Today’s California Primary Will Be A Bad Day For At Least One Millionaire

If the polls can be believed, and FiveThirtyEight says they can, Steve Poizner is getting trounced in his bid to be the Republican nominee for Governor of California. Assuming he loses today, his record in political campaigns will slip to 1-in-3, a .333 batting average. He might get signed by the Giants, but he won’t be Governor of the state. (Though, frankly, neither is an enviable job.)

There are pretty good odds that you’ve never heard of Poizner. No reason you should have, really, unless you’ve been watching television in California over the past few months. The barrage of ads by Poizner and his opponent, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, has been noteworthy even by California standards – or so say acquaintances who are excited about the primary today solely for how it impacts their TV watching habits. This is what happens when two mega-millionaires run against each other and their target audience is an entire state. (Whitman is estimated to have spent a staggering $81-million on her run, $71 from her own pocket; Poizner has raised $28 million, of which approximately $25 million was his own. Does anybody else even want these two to run?)

But, as I was saying, no reason you should have heard of the guy. He was a tech executive who made a bundle integrating GPS into cell phones and then decided, Steve Brill-style, that he knew how to fix education. (Education remains unfixed.) Then he ran for office, which is when I met him.

At the time, I was working for an advocacy organization affiliated with organized labor. As part of our political process, the organization’s political action committee endorsed and supported candidates for office who, in the South San Francisco Bay, were almost always Democrats. In 2004, a State Assembly seat opened up stretching from the San Francisco peninsula down into the wealthy western foothills of Silicon Valley. Poizner ran uncontested for the Republican nomination, while a four-way Democratic primary resulted in the nomination of Ira Ruskin. Ruskin had been an advocate for working people for years, had walked picket lines, was a champion for our organization’s values. We’d endorsed Ruskin in the Democratic primary, there was no reason for us not to back him in the general against Poizner.

So we were surprised when Poizner reached out to us for a meeting. It was awkward (everyone knew he wouldn’t be endorsed), but it was a smart decision. It’s easy in politics at any level to demonize one’s opponent – to assume that he or she holds the most outrageous and unappealing positions possible, to believe that their election would cause irreparable harm to the institution to which they were elected. Meeting someone face-to-face alleviates that. Short and with a bit of a temper, Poizner walked into enemy camp as much to tamp down the ferocity of upcoming battles as to ask for support. He didn’t get endorsed, of course – and we threw ourselves into getting Ruskin elected.

This was in 2004, about a year after Arnold became Governor following the recall of Gray Davis. Arnold’s campaign website was JoinArnold.com, Poizner’s became JoinSteve. He took Schwarzenegger’s playbook, some staff, and blitzed the district with mail and TV ads – even though he paid for a lot of TV ads that aired throughout the region. He had a blog, Poizner4Assembly, which was pretty innovative at the time. (It’s still up – I’m sure Whitman’s folks have already scoured it to find discrepancies in his record.)

In the gubernatorial race, Poizner is positioning himself on the far right. (He recently received the endorsement of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.) In running for Assembly in the Valley, though, he toed a much more moderate line, playing up his experience as a volunteer teacher, often mentioning his pro-choice background.

Poizner ended up out-spending us by a factor of 7-to-1, putting an unheard-of $7 million into a race for a seat that represents 420,000 people. (By contrast, the state of California has nearly 37 million people; Poizner’s put up about $30 million in his current bid.) Fairly miraculously, we won, beating Poizner by about 6,000 votes, or three percentage points. Ruskin was re-elected twice, he’s termed out this year.

(As for the one election Poizner won – in 2006, he ran for Insurance Commissioner, an odd position created by proposition twenty years ago. He echoed Arnold in that race as well, trouncing the same Democrat Arnold beat in 2003’s recall, Cruz Bustamante.)

There’s this odd belief that being a business person somehow translates naturally into being a successful elected official. It may stem from the fact that it’s so common for those who’ve made millions in the marketplace decide to spend some of it seeking office – it certainly behooves them to reinforce that belief. But, as Steve Poizner can tell you, money can’t buy you love, it can’t buy you class, and it can’t necessarily buy you an election.

Unless your name is Meg Whitman.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.