Dianne Feinstein: California’s senior senator learns she’ll be facing a Danville Republican in November.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Dianne Feinstein woke up Wednesday morning eager to learn that her new GOP challenger would be Danville autism advocate Elizabeth Emken, who took second in a field of 24 candidates Tuesday for California’s Senate seat.
Feinstein, 78, a Democrat seeking her fourth full term, came in first with 49.3 percent of the vote in the state’s first test of a new “top two” primary that allows the two highest vote-getters of any party affiliation to meet in the final election in November.
“The first thing I wanted to know was what the result was,” Feinstein said, adding that she went to sleep at 11 p.m. Washington time Tuesday night just as the polls were closing in California.
For political analysts, however, the results were a big yawn. No one, besides Republican Party officials speaking on the record, give Emken, 49, any chance of beating Democrat Feinstein in November.
Riding an endorsement and statewide mailings from the California GOP, Emken easily beat a wide assortment of littleknown competitors for the chance to take on Feinstein, winning 454,937 votes, or 12.5 percent of the ballots. But that was 1,346,485 votes short of Feinstein’s total, which topped 1.8 million.
“Now that it’s narrowed to two, we’ll see how happy voters are with Dianne Feinstein,” said California Republican Party Chair Tom Del Beccaro. Still, he conceded, “We understand that it will be difficult.”
Feinstein, a former San Francisco mayor, first won election to the Senate in 1992 after a failed gubernatorial bid against former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson in 1990. Feinstein won the special election to fill out Wilson’s Senate term, easily prevailing against Republican appointee John Seymour.
Since then, Feinstein has dipped below 50 percent of the vote just once, in her first election to a full term in 1994 against millionaire Michael Huffington. Feinstein edged Huffington 46.7 to 44.8 percent. In her last election in 2006, she swept up 59.4 percent of the vote.
“Sure I’d love to get 80 percent, but it is what it is, and I’m grateful for it,” Feinstein said of her showing. “Nothing’s a walkover. I never think anything’s a walkover.”
She said she would base her campaign on “using my seniority to benefit the state, to get immigration reform, to get my same-sex marriage bill passed, to get our water infrastructure up to date and, most important of all, to get California pumping economically again.”
Emken put to rest fears among Republicans that they might be represented in the nation’s largest state by “birther” candidate Orly Taitz, an Orange County Republican who insists that President Obama was born in Kenya.
Taitz’s name recognition, the result of multiple lawsuits she has filed and related media coverage, a gigantic field of 24 candidates, and a handful of unreliable polls showed Taitz had a chance to come in second.
Instead, she finished in fifth place at 3.1 percent, well behind third-place finisher Dan Hughes, another Orange County Republican.