CA-37: How Low Can You Go?

Well, Laura Richardson won her race for Congress and will represent the Long Beach area for, I gather, the next 20 years. There'll be a runoff, but that's just a formality; the Democrats in the race got close to 80% of the vote (not that there was much of a vote; turnout was about 11%, and Richardson will go to Congress with the support, in the primary at least, of 11,000 voters).

What this really shows is that you don't mess with labor. If Jenny Oropeza made a different vote in the State Senate with regard to the tribal gaming compacts, maybe she'd be headed to DC. But what dismays me is how nasty a campaign Richardson ran, and how in the end it didn't matter one bit. She continually claimed that the Congressional seat ought to go to "one of us," a not-so-subtle swipe at Oropeza's Hispanic roots (although both of them have Caucasian mothers, apparently). She also sent a sickening mailer attacking Oropeza for missing votes in the Assembly, at a time when Oropeza had liver cancer.

Ultimately, I don't think these negative attacks mattered; it was the boots on the ground from labor unions that did. But that's the problem; they DIDN'T matter. Richardson didn't pay the price for running an ugly and dishonest campaign. That, combined with the pathetic turnout, should give everyone pause. This is a low-income and low-information district. The progressive movement is nonexistent here. And the same identity politics drove the race, and labor turned a blind eye to it.

And people wonder why it's hard to take back America...