Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
On the issues, there is not much daylight between the two candidates, but Republicans in San Diego seem to be circling around Jacobs.
California’s electoral system puts the top two vote-getters from the primary through to the general election, regardless of party. In the 53rd Congressional District in San Diego, that means two Democrats are battling to replace longtime incumbent Rep. Susan Davis, who retired suddenly last fall.
In the latest poll, policy adviser and anti–childhood poverty advocate Sara Jacobs, the top vote-getter in the primary, led San Diego City Council president Georgette Gómez. But the poll had as many undecideds as Jacobs supporters, and it came out days before Gómez had even started running ads. Jacobs had been up on TV and online for weeks, drawing on her immense fundraising advantage.
In some ways, the race follows a familiar arc to the progressive-versus-establishment skirmishes that dominated the primary cycle. Gómez, 44, a queer woman of color with decades of community-organizing experience, is one of just a handful of candidates on the ballot backed by progressive groups like Justice Democrats and endorsed by Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren. She faces Jacobs, a deep-pocketed foe with close ties to Big Tech and the corporate sector. But Gómez also has the backing of the California Democratic Party, and conservative groups like AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel. Which raises the question: Who is Sara Jacobs running for?
The race is becoming more contentious as the two candidates vie for the nearly 40 percent of voters who remain undecided.
The answer to that question begins biographically. Jacobs, 31, is the grandchild of Irwin M. Jacobs, co-founder of tech giant (and frequent object of antitrust attention) Qualcomm. The family, one of San Diego’s richest and most prominent, is worth well over a billion dollars, and much of that fortune goes to propping up Democratic candidates, when they are not pouring money into local philanthropic efforts, such as saving the San Diego Symphony from bankruptcy and generating community goodwill. They are not, however, a family of prolific taxpayers. In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders identified Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, Sara’s uncle and Irwin’s son, as the number 11 corporate tax dodger in the country.
For her part, Sara Jacobs paid $1.46 million in taxes on an income of $7.19 million last year, with a net worth of up to $65 million. She’s put more than $2 million of her own money into this congressional campaign, and her grandparents have funneled at least $1.2 million into a super PAC they recently created, Forward California, which has spent exclusively on her behalf. In a now bygone era, Jacobs would likely be donating, perhaps lavishly, to the candidate who was backed by the state Democratic Party and the Israel lobby. But that candidate, in this case, is her opponent, and Jacobs, like many of the country’s wealthiest people, has instead decided to take up the mantle herself, with the financial backing of her inherited wealth and the support of her family.
This is not the first time the Jacobses have spent big on her candidacy. In 2018, when Jacobs ran for Congress in the neighboring 49th District, her grandparents gave $2.5 million to an EMILY’S List super PAC, Women Vote!, which then turned around and spent $2.4 million of it on Jacobs’s behalf.
Jacobs’s campaign points to her nonprofit work at Project Connect (a UNICEF initiative to connect schools to the internet) and the anti-poverty group she founded and chairs, San Diego for Every Child, as examples of how she is able to bring together diverse and unlikely coalitions, in the absence of experience as an elected official. During the COVID-19 crisis, her campaign told the Prospect, San Diego for Every Child mobilized $55 million to support child care for essential workers and distance learning.
While Sara Jacobs has long worked in close proximity to her family’s charitable spending, the merger of their largesse with her political ambition has become a liability during the campaign cycle. Campaign finance law expressly forbids coordination between super PACs and the candidates they’re supporting, and Gómez has publicly questioned whether Jacobs’s grandparents’ super PAC, Forward California, which has spent only on Sara’s race, is truly independent from her campaign.
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Gómez and Jacobs debating earlier this week
According to Erin Chlopak of the Campaign Legal Center, campaign finance laws around super PACs focus more on how the money is spent, rather than how it is raised. She said that Forward California is likely in compliance with existing laws, but it does demand scrutiny. The personal relationship between the candidate and her grandparents is not “in and of itself coordination,” but it also doesn’t immunize Jacobs and her family. “It seems like that would be sort of textbook coordination, but it’s not under existing law,” she said.
Jacobs supports overturning Citizens United, and has publicly committed to not taking corporate donations or contributions from federal and corporate lobbyists. But this commitment doesn’t seem to include her grandfather. “It’s essentially allowing people to do something through the use of a super PAC that they couldn’t do without one,” Chlopak said.
The Jacobs campaign insists that her Michael Bloomberg–style brand of self-funding and family support do not contradict her support for campaign finance reform. “Sara would rather be able to run a campaign that she has invested in herself than sell her soul and her votes to lobbyists and special interests,” the campaign wrote in an email. (Jacobs’s campaign maintains she did not fundraise from mid-March to mid-June because of the pandemic.)
The Gómez campaign, along with the San Diego press, has also questioned Jacobs’s résumé, not for what she lacks in experience, but for how she’s characterized the experience she does have. “I am the only candidate in this race that actually has experience as a policymaker,” Gómez said in an interview with the Prospect. “I know what the difference is between being a public-policy advocate and a policymaker because I’ve been on both ends.”
Courtesy Jacobs Campaign
One GOP community activist says that Republicans should choose Jacobs because she “understands the importance of capitalism.”
But in a recent question-and-answer conducted by The San Diego Union-Tribune of both candidates, Jacobs insisted that she was the “only candidate” who has experience “making and implementing policy at the federal level.”
That may sound like typical campaign back-and-forth, but it underscores a substantive disagreement over what qualifies as “implementing policy at the federal level.” In an email to the Prospect, the Jacobs campaign said that at the State Department, Jacobs “drafted policy analysis and recommendations for her bureau, and in certain cases, briefed officials at the highest level of government.” According to the Union-Tribune, however, she was a contractor with IEA Corporation, which counted the State Department as one of its clients. While it’s common for the State Department to work with outside contractors, such individuals are barred by statute from actually making policy, though they can be instrumental to policymaking by conducting research, advising, and making recommendations.
The Jacobs campaign maintained that her federal experience makes her well qualified to hold federal office. “Sara is proud of the work she did at the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the State Department, at UNICEF, and as a foreign-policy advisor for Hillary Clinton. Questioning her professional experience is silly, and sexist,” her campaign wrote in a statement to the Prospect. She added that while she respects state and local government, she doesn’t think they “need to be stepping stones to higher office.”
When Jacobs ran in the 49th, similar questions about her résumé-boosting dogged her candidacy. The Jacobs family connections also unsurprisingly helped open doors. Information from the infamous WikiLeaks emails showed she got her job on the Clinton campaign after multiple appeals from a major Democratic fundraiser. (“She is happy to start out unpaid,” the emails repeatedly state.) Irwin and Joan Jacobs were on the list of Clinton campaign bundlers who raised more than $100,000 in 2016. The two gave a combined $400,000 to one Democratic PAC and another $50,000 to the Ready for Hillary PAC. The Jacobs family also donated more than $400,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund in 2016, and her grandparents hosted a Clinton fundraiser in their home. During the 2018 race, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta insisted that Jacobs had been well qualified for the Clinton job and garnered high praise from her recommenders.
That’s a much different experience in politics than that of Georgette Gómez, who The Times of San Diego has called “the up-from-barrio fighter for social justice who found ways to move San Diego’s needle even with council Republicans’ support.” Gómez, like Jacobs, grew up in San Diego, though their childhood experiences differ wildly.
Courtesy Gómez campaign
Gómez, despite her continued embrace of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, is not a spotless progressive candidate.
Gómez’s parents were both undocumented, and she grew up in a San Diego community that she says experienced a lot of environmental harm. She described a freeway that runs directly over a community park in her childhood neighborhood, and described inhaling the pollutants of car emissions.
“My grocery store was a liquor store, and my playground was surrounded by freeways,” she said. “Not that long ago, there was some major incident where actually a vehicle went over the freeway, landed in the park, and killed several people.”
Gómez was elected unanimously as president of the San Diego City Council, and she was able to bring aboard the city’s Republican mayor to pass compromise affordable-housing legislation. She also helped make climate a focal point in city conversations, pushing for the city to implement the Climate Action Plan—which she helped design and push for as an advocate and organizer.
On the issues, there appears not to be a ton of daylight between the two candidates, with both having voiced support for big-ticket progressive priorities like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Nonetheless, Republicans in San Diego appear to be circling around Jacobs. Calling the race choosing between “the lesser of two evils,” local GOP community activist Morgan Murtaugh writes that Republicans should choose Jacobs because she “understands the importance of capitalism,” and she “isn’t beholden to anyone,” a reference to AOC’s endorsement of Gómez. This is a feature of California’s top-two primary system, where Republicans get to vote and can determine the victor in intraparty Democratic general-election races.
Jacobs’s closing statement in television ads and mailers has been about the need for bipartisanship and lowering the cost of prescription drugs, a favored talking point of the GOP, with no mention of her previous commitments to Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. Notably absent, too, is any mention of the millions of dollars Jacobs has invested in pharmaceutical companies, private equity funds, and large banks, surfaced in recent reporting in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Nonetheless, California progressive Rep. Katie Porter endorsed Jacobs early last year before the jungle primary when there were still six candidates in the race. On September 15, Porter and Jacobs held a virtual town hall.
But Gómez, despite her continued embrace of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, is not a spotless progressive candidate, either. Two former AIPAC presidents have endorsed her for her pro-Israel stances. Over the summer, more than 60 Bernie Sanders delegates signed a letter to Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and other progressive groups calling on them to rescind their Gómez endorsement over her position on Israel. According to Sanders delegate Josie Caballero, none of the organizations have responded to the letter.
Gómez also voted in favor of a recent city council budget that increased police funding by$27 million, despite calls to defund. She defends this position because of the budget’s housing and COVID relief plan.
Her position on Israel has been particularly vexing, as the Jacobs family has long been active in support of the Israel lobby, while Democratic Majority for Israel, a conservative group that has opposed the more progressive candidate in races all over the country in 2020, is backing Gómez. Both candidates have shown disfavor towards Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
A recent opinion piece in the Times of San Diego questioned Gómez’s knowledge of one of her former staffer’s “illegal and unethical behavior—from multiple instances of stealing from Democratic clubs and campaigns to being paid by a labor union with business in front of the city while still working in Gómez’s City Council office.”
The race is becoming more contentious as the two candidates vie for the nearly 40 percent of voters who remain undecided. Last week, the Gómez campaign unveiled an ad campaign insinuating that Jacobs supported Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The Jacobs campaign bristled, claiming that she didn’t support the bill, just broadly supported lowering corporate taxes, a central feature of the bill (which might help explain why Jacobs has so much Republican support).
The two candidates held a virtual debate last Saturday, but largely avoided attacks on each other. As Election Day nears, winning undecided votes is becoming more and more urgent.
