Democrats are waiting until the last minute to pick a governor

from Maya S. MillerCalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Some California Democrats have a plan to avoid disaster in the governor’s race: Wait until the last minute to vote.

With no candidate emerging as a clear front-runner and an open primary in which the top two advance regardless of party affiliation, panic set in for some who planned to vote Democratic.

To avoid a dire scenario where Democrats are unable to participate in the November general election, many Democrats rallied around former congressman Eric SwawellWHO eventually burst into flames after many women accused him of sexual assault.

That fear has turned into caution, leading some party activists and influencers to encourage people to forgo early voting, watch the polls and then vote for the candidate with the most support just before Election Day.

In a “normal year,” Katie Evans-Reber of San Francisco said she would probably be back former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter though the Democrat is unlikely to make it to November given her current polling. But the stakes are higher this year, she said, and as a lesbian, any Democrat would be more aligned with her core values ​​than a Republican.

She fears that supporters of President Donald Trump, who angered him, could support Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, giving him enough of a boost to challenge the power of Trump’s endorsement of Steve Hiltonthe former Fox News host, who leads all other candidates in the polls. That would send both Republicans to a runoff.

“The thing that turned around for me was going from ‘I really don’t know what to do’ to ‘I’m strategically undecided,'” Evans-Reber said.

It is in gender position Xavier Becerrathe former secretary of health and human services, who climbed from single digits to the top of the polls after Sowell’s downfall. As his popularity grew, so did scrutiny of his record at HHS and in California former Attorney General.

Behind Becerra are progressive Democratic contenders Tom Stairformer businessman turned billionaire activist and Porter. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has also positioned himself as a tech-friendly moderate and Silicon Valley ally.

Evans-Reber and other fervent Democrats are urging others to follow “the same wait-and-see strategy” by sharing videos and social media posts.

one publication, even falsely attributed the strategy of Heather Cox Richardson, a political historian and popular Democratic influencer who writes the “Letters from an American” quilt. This erroneous post was the first Evans-Reber saw and forwarded. She later had to follow up with a disclaimer that Cox Richardson was not the author.

“It’s not like bad advice, but it’s 100 percent not coming from me,” Cox Richardson said in an interview with CalMatters.

Democratic political consultant Paul Mitchell disagrees.

“It’s just bad news,” he said. “I think they should always have a message: ‘As soon as you get your ballot, fill it out, turn it in, mail it in, and be done.’

Mitchell said that while activists can speak out and push for a strategic ballot plan, trying to organize a movement like this at scale is unlikely to produce significant results.

“I think people vote for whoever they were going to vote for anyway,” said Mitchell, whose company tracks how many ballots are cast each day across the country.

The push to vote late flies in the face of recent calls by election officials and Gov. Gavin Newsom for voters to get their ballots early in hopes of speeding up California’s notoriously slow vote-counting process. Attorney General Rob Bonta, a fellow Democrat, told reporters last week that social media posts calling for late voting may be misinformation, misinformation and “potentially illegal,” and Secretary of State Shirley Weber said her office would “look into” those social posts.

“Time is of the essence to prevent election lies from taking hold,” Newsom wrote in a recent letter addressed to all 58 county registrars, urging them to “tabulate and publish the results promptly and accurately.”

Voting by mail on Election Day, some activists suggest, is the worst-case scenario for election officials.

It creates what Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, calls the “pig-in-the-python effect.” County election offices are inundated with in-person ballots on Election Day as well as mail-in ballots that require a painstaking process of matching signatures, opening the envelope and removing the ballot before it can be counted.

Returning ballots even a few days early can give counties a head start, Alexander said recent CalMatters forum on election integrity.

Mark DiCamillo, who conducts polls for the Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies, said pollsters do their best to produce accurate results, but in an election with so many variables, even the best polls can be off base.

The past trend of low turnout in gubernatorial primaries, plus a potentially confusing field of 61 candidates for governor alone, make it difficult to determine who the likely voters will be and factor that into their polls.

“This election has all the elements that you have to deal with,” DiCamillo said. “This is a challenge for the sociological profession.”

Despite concerns about slow vote counts and inaccurate voting, Evans-Reber says she still plans to stick with her last-minute voting strategy. She doesn’t believe her ballot will make it to the county elections office in time. She plans to take her completed ballot to the office or one of the county’s vote centers and deliver it directly to an election official.

“I’m going to run the ballot at the last possible moment,” Evans-Reber said. “I’ll wait until Election Day.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.