Party silent as Tom Steyer spends millions attacking fellow Democrats | Opinion
California’s Democratic Party leadership was wrong when it said there were too many of its candidates running for governor this June. The problem is billionaire Tom Steyer.
This month should be about voters weighing the different perspectives of public servants with public experience vying for California’s top job in the public sector. Their voices and ideas are being drowned out by Steyer’s suffocating advertising campaign. The money is tainting the democratic process. And the party doesn’t seem to care.
With profits from his years running a hedge fund that invested in fossil fuels and private prisons, Steyer “has spent more than every other candidate combined in this campaign,” Xavier Becerra, a Democrat with 35 years of public service experience, said at Tuesday night’s gubernatorial debate on CNN. Steyer is now “using those profits to now try to buy his seat in the governor’s office.”
Becerra’s math appears right. Steyer could easily spend $150 million of his own money before this primary season is through. And given the state of the race, if one is to believe the ongoing surveys bankrolled by the Democratic Party, Steyer hasn’t spent nearly enough to secure the election.
In the party’s so-called California VOTER Index, Steyer now trails Becerra, who has been surging in the polls ever since years of inappropriate sexual behavior by former U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell began to surface. Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton are tied with 18% of likely voters, followed by Republican/Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco at 14% and Steyer at 12%. Everybody else is in the single digits.
Based on the Democrats’ own poll, Steyer will have to find a way to slow down Becerra’s momentum while elevating him over both Bianco and Becerra to get into a November runoff with Hilton.
That would mean Steyer would have to trash Becerra and every other Democrat to try to buy his way into Sacramento. And that’s exactly what he’s been doing.
Becerra “doesn’t even know what the job of governor can and can’t do,” a Steyer spokesperson blasted on social media.
Former Rep. Katie Porter “has accepted maximum amounts from billionaires,” said the campaign from the self-funded billionaire, who has unlimited amounts of his own money based on the rules.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan “has accepted tens of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley’s most controversial corners,” said the billionaire who invested in fossil fuel companies and private prisons.
Some authentic Democratic voices will struggle to be heard among the coming avalanche of Steyer spots. And that’s really too bad.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, for one, was right to call Steyer and Porter’s quest for a single-payer healthcare system in California “pie in the sky,” given how neither has a detailed way to pay for something that would be great.
Porter was right to challenge Becerra whether he supports such a state system, a question he answered in long sentences as opposed to a yes or no.
Becerra was right to defend a gas tax that fixes our roads and builds our bridges, especially since no other candidate has identified an alternate funding source readily at hand.
And Mahan was right to label Gov. Gavin Newsom’s tenure as “incomplete” and urge Sacramento to stretch existing taxpayer dollars further before asking for more.
This is the kind of exchange that Democrats with different ideas and experiences could be waging so that voters can make up their own minds.
Steyer is on a path to spending more than half a billion dollars on his own political ambitions, first a failed 2020 run for president and now this historically damaging run for governor.
Newsom has seen fit to endorse a buddy from Marin County, Josh Fryday, for lieutenant governor, yet nobody for governor. How lame is that?
The same silence on the governor’s race is afflicting U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff and party matriarch Nancy Pelosi and on and on.
Candidates like Villaraigosa, Mahan, Betty Yee and Tony Thurmond were never the problem for the Democratic Party in the race. It’s been Steyer all along.
Steyer is the one person whose coming advertising barrage could knock down Becerra just enough for Bianco to edge ahead, while Steyer cancels himself and all his fellow Democrats out of contention. It is the one scenario that remains all too real, and the one that party leadership is afraid to talk about.
Regardless, money is influencing this process in historically bad ways. Money speaks in today’s morally bankrupt California Democratic Party. Not democracy.