Looks like Adam Schiff's big-dollar campaign of weirdly nice attack ads against Republican Steve Garvey in the California Senate race is not quite having the effect he thought it would have.
According to a left-leaning poll from the Los Angeles Times and UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, seen on RealClearPolitics:
In the primary, Garvey is favored by 27% of likely voters, Schiff 25% and Porter 19%. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) garners 8%, while 12% of likely voters pick a different candidate and 9% are undecided.
That's right: Garvey is now ahead of Schiff in a year when President Trump is leading all polls.
So Schiff's campaign to knock Democrat rival, Katie Porter, out of the top-two-on-the-ballot in November setup isn't working. Schiff put out television ads and mailers breathlessly saying Garvey voted for Trump twice, favors the border wall, and is "too conservative for California" to get Republicans to knock his Democrat rival out of the race. However, that may be working just a little too well, with Garvey now pulling ahead of Schiff in the multi-candidate race.
A poll like this looks like the campaign may have shot itself in the foot.
Sure, it seems to be an old California blue-state machine-politics trick for the top leftist to goose the Republican vote now that the election setup is to hold an open primary and then put the top two vote-getters onto the November ballot.
My own congresswoman, Qualcomm billionaire heiress Sara Jacobs, has been accused of this cynical election maneuver in San Diego back when she was first elected in 2020, apparently boosting the Republican candidate on the sly in a bid to get him into the second-place slot to sideline her other Democrat rivals and scarf up all Democrat votes, preventing a split. It didn't work because the Republican wasn't trying very hard to win, so the other Democrat, Georgette Gomez, ended up on the ballot anyway at the final vote. Jacobs won anyway, and I wrote about that here.
Gomez, though, wasn't done, and she filed an FEC complaint saying the pro-GOP mailers didn't say who they came from, amounting to illicit campaign spending of some kind. I have not found the result of that complaint, but in this matter, Schiff avoided that little issue by not hiding anything.
Here is my mailer from Schiff telling me, a registered Republican, that Garvey is "too conservative for California."
Apparently, Schiff thinks Republican voters are stupid and won't see the cynicism of what's going on. Like Eddie Haskell, he'd like them to know, Mrs. Cleaver, that Garvey is rising in the polls, and he's just too conservative for California, which, between us, he can't be because it's not allowed.
Of course, he wants to goose Republican turnout.
It's just that that's a risky game when jackasses play it. He must be counting on all the Californians who fled his state to propel him into certain victory with the remaining blue voters.
But in the Jacobs case, the GOP candidate only managed to get 10% of the vote. This 27% that Garvey has -- coming from a leftwing pollster and a much lower base in previous polls -- suggests Schiff may have motivated more Garvey support than he meant to. There is no way he would like to see polls with this much rocketing support for Garvey (topping even his own) with such a poll.
I won't say it won't work at this point, given that Schiff's vote is divided between many leftist candidates who are likely to pick Schiff over Garvey if those two emerge as the top two in November. But stranger things have happened in politics and this may be a wave year for President Trump. Could the unwaveringly pro-Trump Garvey ride those coattails as Democrats stay home, not wanting to give their votes to senile Joe Biden?
It's possible because anything is possible at this point. Schiff may be in the comeuppance of his life now that Garvey's voters now top his, and they haven't stopped rising.
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