Ex-San Diego Mayor Faulconer Seeks to Become California’s ‘Second Choice’ Governor
Republican Kevin Faulconer has thrown his hat into the maybe/maybe not California recall/gubernatorial race, hoping to tap into discontent over pandemic restrictions to win in what normally would be an unwinnable election.
Going back to his days as San Diego State University student, Faulconer’s steps up the political ladder have been based on special elections following an incumbent’s political failings.
As Liam Diillon, writing at Voice of San Diego back in the days after Mayor Bob Filner’s self-destruction, pointed out, Faulconer has a history of being a popular “second choice.”
It happened at SDSU. It happened when Faulconer won a special election for his City Council seat following the Strippergate scandal, after he’d lost a race for the same seat three years earlier. Now it’s happening again. The 46-year-old Republican openly pondered but decided against running in the 2012 mayoral election. The winner, Bob Filner, committed a felony in office. And here’s Faulconer poised to take advantage.
This happens to Faulconer because he’s safe, agreeable and competent, the kind of guy voters would want after the person they elected turned out to be a mess. It also happens because Faulconer’s largely been a follower in politics, the kind of guy who relies on others’ bold stand instead of taking one himself.
Since 1911, Californians have attempted to recall their governor 55 times, but were successful only in 2003 against Gov. Gray Davis, who was ousted in a special election. Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected to replace Davis as governor.
Faulconer’s early entry into a contest that may not even happen represents an effort to discourage other, lesser known candidates. While he’s pitching himself as a moderate, that hasn’t stopped him from appearing on looney-tunes media.
https://twitter.com/RachelLaing/status/1355732301166960648?s=20
Rancho Santa Fe businessperson John Cox, who lost to Newsom in 2018, says he has put in $1 million toward the effort and will run in the recall.
While Cox may be able to attract some on the far-right flank of the party, he’s not crazy enough to consolidate support amongst that crowd. Look for somebody like former Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who has solid anti-immigrant and anti-vaxxer credentials, to join the fray.
UPDATE: Mike Cernovich, a far-right political commentator, said in a Periscope video on Monday he was running :
"There's a 0 percent chance I could win the election. I have no delusion about that, but if I can get enough of a base of support I can force hair gel Hitler, which is what we call Newsom ... to answer for his war crimes, his human rights violations," Cernovich said.
https://twitter.com/rpyers/status/1356452371971207173?s=20
Tech billionaire and Democratic funder Chamath Palihapitiya told his million Twitter followers that he intends to run, though he has yet to back that claim with paperwork or cash.
Via Politico:
Faulconer, 54, said he has already raised $1 million in the weeks since he launched his 2022 exploratory campaign for governor. He said that his robust fundraising and support has prompted him to launch earlier than he initially intended as proponents of the recall get closer to collecting the 1.5 million valid signatures they need over the next six weeks.
Few would have given Faulconer a chance a year ago. But recall dynamics defy partisan registrations, as former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proved in 2003 when he came out atop the list of 135 candidates as voters ousted then-Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat.
The third recall effort launched by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s opponents has gained enough support to be considered viable -- though it has yet to gather enough signatures for an election.
Early on, leaders of the effort, according to the Los Angeles Times, relied upon volunteers from “groups promoting distrust of government, science and medicine; peddlers of QAnon doomsday conspiracies; “patriots” readying for battle and one organization allied with the far-right extremist group, the Proud Boys.”
Volunteer-collected signatures have historically had a high rate of rejection when it comes to verification, so observers are saying they’ll need to collect two million signatures to ensure the measure meets the 1.5 million threshold needed to qualify.
IF the recall petition succeeds, THEN the second part of that ballot question will ask voters to choose a replacement. The top vote getter wins, even if they only receive a plurality of votes.
Much is being made of a Berkeley Institute for Government Studies poll suggesting that one third of voters would vote to unseat the incumbent governor. Discontent over Newsom’s handling of the pandemic crisis is clearly the biggest driver of voter vexation, according to the survey, with 62% of respondents saying his performance has been inconsistent.
I guess I should point out that one-third is less than half. Should the mood of the public improve with a (yet-to-be) successful vaccination program along with an increase in federal assistance, this path to a recall could get more difficult.
San Diego’s former mayor is swimming against the tide, as Republicans throughout the country have changed their voter registration in the wake of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.
From The Hill:
More than 30,000 voters who had been registered members of the Republican Party have changed their voter registration in the weeks after a mob of pro-Trump supporters attacked the Capitol — an issue that led the House to impeach the former president for inciting the violence.
The massive wave of defections is a virtually unprecedented exodus that could spell trouble for a party that is trying to find its way after losing the presidential race and the Senate majority.
It could also represent the tip of a much larger iceberg: The 30,000 who have left the Republican Party reside in just a few states that report voter registration data, and information about voters switching between parties, on a weekly basis.
While most of the GOP on Capitol Hill have yet to acquire a backbone, other prominent party members are headed out the door.
From Reuters:
Dozens of Republicans in former President George W. Bush’s administration are leaving the party, dismayed by a failure of many elected Republicans to disown Donald Trump after his false claims of election fraud sparked a deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol last month...
...Kristopher Purcell, who worked in the Bush White House’s communications office for six years, said roughly 60 to 70 former Bush officials have decided to leave the party or are cutting ties with it, from conversations he has been having. “The number is growing every day,” Purcell said.
Their defection from the Republican Party after a lifetime of service for many is another clear sign of how a growing intraparty conflict over Trump and his legacy is fracturing it.
In San Diego, the latest report on voter registration from the registrar of voters indicates that nearly 4500 Republicans have left the party. Most have switched to No Party Preference, although Democrats have grown their numbers by just short of 1100 people countywide.
At some point, the Republicans backing Faulconer are going to have to figure out the Trump problem. Insisting the ex-president is a non-story isn’t going to stand the test of time.
Major donors to Faulconer so far include Palos Verdes real estate mogul Gerald Marcil; investor Shawn Shiralian; Kelly Burt, the past chair of the New Majority, San Diego; Rancho Santa Fe builder Douglas Barnhart; and Sacramento real estate executive Philip Oates, according to data on file with the California Secretary of State’s office.
But Faulconer has a serious liability in the form of former President Donald Trump, who was deeply unpopular among California voters even before the deadly Capitol siege last month. Faulconer supported Trump in the last election, and Democrats will be sure to circulate a 2019 Oval Office photo of the former San Diego mayor standing next to the former president. A Faulconer spokesperson soon after that meeting tried to refute Trump's claim that Faulconer had thanked the president for having built the border wall.
One of the founders of the anti-Trump Project Lincoln pointed out the ties between the “moderate” ex-mayor and the more extremist wing of the party.
https://twitter.com/reedgalen/status/1347262396578992128?s=20
As far as I’m concerned the ultimate irony about Kevin Faulconer running for Governor based on deprecating Gavin Newsom’s seeming indecisiveness is that the former San Diego Mayor wasn’t exactly a strong leader.
His two big bucks projects, a football stadium and an expanded convention center were failures, despite lots of back room maneuvering. Another high profile project, the consolidation of city offices into a single location at 101 Ash Street, turned into a disaster.
As the Union-Tribune editorial board noted in the wake of revelations about the Ash Street deal:
If the mayor wants to recommend reforms, that’s fine. But the new mayor elected in November should work with the City Council on how to fix real estate management. Literally no one in San Diego has less credibility on the subject than Kevin Faulconer.
It took a nationally recognized hepatitis epidemic to spur the former Mayor into action on homeless issues, and while the carrot part of his program will undoubtedly be a big part of his campaign, the stick part --using the police and jails to lower the profile of the homeless-- is a stain on his legacy.
But most of all, the thing about Kevin Faulconer’s tenure as mayor were what you didn’t see; the failure to appoint members of the city’s already weak police oversight board, the lip service given toward resolving the police department’s well-documented and longstanding discriminatory enforcement practices, along with his ideologically driven support for a doomed city pension reform measure.
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