Battleground: How much chance do we have for ‘compromise and civility’?
The Bay Area isn’t a battleground for the midterm election and Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot. The real action in the fight for Congress is downstate and across the country, but when voters here head to the polls Tuesday, nearly everyone will be channeling two years of pent-up rage and righteousness just the same.
Bulbul Gupta of Palo Alto is fed up with “this never-ending insanity that’s coming out of the Trump Administration,” while Carol
McManus of San Jose is so “utterly disgusted with Democrats that I’m voting party line to keep them out of power.”
San Jose lawyer Josh Gilliland is furious over how Trump and Republicans have demonized immigrants, while La Honda trucker Rick Rogers is alarmed about how the “completely insane” Democrats are ignoring the “foreign invasion at the border.”
In this red-hot rhetorical universe, Oakland firefighter Dan Robertson’s notion of carrying his hopes for “compromise and civility” to the ballot box on Tuesday seems almost quaint.
Since Trump’s shocking victory in 2016 — when three in four Bay Area voters cast a ballot against Trump — everyone on the political spectrum has endured months of social media smackdowns and toxic dinner table debates.
Although the 2020 presidential elections may not be for another two years, perhaps more voters than ever
before consider the midterms just as crucial, for either keeping power or shifting it. It is a test of passion and a test of turnout — who is more motivated and who shows up to express it — and perhaps a litmus test of what’s to come.
“Regardless of where you stand there is an incredible amount of energy in the country building up in the last two years,” said Dilawar Syed, a Redwood City health care entrepreneur and Democratic activist. “So many issues have affected so many. This is the first time to pull that lever at the ballot. There is energy. There is no doubt.”
Voter registration is at record levels, Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced Friday, with even more Californians — nearly 19.7 million — registering for the midterms than did for 2016’s presidential election. A Stanford poll released just days before the election shows that a staggering 83 percent of California voters say they will definitely vote this election. Some 45 percent say they are angry a few times a day about something they’ve read or heard and another 29 percent feel the same
way at least once a day.
Just ask Rogers, the La Honda trucker.
“I see this as the most important turning point in America’s history because of how crazy the Left is,” he said. “This over-the-top liberal lunacy. It’s just nonstop.”
And then there’s Julie Cecilio, a senior director of sales at a San Jose tech company, who has an equal and opposite reaction.
“I feel like we’re at a tipping point on a lot of issues,” said Cecilio, who helped start a “Solidarity Sundays” chapter to maintain the momentum of last year’s Women’s March. “We’ve got to get organized now so we can hopefully shift Congress enough to stall some of what I think are extraordinarily disruptive policies and governing long enough for us to get a reset in two more years.”
For Karen Thorpe, 81, of San Jose, the names on her ballot may be Feinstein and Newsom, but it’s all about Trump.
“This isn’t a presidential election, but I don’t want him back. That’s my main thing,” Thorpe said while dropping off her ballot at the Santa Clara County
registrar last week. “The interim election will have a lot to do with who stays in power and I can just be on the side of him not getting any more power, and my little vote will do that.”
In Alameda County, 19-year-old Amanni King of Oakland was inspired to vote for the first time, and drop off her ballot early.
“It feels good because my voice is being heard now,” she said, “so I can continue to make a difference.”
While it might seem that each party is fully entrenched, Gilliland, a San Jose lawyer incensed over immigration rhetoric and Trump’s “kowtowing to despots,” is taking a different tack.
“I’m a lifelong Republican and I just voted a straight ticket Democrat,” said Gilliland, who made his first political switch when he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but was intent on “sending a message” when he dropped off his ballot in San Jose last week. Voting in the midterms certainly “won’t solve all the problems,” he said, “but it’s important to take a stand.”
A recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of
California found that a record high 7 in 10 voters are more enthusiastic about voting than normal this time, with more than half saying they are either extremely or very enthusiastic. But it’s not California politics that’s necessarily motivating them.
Most Californians think California is heading in the right direction, “but they definitely were more pessimistic of the direction of the nation,” said Dean Bonner, the PPIC’s associate survey director. “Fiftyseven percent said the nation was heading in the wrong direction.”
Without finding a cause celebre on their own ballots — a number of local measures are complicated and obscure and most statewide offices such as governor look like shoo-ins for Democrats — many Bay Area voters are channeling their energy to battleground districts in the far reaches of California and elsewhere to try to flip the Republican majority U.S. House and Senate.
Gupta, who marched in Palo Alto to support Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, flew to Houston over the weekend to canvass for U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke as well as upstart congressional candidate Lizzie Fletcher, who is trying to unseat Republican Rep. John Culberson.
Syed — the Redwood City health care executive — hosted a fundraiser in his home last week for Central Valley congressional candidate Josh Harder, who is in a tight race against incumbent Republican Jeff Denham.
With all the angry voters around, you’d think Kristin Podulka would be on top of the cynical list — both her efforts to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 and deny Brett Kavanaugh a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court just weeks ago failed. But she remains optimistic. It helped that she attended a YWCA luncheon last week where Anita Hill spoke and promised, “I will not retreat now,” and that she continues to write letters to voters in swing states encouraging them to vote Democratic.
“Doing something is better than doing nothing,” Podulka said, “Any action helps me feel powerful, because if we feel powerless then we quit.”