Strong Mayor? Why? Part 4

The expensive push by out-of-town oligarchs to crown Kevin Johnson as “strong mayor” of Sacramento has spawned a lot of dubious arguments. But the most wrong-headed is the one being retailed by the mayor’s cheerleaders at the Sacramento Bee. Measure L is about Sacramento’s future, they tell us, “this decision should not be about Mayor Johnson.”

In fact, the strong mayor push has always been about Johnson. He and his allies started agitating to give him more power from the moment he was elected in 2008. When their first effort was ruled unconstitutional by the courts, they kept at it, until a city council majority finally agreed last year to put it on the ballot.

In other cities that have voted on strong-mayor measures, it’s been typical to have voters first decide whether they want a strong-mayor system, then separately elect a mayor fit to fill the newly expanded role. Not in Sacramento. Passage of Measure L would immediately give more power to Johnson.

And perhaps only to him. The strong-mayor powers in Measure L go away at the end of 2020 unless voters approve them a second time. Is there anybody who believes that the coalition backing Measure L—billionaire fat cats, developers, sports owners, cops, firefighters—will be ponying up another $1 million in campaign cash to extend the strong mayor if the likely mayor after 2020 were to be a liberal environmentalist, a pension reformer like San Jose’s Mayor Chuck Reed, or a fiscal conservative opposed to welfare for sports owners and other corporate rent-seekers?

No, forget the Bee’s silly argument. Measure L is about Johnson, and nothing else. The voters’ decision about the strong-mayor system is inseparable from the question of whether Kevin Johnson is qualified for promotion to chief executive officer of the city.

What do we know about Johnson’s executive skills? His only prior management experience was running St. HOPE, a small Sacramento non-profit organization. A federal investigation by the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service found that Johnson, in that management role, diverted federal grant money to personal use; illegally forced AmeriCorps members to live in and pay rent on apartments owned by Johnson’s own development company; and illegally required AmeriCorps members to campaign for his favored candidates in a local election.

On one occasion he entered the apartment of an AmeriCorps member he supervised, climbed uninvited into her bed, and put his hand under her shirt. When the young woman reported the sexual harassment to St. HOPE personnel, Johnson sent his personal lawyer to ask her to change her story and later offered her $1,000 a month to keep quiet. In the midst of the federal investigation, a St. HOPE board member was sent to delete Kevin Johnson’s e-mails from the St. HOPE computers, e-mails then under federal subpoena. The superintendent of St. HOPE’s charter schools resigned in protest of these incidents and of other mismanagement and misappropriation of funds by Johnson, as did two widely respected members of the St. HOPE school board, Bernard Bowler, a businessman, and Robert Trigg, former superintendent of Elk Grove schools.

Johnson’s record of managing his current mayoral duties follows the same pattern. A top aide stole more the $19,000 from taxpayers by charging personal items to a city credit card. The state’s Fair Political Practices Commission has fined him twice for failing to report dozens of gifts from businesses and corporate foundations to his political machine’s front groups. In 2012, as the lead city council opponent of the Measure U tax increase to balance the city budget, he was designated to write the opposing ballot argument. He forgot to submit it. “As a result, no argument against Measure U was included on the ballot,” the Sacramento County Grand Jury found.

Over the course of my career, I’ve often been involved in hiring decisions. I think it’s fair to say that on none of those occasions, in either the private or the public sector, would a candidate with Kevin Johnson’s record have been considered an appropriate choice for even a minor supervisory position, let alone chief executive officer of a $900 million-a-year enterprise with more than 4,000 employees, the position he is seeking with Measure L. In fact, hiring a manager with that record would likely be seen in court as recklessly negligent, putting at risk both the property of shareholders and the safety of employees.

And it’s also fair to say, I think, that the same standards would apply to hiring at the companies of the oligarchs funding the Measure L campaign. Theft of public funds, political corruption, sexual harassment of employees, coverup, neglect of oversight and rules—that’s not the résumé you want to send when you apply for a management job at Apple, Disney, Bloomberg, or even the Sacramento Bee.

So here’s the question that hangs in the air, unasked by the media and unanswered by the oligarchs behind Measure L: If you would never hire someone with Kevin Johnson’s sleazy record to manage your own businesses, why do you insist he’s good enough to manage our city?

Strong Mayor? Why? Part 3

Like every reform, the push in Sacramento to crown Kevin Johnson a “strong mayor” is an effort to change the rules of a political game. And like all such reforms, it comes wrapped in rhetoric about good government. But as we’ve seen in the last two posts, reality doesn’t confirm the rhetoric. Council-manager or strong-mayor system: the choice doesn’t matter to how well a city is run or responds to its residents.

So voters are left to judge Measure L, a change in the rules of the game, by how it will affect who wins. When the clerics in Iran fiddle with the election rules or Vladimir Putin and his oligarch buddies change the constitution in Russia, we understand immediately: Reform is about making it easier for one team to win. It’s no less true when it happens closer to home. If you want to understand the push by Sacramento’s wealthy and powerful for Measure L, think of it as Putin envy.

The backers of the push for “strong mayor”—developers, downtown property owners, public safety unions, the consultants and fixers who hang around city hall—have been power players in city politics for decades. Often they’ve won policy fights and elections. But not always.

Vladimir Putin

There have been checks on their power: independent politicians like Mayors Anne Rudin and Heather Fargo, who had support from women’s, neighborhood, and environmental groups; strong liberals like Joe Serna and Grantland Johnson, whose background in civil rights and labor struggles gave them a commitment to broad sharing of public resources; active and resourceful neighborhood groups; scrutiny by the Sacramento Bee operating in the McClatchy family Progressive tradition of distrust of concentrated private power in business or labor.

But in the Kevin Johnson era the balance has tipped toward the powerful. Ambitious, pliable, and lacking a reliable ethical compass, Johnson has been a perfect front for the dominant coalition: a celebrity African American basketball star with proven ability to attract attention and cash from the corporate foundations and donors that drive so much of the policy agenda of this new Gilded Age. Over the last six years Sacramento has seen the rise of a shadow city government, dubbed K.J. Inc. by the city’s leading political reporter, Cosmo Garvin, who has chronicled it so diligently in the Sacramento News & Review.

The coalition is a new kind of urban political machine, fueled by “behest” gifts from corporate, foundation, and wealthy individual donors and employing a crew of operatives it shares with special-interest groups. Directly and through independent expenditure committees, it has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns to reelect its favored candidates. When challenged by independent voices in community and nonprofit groups, it has bought them off or tried to bully them into silence with threats to cut off charitable donations.

It even managed to engineer the dismissal, at least temporarily, of the executive secretary of the central labor council. When a business-dominated coalition can control the voice of labor, you know Sacramento is seeing an unprecedented change in its politics.

Measure L is best understood, I think, as the coalition’s attempt to create what UC Merced Prof. Jessica Trounstine calls a “political monopoly.” By passing a strong-mayor measure, it aims to tilt the game to hobble its foes and assure reelection. If a governing coalition can do that, it “gains the freedom to be responsive to a narrow segment of the electorate at the expense of the broader community,” she writes.

Kevin Johnson whines when foes of his strong-mayor push call it a “power grab,” and he’s halfway right. Unlike Putin, KJ can’t grab, he must ask. Measure L is more like a “power reach.” But he can’t deny that it’s all—and only—about handing him and the dominant coalition more power. (If you doubt that, ask yourself whether the oligarchs would be pushing this measure if Heather Fargo were still mayor.) And the power they seek would go far toward sealing their political monopoly.

Kevin Johnson

The mayor would gain control over jobs in city departments, letting him reward political allies. He would gain control over the budget, writing the first draft and having veto power over the council’s final choices. That would give him a way to reward or punish community groups and nonprofits that receive city money. Concentrating so much power in a single office elected expensively in a citywide campaign would amplify the influence of the wealthy people and organizations who can supply the election cash.

Perhaps most important, the mayor would gain control over information that citizens and the city council need to assess the performance of the city.

Former San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders showed how it’s done. After that city adopted a strong-mayor system a decade ago, he “moved to consolidate his control over the city bureaucracy by concentrating information in the mayor’s office,” University of California political scientists Steven P. Erie, Vladimir Kogan, and Scott A. MacKenzie write in Paradise Plundered: Fiscal Crisis and Governance Failures in San Diego. “Sanders forbade city employees from speaking to the press, allowing department heads to conduct interviews only when a member of the mayor’s public relations staff was also present.”

K.J. Inc. already excels in spin and restricting press access. It took a lawsuit to reveal that the purported city analysis of the benefits of the Kings arena giveaway was a cut-and-paste job from the deal’s backers. Combine increased mayoral control with the Bee’s declining capacity to cover the city and you can count on city hall’s becoming an information black hole.

Sacramento has already gone far down the road toward what Erie calls, in its San Diego form, the “politics of extraction,” through which “civic elites succeed in channeling the powers of government to benefit narrow, private interests at the expense of the broader city interest.”

While police and fire unions win and protect pay and pensions unimaginable elsewhere in the country, Sacramento residents get stuck with the unenviable combination of high crime rates and among the lowest levels of policing of any major city.

Billionaire sports owners get handed $300 million in subsidies, Sacramento taxpayers get handed taxes higher and more regressive than any other in the region, which provide levels of services for things like libraries and recreation that are far below the standard in comparable cities outside California.

When Erie describes San Diego as “an American Potemkin village—an impressive privatized facade with a dark public-sector underbelly—featuring a gleaming new downtown and bevy of tourist attractions but saddled with billion-dollar pension liabilities and deficient public services,” you pause and ask yourself whether he wasn’t talking about Sacramento instead.

So forget about all the rhetoric and Measure L as some abstract proposition. Think about it concretely. Do we want to risk handing a political monopoly to this mayor and this coalition of self-serving interests who have rung up this record of bringing Sacramento this low?

Strong Mayor? Why? Part 2

In the last post, I disposed of the claim that switching Sacramento to a strong-mayor system would make city government more efficient. Let’s look now at the oligarchs’ second argument: that strong-mayor cities are more responsive and accountable to voters.

Unlike the first, this second argument is at least plausible. The wealthy businessmen who promoted the city-manager system a century ago were no friends of the urban masses. They argued that “good government,” as they defined it, was more important than self-government. City managers were to be freed to run cities according to dictates of science and efficiency and to operate outside of “politics,” the realm where responsiveness and accountability reside. The possibility that city-manager governments can ignore the wishes of their voters is encoded in that system’s DNA.

In practice, though, scholars haven’t found any evidence that one form of city government is more responsive or accountable to voters than another.

The most recent and sophisticated of these studies, by political scientists Chris Tausanovitch of UCLA and Christopher Warshaw of MIT, compares the ideological leanings of residents of 51 large cities with the policies adopted by their local leaders. They find liberal cities get more liberal policies and conservative cities get more conservative policies, regardless of the form of city government.

“In contrast to the expectations of reformers, we find that no institution seems to consistently improve responsiveness…,” they report. “City manager systems, designed to be more professional and less political, appear to be just as responsive to public opinion as their mayoral counterparts. Given the same set of public policy preferences, a city with a mayor looks almost exactly the same as a city with a city manager for most policy outcomes.”

Jessica Trounstine, the UC Merced political scientist, provides a similar perspective in her fine recent book, which looks at occasions when powerful and unresponsive coalitions were able to establish political monopolies in city governments. These unaccountable monopolies arose, she finds, in both strong-mayor and city-manager governments, differing only in the tactics they used.

The verdict? Judged as to whether a strong-mayor system provides more responsive and accountable city government than Sacramento’s current city manager system, the oligarchs’ case once again fails.

So why do the wealthy and powerful pouring so much money into the strong-mayor campaign continue to argue that the reform will make the city more efficient and responsive even when decades of scholarly research and experience show that it won’t?

Because what alternative do they have? Words like “efficient” and “accountable” are talismans in any debate over city government organization. If the oligarchs and Kevin Johnson didn’t claim those magic words and try to own them, their opponents would. It was for the same reason that the wealthy civic reformers of a century ago so often invoked their devotion to “the people” even as they busily went about suppressing voter participation and shifting city power away from voters and toward unelected professional administrators.

Having taken the would-be reformers’ rhetoric seriously enough to assess it and find it empty of substance, I’ll offer, in the next post, a hypothesis about the real meaning of the push for strong-mayor system.

Strong Mayor? Why?

The Sacramento Bee ran a nice graphic the other day detailing the big dollars that out-of-town oligarchs and special interest groups are pouring into Measure L, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson’s November campaign to make him a “strong mayor.” Since it’s safe to assume, as Johnson himself once complained to me about his donors, that “they all want something,” the obvious question for voters to ask is: What?

Their official line is that ditching the current council-city manager setup will help get things done, make the city more efficient, and make its leaders more accountable and responsive to voters. It's hard to take that line seriously, because neither logic nor experience supports it.

Start with the formal name of Measure L itself: the Checks and Balances Act of 2014. The phrase “checks and balances” is meant to give voters a warm glow, evoking dimly remembered school civics lessons about wise men in powdered wigs writing the U.S. Constitution.

But if you paid full attention in class, or follow the news, you understand that the checks-and-balances systems in federal and state constitutions notoriously put up obstacles to “getting things done.” And with good reason: The framers of the Constitution were more concerned about restraining power than enabling action.

The system they created frequently results in divided government. A president of one party vetoes the agenda of the party that controls Congress, while the party that controls Congress tries to undermine the agenda and legitimacy of a president of the opposite party. Sometimes, even when a president and Congress get something done, a Supreme Court controlled by their adversaries barrels into the fray and strikes it down. Our history tells of long periods when federal and state governments sat paralyzed in the face of big problems, and of moments when even day-to-day activities like budgeting become occasions for crisis—think federal government shutdowns, state-issued IOUs, and the collision between President Obama and the Republican House that brought the nation to the edge of default.

Measure L invites the same gridlock in city government. Under Sacramento’s current charter, a mayor and four members of the city council can pass ordinances and a budget. It takes five members of the council, a majority, to block what a mayor wants or set a different course. Under Measure L’s “checks and balances,” a mayor would have to win over five of eight members of the council to get anything done, and it will take six of eight members of the council, a three-fourths supermajority, to pass a measure the mayor opposes.

No wonder the oligarchs talk abstractly of “checks and balances.” Telling voters that they want to make Sacramento city government more like Washington probably isn’t a winning argument.

There’s a big irony in hearing today’s rich and powerful tout a strong-mayor/council government as more efficient than the council/manager model. Because a century ago, it was the very same social group, the rich and powerful, the corporate barons of America’s first Gilded Age, in partnership with newly organized chambers of commerce and a growing class of college-educated professionals, who drove the creation and spread of the city-manager form of government that the rich and powerful now want to dump.

They sought, and often won, changes in city charters to take power away from mayors and councilmen, transfering it to unelected professional city managers. The elected city officials of that day were too parochial for the oligarchs’ taste. Typically drawn from the ranks of local leaders like shopkeepers, artisans, and contractors, they won election by steering services and jobs to their voters and protecting their constituents, many of them immigrants, from the assaults on their religions and pleasures being launched by nativists and prohibitionists. They were focused on neighborhood, not the broader city-wide investments corporations wanted.

“Reformers loudly proclaimed a new structure of municipal government as more moral, more rational, and more efficient and, because it was so, self-evidently more desirable,” the historian Samuel P. Hays writes. Trained city managers, freed from patronage and politics, would deliver more honest and efficient services and attend to city-wide interests instead of neighborhoods and working-class needs. Sacramento adopted that system in 1921.

And now the heirs and successors of those oligarchs say their ancestors got it all wrong. A strong mayor will bring more efficient government.

The political scientists and economists who’ve compared the two systems disagree. They’ve found that whether a city has a strong mayor or council/manager government does not change how much it spends and taxes, how it spends its money, or how efficiently it delivers police, fire, and sewer services. As one study summarized the research, “There is no apparent difference in the efficiency levels of the two municipal government structures.”

The verdict? Judged as a spur to efficiency, the case for “strong mayor” is weak and unproven.

Next: Does having a strong mayor make a city more responsive and accountable?

The Scent of the City

A year ago, when Sacramento's city staff presented the council with an analysis of the proposed giveaway to the new owners of the Kings, I wondered why it paled, in economic sophistication and concern for the public interest, beside a similar analysis performed for the Maloof family. We now know the answer: Corruption.

In a deposition given in the lawsuit that citizens have filed against the giveaway, James Rinehart, the city's economic development director, testified that the city's staff has made no effort to analyze the economic effect of the subsidy or weigh it against the potential benefits of alternative uses of the money. In fact, Rinehart admitted he had never seen the giveaway term sheet and was unaware of any effort by the city to place a value on the non-cash assets—land, parking spaces, digital signage rights—it proposes to throw into the deal.

Hiram Johnson

So how did the city staff report come to conclude that the giveaway "would have multiple benefits to the City"? Documents discovered in the lawsuit show that those claims of benefits were invented by the subsidy seekers themselves, e-mailed to the city, and, by the magic of cut and paste, placed into the staff report, where the city's elected leaders and the public were defrauded into believing they were reading the considered judgment of the professionals of government. When the city staff spoke, the welfare seekers' lips moved.

If you think this kind of thing is par for the course in government, you're wrong. As a deputy treasurer for the state of California, sitting on boards and financing authorities and overseeing staff work on behalf of the treasurer, I watched professional public servants test the claims of organizations seeking state financing and tax credits and analyze the potential risks and benefits to the public. Their scrutiny was applied routinely and across the board, even to projects and financings three or four orders of magnitude smaller than the proposed Kings giveaway, which at over $300 million, is roughly equivalent to an entire year's worth of pay and benefits for Sacramento's city workforce. For the past three decades I've often seen Sacramento's city council bend to the wishes of the developers, downtown property owners, and unions whose dollars dominate city politics. But until now, the city staff, under honest professionals like former city manager Bill Edgar, usually played things straight.

But the evidence collected thus far in the lawsuit shows that the city management's sins go beyond playing ventriloquist dummy to those looking to boost $300 million out of taxpayer pockets. Staff is also actively obstructing the public's right to know. Councilmember Kevin McCarty testified that he repeatedly asked staff for a valuation of the "sweeteners" the city was throwing at the Kings' superrich owners but was consistently rebuffed. "You're not going to vote for it anyway," McCarty said the staff told him.

This, too, is misconduct. In my time at the State Treasurer's Office, many of California's financing authority boards comprised three officials running for governor: Phil Angelides, Steve Westly, Arnold Schwarzenegger. But in their frequent jockeying and disputes, I can't remember a single instance of the professional staff's withholding requested information from an elected official, even when doing so might result in a different policy result than they or their boss sought. When such things happen in state government, as when parks officials failed to report all their revenue to the governor's finance department, it was rightly considered a scandal.

A century ago Progressives successfully pushed many American cities to adopt the city-manager form of government as an antidote to corruption. The idea was that professional civil servants, disinterested and armed with the social science and economic knowledge coming out of the newly burgeoning universities, would be a source of honest, efficient government. Cities would be freed from the handouts and special deals for politically connected businesses that bribed politicians and financed their campaigns and political organizations. Reform would protect the many against the few.

But Progressives did not imagine what is unfolding in Sacramento: professional managers marching in lockstep with wealthy boodle seekers; ignoring principles of sound public finance; rejecting expert knowledge showing the economic infectiveness of sports subsidies; putting special-interest spin into official reports to masquerade as professional analysis; depriving the public and elected officials of a full accounting of their sweetheart deals; even going so far as to try to frustrate Sacramento citizens' use of the very tools of direct democracy that the Progressive created as the bulwark against special interest giveaways and corrupt government.

The state of the city is fragile: Public services and budgets not recovered five years after the end of the recession. High levels of debt and unfunded liabilities, of violent crime and poverty. Low levels of job growth and the college-educated workers vital to future growth.

But the scent of the city? Ripe with a stench that Hiram Johnson, the reformer, and Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, would have smelled in their youth in Sacramento—so ripe that maybe the people paid to report on and police these things might even begin to notice again.

The Wages of Primary 'Reform'

Darrell Issa

The promise of primary reform, including California’s new jungle primary law, was that it would lead to more moderation in politics. Widen the electorate in primary elections beyond all those nasty partisans, the reformers told us, and those elected would be more responsive to a broader range of views.

Richard Winger at Ballot Access News uses the House Republican vote on the fiscal cliff bargain to test that promise. His conclusion? “When one breaks down the list of Republicans who had been re-elected in November 2012, one finds that Republican members from closed primary states were far more likely to vote for the bill than Republicans from states with more open primaries,” including California’s undemocratic new system.

That doesn’t count as definitive evidence, but it’s a reminder that we are still waiting for the reformers to show us any evidence that the changes they pimped have had any benefit at all.

No California Dreaming for Jerry→

California Common Sense has launched a new website, PolicyNook, as a platform for discussion of California’s big issues. My initial contribution discusses the paradoxes of Jerry Brown.

Round 2: What Are We Waiting For?

The June 5 test of California’s reformy new election system, as Joe Mathews points out, didn’t live up to the hype. There’s more to write about it in the future, after all the results come in. But a couple of stray thoughts.

First, let’s settle on a name to call the thing, one that accurately conveys to voters what they are doing.

“Please, do not call it a primary, because it isn’t,” writes Matthew S. Shugart, the UC San Diego political scientist and leading scholar of electoral systems. “In a primary, a political party permits voters to select its candidate for the general election.” But in California’s new system, Big Government now prohibits parties from presenting their nominees to voters in the general election, as they have throughout American history.

So if it’s not a primary, what is it? When I looked at my ballot (image below), one name jumped instantly to mind:

Clusterfuck.

But that name wouldn’t be adopted by the media, for obvious reasons, and Jon Stewart and his Daily Show crew probably hold the trademark.

So we are stuck with something more prosaic. Since the system is a two-round election, with the first round narrowing the field to two candidates to compete in a majority runoff, it makes sense to call the first round the general election, since it is the moment when voters have the most choice, and the second round the runoff. Millions of California voters will be surprised come November to discover that they have only limited party choices—no minor party candidates, and in many legislative and congressional districts, only candidates from one of the major parties. The big choices, they will find, have been made in June, in the low-turnout first round.

Unless the goal of the reformers is narrowing the effective choices of the electorate, it behooves them to campaign for having the first round of California’s system be called the general election, and its date relocated to November, the traditional date for presidential elections, with the runoff to follow soon after.

Since the California system bears some resemblance to the French system of having a majority runoff (although France, being more realistic about the essential role of parties in the life of a democracy, grant them a larger role), it’s instructive to note that France will conduct the runoff in elections for the National Assembly on Sunday, June 17, one week after first round was held.

Not so in California. We will have to wait a crazy 154 days between the June 5 general election first round and the runoff. Voter attention and knowledge about the candidates will wane, and will have to be refreshed with a huge new infusion of campaign cash collected from boodlers, bundlers, and PACs. If the French can figure out how to conduct elections in back-to-back weeks, sparing their democracy a deluge of fund-raising and endless campaigning, why can't we?

How We Got Here

With California fast approaching the hundredth anniversary of the 1911 election that brought us our system of direct democracy—the initiative, referendum, and recall—it seemed a good moment to review the history we tell in California Crackup of how California built and broke its political system. Below is a handy timeline version of the story.

You can see a full-page view here.

Waiting for the top-two revolution

If you are holding your breath, waiting for the top-two primary to work the revolution the New York Times proclaimed last June after the passage of Prop 14, it’s probably a good moment to inhale. As the Assembly District 4 election showed the other day, the revolution isn’t coming.

Assembly District 4 is exactly where the jungle primary is supposed to do its magic of electing more moderate lawmakers to the Legislature. Centered on the upscale Placer and El Dorado suburbs of Sacramento, it is one of the most Republican districts in the state. According to the theory of jungle primary boosters, Democrats and independents, understanding that a Republican is sure to win in such districts, will sniff out which of the GOP candidates is the more moderate. They will give the moderate Republican their votes instead of “wasting” them on a candidate who more closely shares their views but has no hope of eventually prevailing.

There are two problems with the theory.

First, if voters from the minority party are to sniff out the “moderate” in the race, there has to be one. In District 4, there wasn’t. In the current budget crisis, a Republican “moderate” might be defined as someone willing to vote for Governor Brown’s draconian budget cuts and accompanying extension of temporary taxes in return for pensions reforms and relaxation of business regulations. As far as I can tell, not a single GOP candidate in the field was prepared to vote for Brown’s budget, and certainly not the two well-funded frontrunners, John Allard and Beth Gaines, who vied to prove they were the most conservative.

Second, even if there were a moderate majority-party candidate to vote for, it’s not clear that many minority-party voters are willing to put aside their partisan views to vote for a second-best candidate. Without running a campaignThe Democratic candidate in the District 4 election won a plurality of votes in the March 8 election, his vote percentage almost exactly matching Democratic registration. He will likely get almost the same vote share in the May runoff, when Gaines, the second-place finisher, will take the seat.

“I will join the Taxpayer Caucus on my first day in the Assembly and look forward to working with them to protect California’s taxpayers from tax increases and extensions,” Gaines, wife of state Sen. Ted Gaines, wrote on FlashReport the day after the election.

Yes, that jungle primary is a real game-changer.

Think Long Committee “Unlikely to Produce Reforms that Challenge the Political Status Quo”

David Kersten and his team have put out an assessment of the personnel and objectives of the Think Long Committee, the California reform group set up by the “homeless billionaire,” Nicolas Berggruen. Kersten’s conclusion: the Think Long Committee is in too much of a hurry to rush to the ballot and is therefore unlikely to develop or achieve the comprehensive political and governance reform the state needs.