Shinn the Writer

WARNING – POLITICAL RANT FOLLOWS

 

This has been a month of unfinished things. My music page highlights a performance that hasn’t happened yet. My homeowner page deals with an overdue project that hasn’t really gone past the planning stage, let alone come to fruition. My physical page concerns a dental problem for which I’ll get the verdict… soon. And my main page? Well, it concerns my reflections on our midterms whose final results aren’t in yet. But I’m flexible and for the sake of getting this update done, I hope you are too.

 

California had its primary election on Tuesday, one of the strangest imaginable. For those of you who are unaware, the focus was on the Gubernatorial race. A total of 62 candidates were on the ballot. To make matters worse, the top two vote getters would be the only two candidates on the final ballot in November, regardless of party affiliation. It was hard to understand, but from my perspective, until Eric Swalwell, the front-running Democrat, saw his campaign implode. But from my perspective, there were five credible Democrats running, Swalwell, Katie Porter, Javier Becerra, Jim Steyer, and Matt Mahan. Each had the credentials to be a strong candidate.

 

I didn’t care much about the Republicans in the race, but there seemed to be two with reasonable traction, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco. 

 

As one could expect, the top five Democrats took about 55.2% of the total votes and the top Republicans took 38.3. But what if the Republicans had split their vote evenly between their top two, and the Democrats had split their vote evenly between the top five? The two Republicans would have had 19.15% each, and each of the Democrats would have 11.04% each! Even with Swalwell dropping out due to his scandal, each would have wound up with only 13.8%. Either way, we’d have had to have chosen between two Republicans despite the state’s strong Democratic bias.

 

But Trump came in and endorsed Hilton who took a significant number of votes from Bianco who wound up around 11.1%. And surprisingly, Porter and Mahan between them only got 8.6%, so the two top Democrats wound up with 46.2% of the vote and Becerra finished second overall, good enough to appear on the final ballot.

 

My strategy was to wait until the day before the election and choose Steyer or Becerra, whoever was leading. That was Becerra who placed a very close second to Hilton overall. I actually felt good about both of the top two Dems and had Steyer come out on top, he’d have had my support in the finals. Sorry Donald. Bullet dodged.