California

The highly regarded Field Poll has a new poll out this morning which takes an indepth look at the California Governor's race.  It is a must read for any student of politics, particularly the complicated politics of California.

I have come to believe that this race may be the single most important race in the entire country.  If Whitman wins she would be an instant leader to be the Republican Vice Presidential nominee in 2012, or she may even decide to run for President.  If she is on the ticket in 2012 she could help bring a disgruntled national business community firmly into the GOP camp, and potentially put California into play in 2012, a move that could cost the Democrats tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. 

This poll makes it clear that Whitman has a very real shot of winning this race, not just because of her appeal, argument and money but in how she is building her coalition, a strategy that could be replicated by the national GOP with the right ticket in 2012.  In this poll she is, amazingly, winning among young people (the largest demographic age group in the poll) and trails with Latinos - 20 percent of the statewide electorate - by only 50-39.  She has at that magic 40 percent mark today with Latinos, a percentage often cited by Republican strategists as the threshold number GOPers must win if they are to win national and California elections. In contrast, Democrats received 70% of the Latino vote in the 2006 midterms, and President Obama received 67 percent in 2008.  They received similar numbers with young people in each of the last two elections.

For Jerry Brown getting his numbers up to the recent Democratic performance with these two huge parts of the CA electorate - 67 percent plus in each of the last 2 national elections - appears to be now, perhaps, the single most important strategic goal of his campaign in the months ahead.

If Whitman wins this race in the way she is attempting to win it she will become a powerful leader of a modern, 21st century GOP.  Her victory would signal  that the national GOP has begun to figure out to pick the lock of the very 21st century Obama electoral majority, built to a great degree on the enthusiastic support of young people and Hispanics. 

As I wrote a few weeks ago Whitman would be a perfect VP candidate for Jeb Bush if he were to run and win the GOP nomination.  This ticket, led by the governor and former governor of California and Florida, two of the largest states in the nation, could credible attack the Obama electoral map, whose firewall today is the heavily Latin parts of the country (CA-SW-FL). With the new found weakness of the President in the rustbelt and with VA and NC likely to be unwinnable in 2012, the President and his team will have to mount a very fierce defense of this Latin belt.  If they hold it they can hold the Presidency.  And for the GOP, it is looking like they could actually field a ticket in 2012 which could - emphasize could - win enough of the midwest and the Latin belt to mount a very credible challenge to the President next time around. 

So, it is time now to take Meg Whitman, and her modern campaign, seriously.

Update Thursday AM - Whitman has gone up with billboards in Spanish announcing her opposition to SB1070.  Further evidence of a smart and modern campaign.  And the always sharp Christina Bellantoni of TPM also takes a look at the innovative Whitman effort in CA this morning.

In yesterday's New York Times, conservative columnist Ross Douthat accuses President Obama of "pushing a blue-state agenda during a recession that’s exposed some of the blue-state model’s weaknesses, and some of the red-state model’s strengths."

Asking readers to consider California, which he places against the stellar conservative governance of Texas, Douthat notes:

California, always liberalism's favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

(his link points to a Time article about Arnold Schwarzenegger's work in this area, who, last I checked, has an R and a 28 percent in state approval rating next to his name)

While California is undoubtedly a national leader in trends of all stripes, understanding the legacy of California governance as being "liberalism's favorite laboratory," couldn't be more wrong. The reasons for California's epic struggles lie, not in the "always liberalism" that Douthat sees, but instead in the Ronald Reagan conservative tax revolt coming home to roost.

In contrast to, say, California's efforts on energy policy, which research shows have created prosperity in the state over the last generation, the tax revolt defining Proposition 13 destroyed a top notch public schools system and, more recently, rendered the state bankrupt. The 1978 ballot initiative, which capped property taxes and mandated a 2/3 rule for the state legislature to pass a budget, has created a structural shortfall in the state budget and a political inability for legislators to craft a solution -- but Douthat doesn't see fit to mention it.

Conservatives love to argue that California has incredibly high tax rates, and, in the case of some specific taxes, that's true. But that's only because Proposition 13 so drastically lowered property taxes as to necessitate raising taxes to compensate for lost revenue. As Ezra Klein, in discussing Robert Samuelson's op-ed on California (which, like Douthat's piece, conspicuously fails to mention Prop 13), notes this morning:

Total state and local taxes take up 11.73 percent of the average Californian's income. The national average is 11.23 percent. And it's been like that for many years:

Far from being "always" liberal, California's electoral votes were supposed to be safe for Reagan's Republicans, giving them a generational lock on the White House. Here again, California was ahead of the nation, this time in discovering that conservatives couldn't govern and is now as deep blue as the Pacific Ocean.

Now that the nation has learned its lesson from eight years of red-state governance under Douthat's vaunted Texas leadership, America followed California, this time for the better, in overwhelmingly rejecting failed conservative governance. Blue-staters (a lot of folks these days) have only had six months on the job after eight years of botched "red-state" governance. It will be a lot longer than that if conservatives like Douthat can't even figure out where they went wrong; Proposition 13 was certainly one of the first places.

Update: Ezra Klein just blogged on Douthat's column as well. He does a nice job taking down the argument that Texas is a good model for anything and the broader red-blue frame that Douthat tries to use.

Even California, the land of high-tech and innovation, cannot weather this storm. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that unemployment rose to 10.5 percent in February.

The state unemployment rate jumped to 10.5 percent in February, a level not seen since 1983. All told, the recent economic slide has left 1.95 million Californians scrambling for work.

Friday's report from the Employment Development Department charts a sharp rise from January's 10.1 percent rate and brings the state closer to its modern peak of 11 percent, which occurred in late 1982 and early 1983.

The U.S. unemployment rate for February was 8.1 percent. During the Great Depression, unemployment got as high as 25 percent.

January numbers showed California at 10.1 percent unemployment, one of four states with that number higher than 10 percent. (Michigan, Rhode Island, and South Carolina are the others.) Growth in the 1990s was driven, in large part, by the California led tech boom, and California has generally been on the leading edge of the nation's economic activity. High unemployment in heavy manufacturing driven states was how people understood this recession, but these numbers from California mean something different is afoot.

Of course, California's housing market has been hit especially hard, and then there's this. 

Adding to the incredible drama of this already remarkable race, there is a growing body of evidence that Clinton and Obama may go into Super Tuesday tied, or close to it. The Rasmussen and Gallup tracks are now showing significant movement to Obama. The Rasmussen link above also has polls in Connecticut and California with the candidates now within margin of error. At this point, however, it is still too early to gauge the impact of the Edwards withdrawal - something that could influence the apparent Obama momentum one way or the other.

Two further points:

- Obama leads among white voters in the Rasmussem CA poll. I think this poll, and the other polls in this round should put to bed the idea that Obama cannot win white votes. He won plenty of white votes in both IA and NH, and outperformed all predictions of his white vote share in SC.

- Hispanics may end up being the single most important part of the Clinton strategy on Feb 5th. In the new Gallup poll she is holding on to a 28 point national lead, and in the Rasmussen CA poll she also leads by 27 points. As we wrote yesterday this battle for Hispanics - and whether Obama can cut her enormous margin down in the final few days - may be the most consequential battle of all the important battles coming up on Feb 5th.

Am I crazy to be referencing polls given what has happened this year? Maybe...