Check this out:
DEM - Phil Angelides 166636 55.68
REP - Arnold Schwarzenegger 112305 37.52
GRN - Peter Miguel Camejo 12525 4.19
LIB - Art Olivier 2750 0.92
PF - Janice Jordan 2545 0.85
AI - Edward C. Noonan 1661 0.55
Write-in 859 0.29
This is not a misprint.
It's up on the Alameda County Registrar of Voters site as of 7 AM this morning. Wow. Look, I know and you know this didn't happen, but someone at Alameda County Registrar of Voters really didn't want Arnold Schwarzenegger to win.
I wasn't one of them. I voted for him.
Why would a stanch Democrat like me vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger for the second time? Because the California Democratic Party is in the 20th Century when it comes to an understanding of why candidates are and are not compelling to voters and seems to think it has a lock on every election in the state.
As a result of this, what we get is a rash of ineffective policies and a the total erosion of what used to be a can-do attitude in California. We as a party have become bureaucrats and not change-agents. We've lost our mojo. How else to explain the Republican victories in our state, where the GOP's running for cover in others?
BTW, I'm GLAD Jerry McNerney won! Whew, what a relief!
We've got to get with it as a party. We've got to market our candidates better than we do. There's no excuse for what the party does in an age of YouTube and Blip.tv.
In other words, we've got to market and brand our candidates.
Oh,...I should explain the "second time" mention.
In 2002 I attended a fund-raiser for now- SF DA Kamia Harris, when then-California Senator John Burton walked by. Now I'd never met Burton and was interested to at least meet and talk with him especially considering that he was crossing my path. So I simply said "Hello Senator."
His response? "F----- off."
I'm not kidding.
That was upsetting. I thought about the seeds of such a treatment. In other words, why would he even think to say that to someone he does not know? I figured that in the total big picture, he believed that as a powerful California Democrat he could treat anyone the way he wanted.
At that point -- and having seen a little too much of that behavior in general -- I decided to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only Republican I've ever voted for.