CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Here we are, approaching one of the most important elections in this country's history, and the California Democratic Party just did everything but moon the state's voters.
I'm speaking of course of the decision by a small group of insiders to endorse state Senator Kevin de Leon over popular incumbent Diane Feinstein for the United States Senate. The fact that the so-called endorsement was made by a tiny subset (the Executive Board) of the already tiny subset (the state Central Committee) of the state's 8.4 million Democrats was a fact that only tended to show up about 9 paragraphs down in news stories.
After all, a paper like northern California's Press Democrat could headline its story, "California Democratic Party snubs Feinstein, endorses de Leon." It took a substantial bit of reading to get to the reality of the situation.
Let's consider the real numbers. The state of California has 8.4 million registered Democrats. The party apparatus has a state central committee of (the last time I was on it) about 2500 people. Maybe it has grown since then, but this number gives you a rough idea that for every member of the central committee there are more than 3000 other Democrats who aren't being asked for their opinions.
Since the state party only has its conventions once a year, there is also a subset of central committee members called the Executive Board who meet quarterly. It was about 250 people when I was on it, although news accounts suggest that it is now about 360 people.
On Saturday, the Executive Board voted to endorse Kevin de Leon for the U.S. Senate, in spite of the fact that Diane Feinstein has been holding down that seat since 1992 and is generally pretty popular with the state's voters.
If you were just to view the headlines, it sounded like the state's Democratic voters had abruptly turned on Di Fi and were putting the election race in play.
In reality, the Executive Board of the party saw 333 people cast votes for the senatorial endorsement. Of these, 217, or 65%, went to de Leon. The "no endorsement" group put up 94 votes and another 22 (going against Feinstein's request for the party to avoid taking a position) did in fact vote for Feinstein.
Thus 217 out of eight million registered Democrats were able to force an official position in favor of de Leon for the state party. In case you were wondering, in fraction form that comes to 0.000026 of the state's registered Democrats who had the ability to pull this power play. If you're adept at math, you will notice that it takes twenty thousand registered Democrats to equal one Executive Board member.
And that means that when you think about this endorsement, it was just as much a snub of the state's Democratic voters as it was a snub of Di Fi. I wonder if any of those geniuses on the Executive Board can remember as far back as June of this year, when we had the statewide primary election. For all senatorial candidates combined, there were just under 7 million votes cast. Here's what the real Democratic Party -- the people who cast ballots -- said about who they choose to support:
Diane Feinstein: 2,947,035 votes
Kevin de Leon: 805,446 votes
In other words, de Leon was lucky to scrape up 12.1% of the votes, just enough to finish in second place. Feinstein pulled in 44.2% of the total of all votes cast (for Democrats, Republicans, and others), a solid majority of those who voted for any Democrat.
How much simpler can you make it? We already had the primary election! Feinstein is the solid favorite of the state's Democratic voters. But that entitled group of 217 people claim to be able to speak for the California Democratic Party. Sorry, but it's the more than three million voters who make that decision, not the insiders' club.
There is a point to this arithmetic obsessing. What went on over the weekend is, in microcosm, what everyone has been complaining about for the past couple of years. We have a party apparatus that sets itself above the common voter and in so doing, alienates the public.
In a moment of crisis when the strength of our democracy is being tested, we need to unify against the Trump Party. Picking intramural fights should be completely out of the question.
Breaking News
Word is coming out about Monday's press conference featuring Trump and Putin. How much more can Trump embarrass and disgrace this country? When will the hard core of Trump supporters admit that there is anything wrong with this picture? If there is any honor left among the Republican leaders, there should be more protests this week.
We'll see.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
