California State Assembly 2020 Primary Preview: GOP Wants to Keep Districts 71 & 75
Two of the seven California State Assembly Seats representing San Diego are held by Republicans, down from four not long ago.
Today’s preview includes districts representing areas in the county north and east of the city currently held by Republicans.
State Assembly District 71 includes much of Duncan Hunterland. Donald Trump won the district by 18 points in 2016, and it’s been reliably represented in Sacramento by Republicans for decades.
Given that there are but two candidates in the 71st primary, this means they’ll repeat as opponents in the general election.
Incumbent Randy Voepel is running for a third term.
Prior to serving in the legislature he was a city councilman and mayor of Santee.
According to California Secretary of State, both of Voepel’s campaign contributors who maxed out at $4700 in 2019 were companies in the business of selling tobacco products: RAI Services, the corporate parent of RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris USA.
The Assemblyman was a featured speaker at a July, 2019 rally staged by adherents of Falon Gong, a spiritual movement founded in China known for its conspiratorial flavor of anti-communism, as reported in the Epoch Times, an affiliated media outlet.
Falon Gong has been suppressed by the Chinese government, and has organized in countries world-wide to oppose the regime. A key part of their efforts involves getting conservative legislators to denounce allegations of forced organ harvesting on the mainland.
The goal with his kind of organizing strategy is to get the name of the organization associated with politicians in news coverage to build their credibility. It’s the same sort of thing Rev. Sung Yung Moon did back in the 1970’s with the Moonies, only then it was focused on supporting another president facing impeachment.
During the first half of 2019 the Epoch Times spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump Facebook ads. NBC reported the amount spent was more than any group except the Trump campaign itself. The group and its affiliates have since been banned from advertising on the social media platform.
From Wikipedia:
In October 2019, the fact-checking website Snopes reported that The Epoch Times is closely linked to a large network of Facebook pages and groups called The BL (The Beauty of Life) that shares pro-Trump views and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
The BL has spent at least $510,698 on Facebook advertising. Hundreds of the ads were removed for violations of Facebook's advertising rules. The BL network of pages has 28 million followers on Facebook in total, according to Snopes.
The editor-in-chief of The BL recently worked as editor-in-chief of The Epoch Times, and several other BL employees are listed as current or former employees of The Epoch Times. The BL is registered in Middletown, New York, to an address that also is registered to Falun Gong's Sound of Hope Radio Network and is associated with the YouTube series Beyond Science, but Snopes found "the outlet as a whole is literally the English-language edition of Epoch Times Vietnam."[70][71]
Snopes found thatThe BL uses more than 300 fake Facebook profiles based in Vietnam and other countries, using names, stock photos and celebrity photos in their profiles to emulate Americans, to administer more than 150 pro-Trump Facebook groups amplifying its content.[71][72]
Many of the bills Voepel sponsored last year in the legislature were symbolic nods to safe causes, like a declaration for “Secure Your Load Day.”
Voepel’s final bit of legislation introduced in 2019 was part of the movement on the right to gin up fear among voters about Antifa, the umbrella name for autonomous mostly anarchist groups who’ve been known to do battle with neo-Nazis and other right wing militants.
It’s a resolution calling for groups associated with Antifa to be designated as domestic terrorist organizations. They are Donald Trump’s favorite boogeyman when he’s asked about protests against his administration’s policies.
Violence by individuals and groups associated with right wing militants were responsible for every single extremist-caused death in the United States in 2018. Antifa, which is by no means a bunch of peace loving hippies, hasn’t been held responsible for any deaths.
Randy Voepel (Incumbent)
Website | Facebook | Twitter
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Elizabeth “Liz” Lavertu is the Democrat running against Voepel for 2020. She comes to the race after serving as Co-Chair of the Spring Valley Community Planning Group and as an advocate for arts programs in local schools. She has been endorsed by the Democratic Party.
Her website lists a number of semi-generic stances on issues including expanding Medicare for All, housing, wildfire protection, the environment, fixing roads, funding schools, and homelessness.
Her elevator pitch is a promise to bring more taxpayer dollars back to the district she wants to represent. It sounds like Lavertu has more than making people afraid in mind.
Elizabeth Lavertu
Website | Facebook | Twitter
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State Assembly District 75 includes the inland parts of north San Diego County, plus Temecula in Riverside County. If you measure its partisan lean, it was about half as Red as the 71st District in support of Donald Trump in 2016.
The surprise election of Democrat Paul McNamara as Mayor of Escondido over GOP incumbent Sam Abed in 2018, shows just how far things have come in recent years.
Incumbent Republican Marie Waldron came to the Assembly by way of the Escondido City Council, and served as Vice Mayor for several years.
While on the Escondido council Waldron was prime mover of an ordinance prohibiting landlords from renting to illegal immigrants. This gained her support from the San Diego Minutemen in a failed bid to win an Assembly seat in 2006.
Since making the jump in the legislature, Waldron has done well. She won with 56.4% of the vote in 2018 against Democrat Alan Geraci; 62% in 2016 against Democrat Andrew Masiel Sr.
In 2014, Democrats didn’t even bother to field a candidate against her.
Last March a coalition of North County progressive groups including Indivisible CA50, Indivisible CA: StateStrong, and Indi Squared, staged a “Where’s Waldron” protest outside her Escondido office, in response to what they said was her lack of accountability and regressive behavior.
And it’s true that Waldron keeps a low profile. Her 2018 Democratic opponent made a big deal about her often-locked office in Escondido.. However, she does participate in the time-honored political tradition of sending out newsletters and getting them printed up as op-eds in papers desperate for content.
One notable bill she opposed in 2019 was AB 1184, Assemblyman Todd Gloria’s bill requiring government agencies to retain email records for at least two years.
Asked by Voice of San Diego why she was the only San Diego-area lawmaker to vote against the bill, the Assemblywoman responded:
“With my experience in city government, I know how hard local agencies work to be open and transparent. If bad actors are keeping public documents hidden by clicking into a different email account or communicating through a personal device, we should certainly address that,” she said in an emailed statement. “Unfortunately, AB 1184 goes too far in creating a burdensome, unfunded mandate for local governments to retain even the most minor, inconsequential emails. At a time when we’re expecting cities, counties and special districts to be more and more efficient, adding the cost of retaining documents that may not even be public records will take us in the wrong direction.”
The bill does not, however, necessarily require that agencies keep “the most minor, inconsequential emails,” as Waldron argues. It requires the retention of emails “containing information relating to the conduct of the public’s business.”
Mandate, my ass. Cost might have been a factor back in the days of America Online as a top service provider, but it ain’t true now. I wonder if her office computers are still using Windows 95?
Marie Waldron
Website | Facebook | Twitter
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Democrat Candidate Kate Schwartz-Frates (it’s just Schwartz on the ballot) currently serves as an elected Director on the Fallbrook Regional Health District board.
Her campaign slogan “Prescription for Change” is clue #2 that she’s in the wellness business, having been a licensed behavioral health care provider for better than three decades.
Issues mentioned her campaign site include access to affordable healthcare, wrap-around care for housing the homeless, increased density for multifamily house in transit corridors, major investments in transportation infrastructure, doing more to protect the environment, and behavioral health services to all students.
All of this seem generic, but if you wander over to her Facebook page, it’s backed up with shared posts suggesting a more progressive agenda.
Kate Schwartz is endorsed by the California State Democratic Party, and Run Women Run.
Kate Schwartz
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Roger Garcia is a Temecula based activist who is listed as a Democratic candidate.
I could find only two mentions of him on the internet: an undated notice for an Our Revolution (Bernie Sanders folks) endorsement meeting, and a mention in the Fallbrook Democratic Club newsletter that he’d no-showed for a meeting.
Look for Waldron and Schwartz to repeat in the general election.
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