About Last Week…

So Toni Atkins announced her gubernatorial campaign last week.

Outside her close circle of friends and the all-powerful Sacramento Blob – conveniently the same thing in her case – no one noticed.

Sometimes candidates are no hopers, some run for vanity, some run for an actual policy reason, some run to keep other people from winning, some run because they’re bored, some run to keep a campaign account open to be able to play fast and loose with that, and some run because they are factory built for that purpose and nothing else – think Gavin Newsom.

It appears Atkins is running because she thinks she deserves another line on her resume.

The resume candidate is not a new phenomenon but it is one of the hardest to stamp out. Thursday, LA DA George Gascon referred repeatedly to his past jobs, usually when he didn’t want to directly answer a question.

That is the hallmark of the classic resume candidate.  

“So what are you going to do about the potholes?”

“I served as vice-chair of the regional transportation board for a year.”

Having a thick political resume is not an inherently bad thing, but it is even more abundantly clear that it is not an inherently good thing, either.  It means – unless you can point to something you actually tried to change – that you are most likely part of the problem.

Atkins’ resume is the kind of thing that impresses the Democratic political class but leaves most normal people wondering why – when she had so many chances at so many levels to keep the California of then from turning into the California of now – they should pay even the slightest attention.

San Diego council staffer, San Diego council member, accidental San Diego mayor, assembly member, state senator with positions of leadership in both houses. That’s twenty five years in a nutshell.

She does not have a scintillating personality, not too many legislative achievements, and a penchant for using hard political elbows; none of that exactly translates into a a potential groundswell of public support.

She is a lesbian – good for her – but she’s also white, cancelling out that diversity bonus.

All that being said, the competition for the job is not exactly a Murderer’s Row of exciting, popular political heavyweights.  Attorney General Rob Bonta, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, party fixture Betty Yee, and education Superintendent Tony Thurmond of “you’re my friend so have a job” fame are the competition so far.  

Scintillating.

As with Gascon, what needs to be remembered about all resume candidates is the simple fact that just because they had a bunch of jobs doesn’t mean they did those jobs well.

Speaking of doing a good job, Donald Trump is leading in the upcoming California GOP primary.  Really, really leading:

66 to 11 to 8 – Trump, then Nikki Haley, then Ron DeSantis.  

Calling this lead insurmountable is an understatement.  A year ago, DeSantis led, by the way.

As for what could happen in the race in the next seven weeks or so to change that, meh. Haley might do well in New Hampshire and better do well in her home state of South Carolina but then the rest of the country gets to vote and that’s the end of that.

So Trump will romp to victory here – does that mean he has a chance in November?

Nope. But it may not matter, anyway. Current polling – yes, still nine months away – makes California superfluous to a Trump victory and his showings in 2016 and 2020 were really bad.  In the rest of the country, Trump’s opponents see him as orange man bad; in California it’s ORANGE MAN BAD.

But the size of Joe Biden’s (presumably) victory here in November does matter. We are all told over and over again that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, so America really wanted her and she would be president if not for the settler/colonialist/evil/presumably white/capitalist electoral college.

Hillary won the national vote by 2,868,686. She won California alone by 4,269,978.

That means, in the other 49 states, she lost the national popular vote by 1,401,292 votes.

In 2020, Biden won the national vote by 7,059,526.  He won California by 5,104,121 – add in his margin in New York of 1,992,889 and Trump wins the popular vote in the other 48 states.

That, by the way, is why the electoral college exists – to keep one or two big states from utterly dominating the nation.  It’s not a flaw in the constitution – it’s a specific and intentional and well-reasoned feature.

Oh, and, yes, the numbers may be closer – or further – than they appear, depending upon which mirror you are using to view them.

But what they do clearly show is that if Trump can break 43-ish% of the vote in California, he can come close at least to making sure the national electoral and popular vote actually match.  Which would be nice.

Speaking of nice, there is an Australian TV show called “Utopia.”  It is a comedy set in the offices of the national government’s infrastructure planning agency. 

While that may not sound a perfect topic for humor, it really is and this clip caught my eye as it speaks to the California experience of government so well:

Thanks for reading the Globe!