Poizner walks back Trump-like positions
As he tries to make history as the first independent candidate elected to California statewide office, former insurance commissioner Steve Poizner is saying mea culpa for his past Trump-like stances.
Eight years ago, during his unsuccessful run for governor as a Republican, Poizner bemoaned the influence of undocumented immigrants and vowed to block them from receiving “taxpayerfunded benefits.”
He supported ending in-state college tuition for undocumented students, called for the California National Guard to deploy to the Mexican border, and endorsed a controversial Arizona law that allowed police to detain people they thought were undocumented. He even argued that public schools should refuse to enroll undocumented children.
Now, as he’s running for his old insurance commissioner job as an independent, Poizner insists he no longer supports those ideas.
“I regret the tone and direction that we took in that campaign,” he said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group editorial board this week, calling his approach in that race “wrong and harmful.”
Poizner says he now believes everyone who’s undocumented should be “put on a path to get documented,” and young people on the DACA program should be eligible for U.S. citizenship. He took his previous anti-immigrant positions while under “huge pressure” in a competitive primary race against former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, Poizner said.
“It really felt like a foxhole,” he said. “I will never ever, ever again run a campaign that has a divisive tone.”
But his Democratic opponents in the insurance commissioner race point to Poizner’s history of immigrant-bashing as a sign that his new independent branding is little more than political opportunism.
State Sen. Ricardo Lara, the son of formerly undocumented immigrants from Mexico, called Poizner’s decision to run as an independent “disingenuous,” and said he planned to educate voters about Poizner’s past statements on immigrants.
“You don’t forget those remarks about families like mine,” Lara, D-Bell Gardens, said in an interview. “You can apologize, but you can never take back the words that harm so many people.”
Poizner, a wealthy former Silicon Valley tech executive, was considered a political moderate before veering to the right during his bid for governor.
He says he now wants to be a pioneer for non-partisan politicians at a time when more and more Californians are declining to pick a party. More than 4.7 million voters — one in four — chose no party preference, according to the most recent data from January, nearly as many as those registered as Republican. There is no Republican candidate in the race for the obscure insurance commissioner job. Also running is Democrat Asif Mahmood, a Los Angeles doctor. Incumbent commissioner Dave Jones, a Democrat, is running for Attorney General.
Dan Schnur, a former Republican strategist who unsuccessfully ran for Secretary of State as an independent in 2014, said Poizner had a good chance of being the first person to win statewide office in California without a party affiliation.
“Steve has the benefit of having held statewide office in the past, as well as access to significant financial resources,” Schnur said. “He’s in a very strong position, much stronger than I was in my race.”
Still, there are some major structural hurdles for independent candidates. Under California law, they have “NPP” — no party preference — next to their name on the ballot, instead of “independent,” potentially confusing many voters.
Poizner, who voted for libertarian Gary Johnson for president in 2016, changed his voting registration to no party preference in January. He declined to say whether he had decided to run as an independent before or after doing polling about what that would mean for his candidacy.
Along with former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Poizner is the last person elected to California statewide office as a Republican. His decision to jump ship from the GOP this year could be bad news for the party’s leaders, who are trying to break Democrats’ stronghold on major elected offices.
“If he were to succeed, or at least get close, it would provide a roadmap for Republicans to political relevance as independents,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University. Other prominent candidates might follow his lead.
State GOP chair Jim Brulte did not respond to a request for comment.
Poizner plans to spend some of his own fortune on the race while also taking donations, although none from insurance companies.
If elected, he says he’d focus on beefing up efforts to combat insurance fraud, improving forest maintenance to reduce costly wildfires, and enforcing regulations on homeowner insurance.
“It’d be great if the insurance commissioner was truly independent of all partisan politics,” Poizner said. “If you want to be a partisan warrior, there’s plenty of places for that.”