Good morning FR readers!  Wow, what a primary night.  First and foremost, I want to extend a very big THANK YOU to FR’s frequent Guest Editor, Nick Romero, for getting up really early this morning to put together our comprehensive main page compendium of today’s political news stories!  If you will recall, my ‘day job’ is working for Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona — a great conservative who was up for re-election yesterday.  Well, we didn’t get the unofficial final results until after 3am, but my boss was re-elected to a new four year term over three opponents with 50.9% of the vote!  Congratulations Sheriff Carona and to your entire campaign team!  The immediate benefit to FR readers throughout the fall will be that I will be a bit less distracted since I won’t be worrying about a run-off for my boss, and will be able to put much more time into the website!  Yeah!
 
Anyways, I thought I would take a few minutes and make some general observations about election night:

• The ulta-low turnout across-the-board created a very unique and unpredictable election night. 
• Even with a turnout model statewide that favored Democrats, Rob Reiner’s tax initiative got walluped in the polls, losing 39% to 61%.  This anti-tax vote doesn’t bode well for Democrats in November.Even with a turnout model statewide that favored Democrats, Rob Reiner’s tax initiative got walluped in the polls, losing 46.9% to  53.1%.  This anti-tax vote doesn’t bode well for Democrats in November.
• It is clear that if there was a normal turn-out amongst Democratic voters, they would have nominated Steve Westly last night.  Instead, because of the small turnout, Angelides was able to eek out the nomination from ultra-liberal, core Democrat voters.  Angelides is the idea candidate for Arnold Schwarzenegger to campaign against because he is such an advocate for higher taxes and for expanding the size and scope of state government.
• Everyone was saying that the articulate and presentable State Senator Jacque Speier would be running against GOP State Senator Tom McClintock this November.  Her unique story about being a victim of senseless violence back in the day, when she and her former Congressman boss were stricken at the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana (her former boss was killed there) would have given her an interesting platform.  But even using that story, she was defeated in the low-turnout primary by Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi.  This will be a fun race to watch, as the contrast is even greater between these two candidates than the differences in the Governor’s race.
• Statewide in GOP primaries, clients of the consulting firm of Wayne Johnson and Tim Clark fared well — conservative Tony Strickland bested moderate GOPer Abel Maldonado to claim the GOP nomination for Controller, and in a battle between two friends of the FlashReport, Michelle Steel & Ray Haynes, Steel narrowly one the race for the 3rd District Board of Equalization seat.
• "Mr. Open Primary" Assemblyman Keith Richman is the latest victim of the bizarre and hard-to-figure-out Claude Parrish.  This enigmatic and odd character, who was termed out of the State Board of Equalization, easily bested Richman to become the GOP nominee against the VERY formidale Attorney General Bill Lockyer this fall, in the race for State Treasurer.  This is probably a testament to the success of slate-cards in down-ticket races.
• Steve Poizner, the GOP nominee for Insurance Commissioner had a great night.  Why was it so great for the unopposed GOP nominee?  His opponent all along was going to be Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante.  But it was a very BIG SIGN of Bustamante’s weak position within his own party that an unknown challenger in his Democratic primary took nearly a third of the vote!

**There is more – click the link**

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.