Steep climb to reach Senate
Feinstein rival lacks war chest, name recognition
Deciding to challenge a California political institution and a leader of his own party will turn out to be the easy part for state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León. He’s about to find out how many obstacles stand between him and an election victory next year over Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
De León faces significant disadvantages in funding his campaign. Practically everyone in California has heard of Feinstein, while almost no one has heard of de León — even the left-wing voters he hopes to energize by styling himself as a progressive alternative to the state’s senior senator.
And de León, 50, has to delicately navigate the most sensitive topic in the campaign — the 84-year-old Feinstein’s age. If he handles it badly, he’ll jeopardize not just his chances in the 2018 election, but his entire political career.
“Those were all the things that made it hard for him to jump in — and potentially hard for him to win, too,” said Thad Kousser, chairman of the political science department at UC San Diego.
Here is a look at some of the challenges that de León, a career legislator from Los An-
geles, faces against a senator who has been in office for a quarter of a century. Where will the money come from? Over the years, de León has been a successful fundraiser for his state campaigns. But almost none of what he’s raised can be used to run against Feinstein.
As of June 30, the deadline for the state’s most recent campaign finance filings, de León had $886,000 left over from his 2014 campaign for state Senate and $2.82 million from a onceprospective 2018 run for lieutenant governor. But federal campaign finance rules put most of it off-limits, because de León raised it under more lenient state laws.
California, for example, allows contributions of up to $4,400 for a state Senate race and $7,300 for lieutenant governor. In a campaign for U.S. Senate, however, the limit is $2,700 from individuals and $5,000 from a political action committee.
And the federal government doesn’t allow contributions from labor unions or corporations, major sources of campaign cash for politicians in the state capital.
In the first six months of the year, for example, de León’s campaign for lieutenant governor had five contributors that gave the maximum $14,600, $7,300 each for the 2018 primary and general election. They came from a school-employees union, a California dentists’ political action committee, the state building trades council, the state laborers union and the iron workers union.
That means de León starts with a bank account of zero. Feinstein raised more than $2.1 million for her Senate campaign in the first six months of the year, and had a total campaign fund of $3.57 million on June 30.
And Feinstein has another, huge advantage: She will tap her $79 million fortune to selffund her campaign if necessary, campaign adviser Bill Carrick said. How famous is Sacramento Famous? De León is a powerful force in state politics as the head of the state Senate. But the Sacramento area, where the Legislature’s activities get more local coverage than in most of the state, has only about 15 percent of California’s voters.
The last time he won reelection in his district, in Los Angeles, de León had to win over just 57,000 voters. When Feinstein won her last re-election, in 2012, she received 7.8 million votes.
When voters were asked in a Berkeley IGS poll in April whom they would want to replace Feinstein should she choose not to run, de León was named by just 3 percent of respondents — the same as Secretary of State Alex Padilla and San Francisco billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who is still mulling a Senate bid. Voters preferred seven other people to replace Feinstein before mentioning de León, including Ashley Swearengin, the Republican former mayor of Fresno, who was the choice of 22 percent.
Feinstein has nearly a halfcentury of public service, starting with her election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969. She not only has widespread name recognition, Kousser said — “she has a trusted brand name. People know what they are getting with her.”
That said, Kousser pointed out that “nobody knew who the hell Barack Obama was when he ran for the Senate (in Illinois in 2004). He had much less of a policy record than Kevin de León had.”
“But,” Kousser said, “the big difference was that Barack Obama wasn’t running against Dianne Feinstein.” How are they different on the issues? While de León intends to run to Feinstein’s left by emphasizing his opposition to President Trump and his support for single-payer Medicare-for-all, on many other domestic issues “they’re in pretty close alignment,” said Bill Honigman, the California director for the national Progressive Democrats of America.
Although the organization disagrees with Feinstein’s past support for the Patriot Act and the Iraq War, “we don’t know much about (de León’s) position on national security issues,” Honigman said.
And while there is a lot of frustration with Feinstein from California’s left, 50 percent of voters still approve of the job she’s doing in Washington — including 73 percent of Democrats — according to a Berkeley IGS poll taken in September. People with no party affiliation approved of her performance by 41 to 36 percent.
Given de León’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president both in 2008 over Obama and in 2016 over Sen. Bernie Sanders, independentVt., “he is going to have a lift with progressives, there’s no doubt,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the progressive National Nurses United, which has 100,000 members statewide.
Still, DeMoro said, “the fact that he would break away and challenge the political establishment will speak highly of him to the progressive community.” The O-word: One of de León’s biggest challenges will be drawing a generational contrast between him and Feinstein without being seen as ageist. The Berkeley IGS poll in April found that 56 percent of respondents would support Feinstein’s re-election, but that dropped to 50 percent when they were told of her age.
However, analysts say de León has to be careful about using phrases such as “her time has passed,” because “basically you’re saying she’s old,” said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor of the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan analyst publication about Congress.
“He has to stay positive and explain how he embodies the new California,” Kousser said. “The voters know who Dianne Feinstein is. They can draw their own conclusions.”