Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
Ayla Johnson votes while holding her son Logan at a mobile voting station during a special election for California’s 25th Congressional District seat, May 12, 2020, in Lancaster, California.
No matter how you slice it, what happened in last week’s special election for California’s 25th Congressional District was not good for Democrats. In resounding fashion, Democratic hopeful Christy Smith, a state assemblywoman from Santa Clarita, was beaten by Republican defense industry executive Mike Garcia. While ballots are still being counted in what was an almost all-mail-in election, recent tallies had Garcia, a Trump endorsee, trouncing Smith by a double-digit margin in a seat won by Democrat Katie Hill by nine points just two years earlier. Smith conceded quickly.
There are the coronavirus caveats. Stay-at-home orders meant low turnout, which favored Garcia: older, whiter, and more-affluent voters tend to vote by mail already and predominate in low-turnout elections. And CA-25 had been in Republican hands for decades before it was flipped by Democratic newcomer Hill in 2018, who resigned late last year after revelations of an affair with a campaign staffer.
But the solace ends there. In the first special election of the pandemic era, where Trump’s brazen mishandling has led to the deaths of tens of thousands while being openly combative with California officials over the state’s response, Democrats were thumped by one of Trump’s gold-star flunkies. It marks the first time the GOP has flipped a Democratic-held California congressional district since 1998, over two decades ago. CA-25 may be purplish, but seat-flipping is not a phenomenon that tends to happen in both directions in California, especially with the latter-day Republican Party, especially under Trump. And the 25th District is not a rural backwoods that has been part of the Trump core, either; it’s the suburban corridor just north of Los Angeles, next door to a deep-blue urban hub and very much the suburban composition that Democrats have identified as their new wheelhouse. It backed Hillary Clinton by seven points, and Trump has long had a deeply underwater favorability rating there.
The favorable skew of a vote-by-mail-heavy, low-turnout election doesn’t quite explain the lopsided result either. Currently, Democrats enjoy a significant 6.6-point voter registration advantage in the district. Given the nature of the region, that margin would reasonably be expected to be growing. That means that Smith underperformed the registration expectation by almost 20 percent (and Hill, for that matter, by even more).
Defenders of the Democratic approach have looked to a number of possible explanations for how things could have gone so poorly. One common refrain has been that Democratic groups weren’t ultimately trying that hard to get Smith elected. The seat will be up for election again in November with the same two combatants. Those influential groups, which could have spent millions to get Smith elected now, were shrewdly saving money for the bigger battle to come, the theory goes. Indeed, House Majority PAC and EMILY’s List, which endorsed Smith, did decide in the run-up to the election that the Los Angeles ad market was too expensive to justify doing big buys on Smith’s behalf.
But that decision was only made after early signals that the race was already out of hand. In fact, the DCCC sunk a sizable $3 million into ads, research, and aid to the campaign, while the House Majority PAC spent $1 million during the March primary trying to keep Garcia from qualifying for the run-off against Smith, their chosen candidate. Meanwhile, Democratic operatives called in big-name endorsements to try to drive enthusiasm: former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren all gave Smith their seal of approval.
The other comforting explanation for Smith’s loss has been that the coronavirus thwarted the grassroots energy that would have propelled her to victory, or that complacency from activists shoulders the blame. But that doesn’t stand up to examination. According to an email sent to volunteers, one office in Southern California alone made 20,000 phone calls, sent 23,000 postcards, and sent 100,000 texts on Smith’s behalf since the March 3 primary.
So how did Katie Hill triumph where Christy Smith fell flat? It’s likely Hill got a bump from running during a midterm referendum election, a benefit Smith didn’t enjoy. But there are other crucial differences as well. Hill, like many of the successful House Democrats in 2018’s wave election, ran as an avowed progressive and enthusiastic supporter of Medicare for All. Hill ended up joining the New Democrat Coalition, a centrist group, in Congress; but she ran on progressive ideas. Smith made no such commitment; running as a safe centrist, her platform featured few of the progressive agenda items that excited voters one cycle prior.
In fact, the three big issues that made Democrats so successful in the midterms have all had cold water of varying degrees thrown on them by the rise of Joe Biden’s candidacy. It’s much harder for Democratic hopefuls to run on Medicare for All when their top-of-the-ticket standard-bearer is going on the news claiming he’d veto it. Biden’s presence is not going to drive turnout down-ballot for M4A candidates in November; if anything, his position precludes them from running as such.
Rolling out politicians who bring low enthusiasm because of their lack of motivating policy ambitions can meaningfully work against Democrats, even when the structural factors are working in their favor.
That same thing is true of money in politics, another top-line issue for Democrats in 2018. House hopefuls, both progressives and moderates alike, took pledges refusing corporate PAC money, and made getting money out of politics a foremost concern. This was always kind of a pose; Katie Hill rejected corporate PAC dollars but took money from the corporate-funded NewDemPAC; Christy Smith also rejected corporate PAC money, but accepted it for her state assembly races and initially hedged on a blanket rejection. But Joe Biden was a pioneer in embracing PAC money during the presidential primary. He was the first candidate to break his pledge to go without a super PAC and has repeatedly reneged on his money-in-politics commitments, which again forces down-ballot Democrats to cede the issue, lest they run in opposition to their own presidential candidate.
Finally, the Biden campaign has taken the air out of the gender politics that were so motivating in the 2018 cycle. While “Elect women” became a common rallying cry, and more women were elected to the House than ever before, the Tara Reade allegations have caused national Democrats to all but abandon their “Believe women” affirmation that emerged in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the Kavanaugh hearings. Now, Nancy Pelosi, the Biden camp, and others are championing due process instead, which, as Republicans found out in 2018, is not so potent a vote-getting slogan.
As it stands, Democrats are banking on the idea that Smith will fare better in November’s do-over, when Trump and Biden are on the ballot and a much larger and more Democratic electorate votes. But it bears repeating that the quality of the candidate does actually factor into how a candidate performs. Rolling out politicians who bring low enthusiasm because of their lack of motivating policy ambitions—like Smith, like Biden—can meaningfully work against Democrats, even when the structural factors, like a widely reviled president and a tanking economy, are working in their favor.
Smith may win in November. But there are meaningful lessons to be learned from Tuesday’s debacle, and Democrats would be foolish to repeat them in six months. It’s likely they will.
