Fewer than two years ago, California gifted Democrats a continuation of a blue wave that finally spanned from the bottom of the coast to the Valley with the crucial flipping of Orange County and, perhaps even more shockingly, the 25th District. The historically red electorate decided to bet on the “Medicare for all” political neophyte Katie Hill, whom Vice had declared was running the “most millennial campaign ever.”
Evidently, the experiment failed, and now, Republicans are about to win back their first California congressional seat since 1998.
As you may recall, evidence emerged that Hill was sleeping with at least one paid subordinate working on her campaign, and soon after, rumors began swirling that she had engaged in an affair with a different House staffer in violation of ethics rules. (The staffer in question has vehemently denied engaging in any sort of romantic or inappropriate relationship with Hill, claiming that Hill’s husband mistook the journalist she was actually dating for him.)
Regardless, the Valley may be liberal enough to try out loony, left-wing policies, but, in the post-#MeToo era, even a feminist icon, as Hill was so heralded, can’t engage in flagrant sexual predation without offending the suburban set. And so, a special election was set, unknowingly during the worst of California’s coronavirus lockdowns.
From the primary, Democratic nominee Christy Smith had the backing of the party establishment, keen on icing out the (temporarily) Bernie Sanders-backed Cenk Uygur. Smith ran the sort of campaign that gave Nancy Pelosi her speakership back in 2018 in spectacularly feminist fashion. Given Smith’s much more established state politics credentials and relative centrism in comparison to Hill, it seemed like a slam-dunk for Democrats. After all, Hillary Clinton won the district by 6 points.
But alas, with the overwhelming majority of the vote in at press time, the victor appears to be Mike Garcia, the former Navy veteran and Raytheon executive who earned the glowing endorsements of President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. But Smith is a somewhat generic Democrat, and Garcia, hardly a MAGA hat-toting provocateur, is a somewhat generic Republican. Is there much to extrapolate here? Yes, but it’s less a lesson in party politics than in pragmatics.
For starters, Garcia overwhelmingly benefited from California’s mail-in and drop-off ballots. California had already established a vote-by-mail system for the 2020 primaries, but Tuesday’s special election provided an interesting sample of its implications for a general election, and, contrary to Republican fulmination, it went significantly less poorly than once thought.
For another, maybe the party that wants power shouldn’t continue to celebrate a person, man or woman, who continued being feted by liberals and the media after resigning from office for allegedly banging at least one subordinate. Remember how we had a huge hashtag and movement about how that’s an abuse of power? It was a whole thing.
Smith’s respectability campaign was never going to read as authentic so long as Hill kept on throwing herself at every magazine spread that would take her. Consider: Can you think of a single “safe” campaign that would let Al Franken or Roy Moore cut an ad for them without denouncing it? Because that’s what Hill did much to the astonishment of the California press.
And so Hill inadvertently gave Republicans their first House pickup in California in decades. It’s a testament to the merits of a candidate like Garcia, qualified and likable as well as the son of a Mexican immigrant, but, probably more significantly, indicative of the sheer awfulness of Hill.
Republicans will want to read into this apparent victory, but the lesson is pretty simple. Voters don’t want their representatives humiliating their districts on the national stage, and if you run a semicompetent conservative with suburban sensibilities, maybe older voters can actually swing vote-by-mail in that candidate’s favor.
