Gaming San Diego’s Primary Elections: A Sure Path to Mediocrity

'Everybody Does It' Is No Excuse

First up, let me apologize. I promised a voter’s guide article featuring the contests for the County Board of Supervisors, an entity that arguably has become the most influential force in local politics. The problem is those contests aren’t happening until next fall because only two candidates qualified for each of the three seats that are open.

The Union-Tribune’s endorsement of Terra Lawson-Remer for Supervisor last week over former Mayor Kevin Faulconer fooled me. This was the right choice for a multitude of reasons, mostly because the County has the money to fund at least some of our social safety net, and the current board is actually putting it to good use. The endorsement was, however, ill-timed. 

I certainly was fooled, and I should know better. It wasn’t surprising once you think about it; the new owners of the UT can barely produce a functional online version, which at least doesn’t feel as empty as the printed version.

I voted over the weekend. It was actually not that difficult, since there are so many contests in San Diego skipping the primary because only two candidates qualified. Interestingly enough, contests where there is one candidate (except judges) were on the ballot. 

I could have written in Alfred E. Newman and Bullwinkle instead of Chris Ward and School Board Trustee Richard Barrera, but a moment of adultness swept over me so I filled the circles next to the listed candidates.

So, the candidates you won’t see on your ballot, depending on your residence, are:

Board of Supervisors (Districts 1,2, & 3), San Diego County Board of Education District 4, Judicial Offices 1-40, 42, and 44 - 48 aren’t on the ballot (one candidate running). City of San Diego Council candidates Joe LaCava (D1), Marni Von Wilpert (D5), and Raul Campillo are unopposed..

The dearth of candidates running for local offices is a sign of the times. The California Republican Party is not very functional, what with MAGA extremists and grifters having run most of the decent human beings out of the party. 

If you look at the South Carolina GOP Primary this past weekend, Nikki Haley actually won… If you subtract the evangelical voting bloc. Trump won 75% of their vote. But among everyone else, Haley actually beat Trump, 51 to 49 percent., according to exit polls. 

Rather than encouraging debate by legitimizing dissent, much of the local Democratic Party has become a less than inspiring place to hang politically. The skunkiness of pot money is pervasive; and NIMBYs have elected officials walking on pins and needles. 

What should happen is the emergence of a third party embracing bold positions on issues of concern. This won’t happen. The system is rigged by design. Top two primary contests may have kept a few wackadoodles out of office, but everybody from Democrat Adam Schiff to Republican Carl DeMaio is gaming the system. 

Todd Gloria’s sympathizers rounding up PAC money to promote a Republican candidate is a sure sign of this malaise of democracy at the local level. The incumbent mayor is going to win anyway. His institutional support makes Gloria insurmountable.

Rather than engage in vigorous debate with a candidate who has a different perspective, the mayor’s crew just wants a guy they can paint a MAGA hat on, point to and say “bad man, stay away.”

It should surprise no one that a Carl DeMaio-friendly PAC is doing the same thing for his assembly contest, hoping to quash the GOP endorsed candidate.

Tomorrow, I’ll share my voting choices, and I guarantee they will piss some people off.

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Monday News You Should Read

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Disinformation is a public health crisis. Here’s how scientists and doctors are fighting it by Michael Hitzik at the Los Angeles Times

• A problem of longer standing for anti-disinformation crusaders is encompassed in Brandolini’s Law, coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian software engineer. Cleaned up, it states, “The amount of energy needed to refute [B.S.] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it .”

• To put it another way, disinformation peddlers need only make a claim that sounds plausible or might even have a small kernel of truth to influence the unwary. Debunking or refuting their assertions often requires offering nuanced or technical information that doesn’t have the same pizzazz.

• Recognizing disinformation techniques and how they implant sticky but erroneous concepts in the minds of laypersons, Sell says, points to some useful rules of engagement. One is the value of “prebunking” — “addressing or refuting potential false information” before it’s widely disseminated, as the Johns Hopkins handbook puts it.

• “People are not that creative,” she says. “They use the same stories over and over again with different health threats. You can expect that with any vaccination campaign there will be an infertility rumor, no matter what vaccine it is, or a rumor that a vaccine has been experimented on children. We see that every time. They work because they resonate” with target audiences — such as pregnant women or parents of small children.

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Stupid Power - Deluding ourselves about America's delusions. By Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work

• The burning desire to buy guns and shoot at brown people and drive big trucks and watch stupid TV shows and scream at football games and eat greasy garbage and tranquilize ourselves into constant oblivion—this is America, as much or more than anything written in the Bill of Rights is. It has always been thus. 

• Donald Trump’s superpower is not his money or fame but the fact that he is the human embodiment of Stupid America. He does not have to try to channel this; it is his nature. To imagine, as many traditional political analysts do, that he can be damaged by pointing out that he is a bad guy is to make the same mistake that Brer Fox made when he flung Brer Rabbit into that briar patch. That is his comfort zone. Trump’s success can be seen as a crude measurement of the dominance of Stupid Power in the pantheon of powerful things. He is the political equivalent of saying “fuck it” and drinking twelve beers and blacking out and driving your car into the front window of a KFC. That little urge exists in the American mind. It is our birthright. 

• Just because people put on clean clothes and go to church on Sunday morning doesn’t mean that they don’t feel the tingling urge to say “fuck it” on Sunday night. We did not get to be the world’s most dominant country by pure virtue and reason. We murdered everyone and bathed in their glorious blood. We flattered ourselves with fantastical fairy tales of our own heroism. Stupid Power thrives in stupid places. We opened the door for it the very first time we told our kids that we were the good guys. Until we fix that error, there’s no telling how far down the greasy pit of idiocy America is going to go.

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The Out in Left Weekly: February 25, 2024 by San Diegan Brendan Dentino 

• San Diego Padres season = over (tentatively)

• The Padres’ struggles last season were portended by pitcher Joe Musgrove dropping a kettlebell on his foot in spring training, forcing him to miss a month of action. In the very first game of MLB’s 2024 season, Musgrove got the start against the Los Angeles Dodgers. He allowed four earned runs, walked a batter, and hit another. His ERA is incalculable because he didn’t record an out. The Dodgers went on to win 14-1.

• Spring training games don’t mean anything, and Musgrove was excellent last season when healthy. But if I were a Padres fan I would have very much not wanted my team to kick off a redemption campaign by immediately getting stuffed into a locker by its biggest rival on national TV. 

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(LEAD PHOTO: CRAIG SUNTER/FLICKR)

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