{"id":198,"date":"2014-05-21T13:54:48","date_gmt":"2014-05-21T13:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.ruudmedia.com\/gsc\/?p=198"},"modified":"2017-12-06T14:00:43","modified_gmt":"2017-12-06T14:00:43","slug":"will-donnellys-candidacy-deal-a-deathly-blow-to-the-state-gop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/will-donnellys-candidacy-deal-a-deathly-blow-to-the-state-gop\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Donnelly\u2019s Candidacy Deal a Deathly Blow to the State GOP?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Democratic Political Consultant Garry South in studio at The Sacramento Bee in Sacramento on Wednesday, April 17, 2013.<\/p><\/div>\n

Let\u2019s face it, we already know who the next governor of California is going to be. Come 2015, it will still be\u00a0Jerry Brown.<\/a>\u00a0New boss, same as the old boss. He won his 2010 race by a solid 13 percentage points against a national-record $180 million spent against him by Republican Meg Whitman.<\/p>\n

Now, Brown\u2019s popularity is surging, he is drawing national acclaim that would make a lesser politician blush, and he\u2019s sporting a record of doing exactly what he said he would do so far in his second go-around as the state\u2019s chief executive. The wily survivor Brown could be on track to finish with an unheard-of 65 percent to 70 percent of the vote in November. If\u00a0Mother Teresa<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Nelson Mandela<\/a>\u00a0came back from the dead, they couldn\u2019t beat him.<\/p>\n

So the only real question is which sacrificial lamb will emerge as the Republican candidate against Brown \u2013 and how much collateral damage that candidate may do to the beleaguered GOP. Thirteen days from today, California will hold its first-ever top-two primary for governor, and six other statewide offices. The two highest vote-getters, no matter their party or the spread between them, will have a one-on-one runoff in November. Here\u2019s why this could be a near-death experience for state Republicans, already reeling from massive election losses in 2010 and 2012, and down to the lowest percentage of registered voters \u2013 28.55 \u2013 in the state\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

Brown will certainly finish first in the primary by a large margin. On the Republican side, the two main candidates are state Assemblyman\u00a0Tim Donnelly<\/a>\u00a0and former Bush Treasury official Neel Kashkari, both neophytes making their first run for statewide office. In a Field Poll last month, Donnelly was second to Brown with 17 percent, while the unknown Kashkari, although clearly the panicked Republican establishment\u2019s favorite, has been struggling to raise money and increase his exposure and had only 2 percent.<\/p>\n

Donnelly, who parenthetically bears an unsettling resemblance to Festus in the old \u201cGunsmoke\u201d TV series, by just about any measure would be one of the most radical candidates ever to run for governor as a Republican. In fact, one would probably have to go all the way back to former superintendent of state schools\u00a0Max Rafferty<\/a>\u00a0in the 1960s to find a Republican general election candidate as far to the right \u2013 and as vitriolic about it \u2013 as Donnelly.<\/p>\n

How off-brand, off-message and off-putting is Donnelly? Consider some key exhibits.<\/p>\n

In the mid-2000s, he joined the anti-immigrant Minuteman movement as a border vigilante. In a videotaped speech to a 2006 anti-immigrant rally, Donnelly\u2019s harangue compared Mexican immigrants to Islamic insurgents in Iraq, claimed that two-thirds of all\u00a0gang members<\/a>\u00a0in the U.S. were here illegally, asserted that 20 percent of those here illegally were rapists, murderers, child molesters and\/or terrorists, and compared the effort against illegal immigrants to the\u00a0Civil War.<\/a>\u201cWe are on the brink of a battle,\u201d he warned, \u201cthe likes of which this nation has not seen since 1861.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Donnelly was elected to the Assembly in 2010 from an isolated district in\u00a0San Bernardino County,<\/a>\u00a0he declared he was going to Sacramento to \u201cstart the war\u201d \u2013 presumably against the majority Democrats. \u201cI\u2019m going to reach across the aisles \u2026 and annihilate them and pound them into the ground,\u201d Donnelly promised.<\/p>\n

In 2011, Donnelly brought the state senator who authored Arizona\u2019s draconian anti-immigrant law to the Capitol in Sacramento for a rally. Most of the law was eventually overturned by the\u00a0U.S. Supreme Court,<\/a>and the Republican state senator, who was also president of the Arizona Senate, was recalled by voters in his own district. But it didn\u2019t stop Donnelly from introducing a similar measure in the Assembly.<\/p>\n

In 2012, as an incumbent Assembly member, he was stopped and arrested at Ontario airport for trying to carry a loaded .45 pistol onto a flight. The anti-gun-control Donnelly, who\u2019s been campaigning heavily at gun shows around the state, does not a have a permit to carry a concealed weapon and is now banned from using any firearm not registered to him.<\/p>\n

Recently, Donnelly was the single vote in the Assembly \u2013 72 to 1 \u2013 against a ban on selling any items with a representation of the Confederate flag in state-owned gift shops or on state premises.<\/p>\n

I could go on and on, but I would repeat myself. And by now, you get the drift.<\/p>\n

If Donnelly is the second-place finisher, as is likely, and moves on to November to face Brown, he will be a gift from heaven to Democrats trying to restore their two-thirds majority in the state Senate, and hang onto their supermajority in the Assembly in this low-turnout non-presidential election.<\/p>\n

Why? Because if Democratic legislative candidates are smart \u2013 and they are \u2013 they will make Donnelly a centerpiece of their campaign. How? By demanding that their GOP opponent either say they are voting for Donnelly, and thereby align themselves with his far-right views that are completely out of sync with most California voters. Or, distance themselves from him and denounce those views, and thereby risk alienating their own conservative Republican base voters.<\/p>\n

In other words, tea party darling Donnelly would be the perfect foil for Democrats in competitive and marginal seats. They should make Donnelly into the Barry Goldwater of 1964 or the George McGovern of 1972, in which candidates of both hapless nominees\u2019 parties were falling all over themselves to skitter away from them and save their own political skins. Brown himself could assist this effort by using what will be probably be a $30 million to $35 million war chest to help point out Donnelly\u2019s extremist views, instead of just ignoring him like a fly at a picnic.<\/p>\n

The California Republican Party assiduously has been trying to rebrand itself, particularly among minorities, after suffering massive losses of voters and elections, and after former GOP Gov. Pete Wilson alienated the state\u2019s fast-growing Latino population (currently nearly 40 percent of the state) by riding the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 to a come-from-behind victory in 1994.<\/p>\n

This is the 20th anniversary of that watershed event, which fundamentally changed California politics and rendered Republicans here increasingly uncompetitive and irrelevant. If the GOP follows that up with the rabidly anti-immigrant Tim Donnelly as a candidate for governor, they can say adios to any meaningful attempt to rebrand the party for a long time to come.<\/p>\n

\n

Garry South is a longtime Democratic strategist and commentator who managed Gov. Gray Davis\u2019s campaigns in 1998 and 2002.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s face it, we already know who the next governor of California is going to be. Come 2015, it will still be\u00a0Jerry Brown.\u00a0New boss, same as the old boss. He won his 2010 race by a solid 13 percentage points against a national-record $180 million spent against him by Republican Meg Whitman. Now, Brown\u2019s popularity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232,"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions\/232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garrysouthconsulting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}