'Be different'
Voter unhappiness was a common denominator in Tuesday’s election
By Jake Armstrong 06/10/2010
California voters sent a paradoxical message in Tuesday’s primary election, pitting a billionaire businesswoman who broke campaign spending records to promote her brand of fiscal responsibility against a career politician in November’s gubernatorial showdown.
Then, they changed the way Californians will choose their political candidates in the future, while simultaneously rejecting a foray into publicly financed political campaigns.
They also beat back corporations’ attempts to tinker with voter-approved car insurance regulations and to limit the power of the people to choose their community’s electricity provider, shooting down Pacific Gas & Electric’s Proposition 16 as well as Mercury Insurance-backed Proposition 17.
“If there is a common denominator, it is that the voters were not happy,” said Jack Pitney, political science professor at Claremont McKenna College.
In sending former Ebay head Meg Whitman, who spent a record-breaking $80 million on her campaign, to the governor’s race and tapping ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina to challenge Barbara Boxer in November, Republican voters overwhelmingly backed successful businesswomen who cast themselves as outsiders while using their personal fortunes to promote their brands of fiscal conservatism. Pitney said that mirrored voter sentiment that in 1992 led to the rise of Ross Perot, who positioned himself as an outsider though he earned his fortune selling computers to the government.
On the Democratic side, voters had few options given the limited number of candidates who would be viable against a billionaire in the governor’s race. So it made sense that the party’s voters chose current Attorney General Jerry Brown, who was governor twice before term limits were enacted and was widely seen as the best-equipped candidate to take on a Republican with a massive funding advantage, Pitney said.
“Obviously, he starts off with virtually universal name identification and deep experience,” he said.
Locally, incumbent Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, and Republican upstart John P. Colbert cruised through the primary with no opposition to face off for the 29th district in the fall, as did Assemblyman Anthony Portantino and GOP newcomer Alvaro Day, who will go head to head to represent the 44th Assembly district.
Voters’ dissatisfaction with the competence of government at all levels showed in the passage of Proposition 14, which does away with partisan ballots in most federal and state primary elections.
“I think the message is ‘be different,’ a lot like the term limit movement 20 years ago. Voters supported term limits because they wanted a different kind of politician,” Pitney said, noting one irony: “Of course, the politicians they were voting for right now are the ones produced by term limits,” Pitney said.
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