tuesday night that if the Democrats had run “a Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton candidate, (the race) wouldn’t be close,” adding that a Democrat taking the more moderate stances that Lamb did wouldn’t win against a more liberal candidate in a party primary.
Democrats agree that the Pennsylvania race was a unique political situation, but suggest that what happened there has little to do with the campaigns in California.
“There isn’t a targeted district in California that’s nearly that Republican,” said Drew Godinich of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Lamb ran a campaign that matched that district, and I’m going to trust the Democrats who run those campaigns and live there to understand the values of their districts.”
Democrats, better than Republicans, understand that the old GOP bastions are very different from how they have traditionally been viewed.
The old Orange County, which was a virtual synonym for “conservative Republicans” doesn’t exist any more, but Republicans officeholders “expect they can vote like they did 30 years ago,” Godinich said. “That’s not going to cut it.”
But Democrats, even as they see the state shuffle to the left, still must be wary of moving too far, too fast.
“Both parties are perpetually engaged in a dispute with the far edges of their parties, the progressive left for the Democrats and the conservative right for the Republicans,” said Sragow of the California Target Book. “But voters don’t walk around with a ‘P’ or a ‘C’ on their foreheads.”
Most California voters fall somewhere in the political middle, sharing a mix of liberal and conservative views, he said.
There are plenty of Californians who are “unhappy with gun control, but support single-payer, much to the dismay of political analysts,” Sragow said. “You can’t put them in a progressive or conservative box because most people have a range of views ... but if you want to win elections, you have to appeal to those people.”