OC Political

In my effort to keep our readership happy and provide some interesting content on the blog while we all wait for the filing period for the November General Election to commence, I will be giving an analysis of each race (not including races with a Custom Campaigns client in it) detailing what happened. Each race will be analyzed with an Orange County perspective in mind.

I will be waiting a few weeks on my analysis of the race for California State Controller because the race is ridiculously close between 2nd-4th place and I want to know for sure who is advancing before I analyze this one. On a side note Chris Nguyen has informed me that he will be doing his analysis of different races with heads on the map (he did these in 2012).

We will start by taking a look at the race for Governor. Under the  Prop 14 rules the top two candidates advance to number regardless of how high a percentage the top vote getter receives. This is good news for Neel Kashkari who advances to November but faces a steep uphill battle. Here are the statewide results on the race:

These results show Tim Donnelly running fairly closely to Neel Kashkari statewide but surprisingly in conservative Orange County Kashkari had a much wider margin of victory over Donnelly as can be seen by the results:

Looking at results from the different cities in Orange County Neel Kashkari managed to finish ahead of Donnelly in all but one city. I was shocked to see that the city Tim Donnelly finished ahead of Neel Kashkari in was Santa Ana of all places by a margin of over 500 vote (vote counting is not quite over yet).

Statewide though Jerry Brown dominated most counties however it was Tim Donnelly and not Neel Kashkari that pulled off a win in a couple of counties (Modoc & Lassen). Here is a map from the Secretary of States website that shows the winners by county.

Donnelly ran a more grassroots campaign relying on members of the tea party and other conservative groups to help spread his message spending a grand total of $585,000 on the race including the following major categories of expenditures (expenditures are through 5-17-2014):

Consultants $220,000
Campaign Literature/Mailings $9,000
Campaign Paraphernalia/Miscellaneous $4,000
Television/Cable $0

Kashkari definitely ran a more aerial campaign as can be seen from his campaign finance reports were he spent over $2,500,000 on the race including the following major categories of expenditures (expenditures are through 5-17-2014):

Consultants $340,000
Campaign Literature/Mailings $237,000
Campaign Paraphernalia/Miscellaneous $9,000
Television/Cable $1,000,000

Jerry Brown is clearly waiting for November with his campaign spending less than $100,000 in June.

At the end of the day numbers don’t lie and Jerry Brown is in a very strong position going forward to November. Despite low Democratic turnout Brown managed to capture over 50% of the vote statewide. Kashkari is going to be attacked by Jerry Brown in messaging to conservatives (who already were likely in the Donnelly camp) that Kashkari voted for Obama and ran TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). With increased voter turnout in November for Democrats and the possibility of some conservative voters sitting out this race Jerry Brown is at a definite advantage going into the November election. Financially Brown has over $20,000,000 cash on hand while Kashkari has just $1,400,000 which is a substantial deficit to start things off.

I am not going to make a prediction on this race though because Neel Kashkari did run a much stronger campaign than Donnelly and despite facing tough odds against Jerry Brown the CRP has been a bit revitalized with Jim Brulte doing an excellent job since taking over. I look forward to seeing Kashkari run a much stronger and more competent campaign than Meg Whitman did in 2010 (he can start by keeping the axe off of future mailers).