Iowa Envy

Last year, Democratic governor Jerry Brown signed a bill to move up the state’s presidential primary to March 3. That would put California on the first slate of “Super Tuesday” contests, exactly one month after the Iowa caucuses and just after the early primaries in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. What’s more, the mail-in voting period in California begins about 30 days before any election. Since 2008 at least 58 percent of the state’s primary votes have come via the mail-in ballot, and so it’s likely the majority of California Democrats will be making their pick for the presidential nominee at the same time as Democrats in Dubuque and Nashua.

This is not the first time the Golden State has jumped ahead from its traditional June primary date. In 1996, California tried holding its primary in late March—but by then Bob Dole had wrapped up the GOP nomination and Bill Clinton was running unopposed. The state went even earlier in March 2000, but again, both parties had presumptive nominees before Californians could vote.

Four years later, California kept its primary in early March, but that was a full two months after the 2004 Iowa caucuses, and there was no real competition in California for eventual Democratic nominee John Kerry. In 2008, California primary voters went to the polls earlier than they ever had: February 5, just one month after the Iowa caucuses. The state was a windfall for John McCain on his march to the GOP nomination. But on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton’s narrow, come-from-behind win had the effect of giving her enough delegates to keep her moribund campaign against Barack Obama alive for several more months. The state gave up for the next two cycles, returning to the June date.

When the latest change was made, California secretary of state Alex Padilla hoped that things would finally be different. “Candidates will not be able to ignore the largest, most diverse state in the nation as they seek our country’s highest office,” he said.

Yet candidates ignore California less for the timing of its primary than for the difficulty and costs of campaigning here. Television and radio ads are a must for getting any kind of name recognition, and the state has 11 major media markets, including 2 of the nation’s 10 largest. “You can look great in a 30-second TV ad, and that’s all you need,” says Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego. “The battle for California will be on the airwaves.” With numerous geographically dispersed urban areas, the sort of retail politicking that works in Iowa or New Hampshire is logistically impossible in California.

There’s also been something missing for a generation: credible presidential hopefuls from California. The only truly competitive one was Jerry Brown, who ran against Bill Clinton in 1992. What has California Democrats really buzzing about 2020 is that they may have several of their own to choose from.

It’s no secret that Kamala Harris, the freshman senator and progressive firebrand, wants to run for president. She’s building a proto-campaign infrastructure, cultivating a donor network, and making a name for herself in the national media. Yet despite being a fixture in Northern California Democratic politics for a couple of decades—she dated San Francisco mayor Willie Brown and was the city’s district attorney for seven years—and despite twice being elected the state’s attorney general, Harris doesn’t have nearly the same recognition statewide as titans like Dianne Feinstein and Jerry Brown. A Morning Consult poll earlier this year found 26 percent of registered voters in California said they didn’t know or had no opinion of their junior senator. The joke is that Harris’s presidential stock rises the farther you get from California.

Her influence, though, is growing within California’s Democratic party. She endorsed 27 candidates for statewide and local offices ahead of June’s jungle primaries, and nearly all of them won or advanced to the runoff. One Democratic operative here calls Harris’s the most coveted endorsement in the state.

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti is getting into the game, too, and has already started fulfilling the requirements to be a bona fide presidential wannabe. Make a pilgrimage to Iowa? Check. Set up a national PAC to help Democratic candidates in the midterm? Check (the Democratic Midterm Victory Fund raised just under $700,000 through June). Draw a dubious comparison between your hometown and early-primary state voters? Check (“Iowa and Los Angeles have a ton in common,” Garcetti said during his April trek to Des Moines).

Garcetti has a geography problem, too. California’s Democratic machine is based in the Bay Area, and politicians from Southern California usually struggle to break in. And unlike San Francisco, Los Angeles is not consumed by politics—national, local, or otherwise. Bill Carrick, a veteran strategist who has worked for Garcetti, describes the problem with a cab comparison. In Boston, he says, cabbies have strong opinions on every mailer sent out by a mayoral candidate. In Los Angeles, they won’t know there’s an election going on. “Politics here is not a preoccupation,” Carrick admits, and Garcetti won’t be able to count on a massive base of support from his hometown—just 15 percent of registered voters in Los Angeles turned out for his first election in 2013.

Other prospective California Democratic presidential hopefuls include House members Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff and liberal super-donor Tom Steyer. None is taken too seriously, particularly Steyer, who has geared up to run for statewide office before (including the 2018 governor’s race) only to back away. But when Michael Avenatti, the L.A.-based lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels and a cable-news mainstay, is teasing a White House run, perhaps any California Democrat can. And while it’s clear that current lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom has national ambitions, there’s little to suggest the 50-year-old Democrat is prepared to start running for president as soon as his victory in the governor’s race is called in November.

“I think Kamala Harris is the only candidate who fits the profile of what California primary voters like in recent years,” says Kousser. “I don’t think Eric Garcetti or Adam Schiff win that race to the left.”

The hope is that a favored son or daughter of California can use the March primary and its wealth of delegates as a slingshot to the nomination. If, say, Harris scared off other candidates from contesting her big and expensive state, she could rack up enough delegates (which are distributed proportionally, according to Democratic party rules) to be formidable, especially if the field is still crowded on Super Tuesday. But even Harris’s allies admit she needs to deliver a strong showing in either New Hampshire or South Carolina for any California-focused strategy to work.

And there’s always the possibility that a non-Californian could find lots of delegates there after a good early-state performance. Despite its progressive reputation, California likes establishment Democrats. Primary voters went for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008 and over Bernie Sanders in 2016. Jerry Brown lost his home state to Bill Clinton in 1992.

But California is a different state from even just a couple of years ago, thanks to one man: Donald Trump. The L.A. Women’s March protesting his inauguration in January 2017 drew 750,000 people; it was the second-largest in the country after the main event in Washington. Democrats are hoping to wake the sleeping giant of Latino voters thanks to Trump’s immigration policies and antagonistic rhetoric. “The biggest thing that’s dominating the political discussion in California is Trump,” says Carrick. “That really has become the touchstone on which everybody has basically been motivated or activated.”