There’s a whiff of alarm in recent fundraising appeals from Democratic frontrunners seeking to succeed California’s late U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein in a race widely assumed to be an intra-party arm-wrestle for a safely blue seat.
The cause? The 11th-hour entry of former Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres first baseman Steve Garvey.
“A celebrity Republican is gaining traction in the polls, and he could advance to second place and keep us from qualifying for the general election,” warned a Thursday pitch from Orange County Democratic Rep. Katie Porter’s Senate campaign.
It echoed a fundraising plea weeks earlier from rival Burbank Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff’s camp: “A Republican celebrity candidate is surging in the polls for California’s Senate race. … This scenario is what the California GOP has dreamed of.”
The distress from Democrats comes after a recent Politico-Morning Consult poll vaulted the 10-time National League All-Star into second place over Porter and rival Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland. A Dec. 11 SurveyUSA poll also put Garvey second.
If that holds for the March 5 primary — for which voters begin receiving ballots in a month — the deciding vote in November’s general election will be between a Democrat and Republican rather than two Democrats. That’s not always the case in deep-blue California, where “top two” primary rules advance the two candidates with the most votes regardless of party.
Though defeating a Democrat in November would be much tougher for a Republican — Democrats enjoy a 2-to-1 advantage in party registration over the GOP — it raises the urgency now for the leading Democrats.
“Steve Garvey’s name ID and strong showing in recent polling gives him a strong chance of flying the red flag in November,” said Thad Kousser, a University of California-San Diego political science professor, “even if he still has little chance of winning in the general.”
As the race kicks into high gear over the next couple of months, Californians will be seeing more of Garvey and the Democratic front-runners. Garvey is expected to make his first public campaign trip to San Francisco later this month. And his strong showing in the Politico poll earned him entry to a televised Jan. 22 debate with Schiff, Porter and Lee at USC.
Feinstein, who died Sept. 29 at age 90 as her health deteriorated, had become a Democratic juggernaut over more than three decades in the Senate. Since winning the 1992 race for the remainder of former Republican Sen. Pete Wilson’s term when he became governor, she faced just one close challenge by a Republican to keep it, from Michael Huffington in 1994.
As California’s electorate shifted more Democratic in the years since, Feinstein went on to double-digit victories over Republican challengers Tom Campbell, Dick Mountjoy and Elizabeth Emken.
Since the state’s 2011 top-two primary system, Feinstein faced her first significant intra-party threat in 2018 from Democrat Kevin de León, then the state Senate president and now a Los Angeles city councilman. She beat him decisively that November.
But Republicans still can advance to the general election for the U.S. Senate under California’s top-two primary system despite the state’s lopsided voter registration, with 47% registered Democratic, 24% Republican and 22% with no party preference as of October.
In 2022, Mark Meuser, a little-known Bay Area Republican lawyer, placed second in the primary over a long list of small-caliber contenders from both parties challenging U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, appointed by fellow Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom to the seat after former Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris became vice president. Padilla went on to crush Meuser in a November landslide.
The Politico poll of 858 California likely voters found 28% favored Schiff, 19% Garvey, 17% Porter and 14% Lee, putting Schiff further ahead in a race other polls have shown to be closer among leading Democrats. Though Garvey’s showing was within the poll’s 3-percentage point margin of error over Porter, her campaign noted with alarm that “this was the first poll that showed Katie behind Steve.”
SurveyUSA found Schiff at 22%, Garvey at 15% and Porter and Lee at 12% each.
For Garvey to advance, he needs to quickly consolidate the Republican vote now scattered among several low-budget GOP contenders.
“When Republicans coordinate on a single candidate, they always have enough voters even in this blue state to carry that candidate through in the top two to November,” Kousser said.
The Politico poll found 7% support each for Republican executive James P. Bradley, who also ran for the seat in the 2018 primary, and for lawyer Eric Early, who’s run unsuccessful bids for Attorney General and Schiff’s House seat. It found 1% backing for another GOP candidate, retired security analyst Denise Gary-Pandol.
Corralling the GOP vote will take money — lots of it.
“If Garvey has $6 million to $8 million to spend for the March primary, I think it’s very likely that Republican voters would consolidate to him and that means he probably makes the runoff,” said Rob Stutzman, a veteran political strategist who worked for former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“He needs to make Republican voters aware of him,” Stutzman said. “Does he have an adequate budget? People vote right after the end of the month. We need to start seeing ads from the Garvey campaign in the next week or two.”
How much Garvey has to spend remains unclear due to his late October entry into the race. The last quarterly campaign filings showed Schiff with $32 million cash on hand, Porter with $12 million and Lee with $1.3 million at the end of September. Early, Bradley and Gary-Pandol had less than $100,000 combined.
The next campaign finance reports aren’t due until the end of the month. Schiff’s campaign on Friday trumpeted an additional $6.3 million to his war chest, now flush with $35 million. Porter, Lee and Garvey’s campaigns haven’t released their figures.
Garvey, part of the Dodgers 1981 World Series winning team, spent 18 years in the major leagues and later worked in sports marketing. Various sources have estimated his net worth from $5 million to $28 million, so he could have significant personal wealth toward a campaign.
“California is obviously a heavily Democratic state,” said political analyst Dan Schnur, who’s taught politics at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine University, “but that vote will be split several ways. If Garvey can raise a decent amount of money, he should be able to consolidate the Republican vote.”