Your Five Days After Campaign Advice… You shoulda listened to me. Uhh, okay, that was really unfair. So, let’s move on. Watch for my San Diego Winners and Losers here in the next few days. In the meantime, a brief post-election pot-pourri from the San Diego area…

A San Diego Sweep… Revolution 2010 may have been ignored by most California voters, but in San Diego there were conservative and GOP victories in a number of key races, not the least of which is a Republican winning a long-held Dem seat on the San Diego City Council. Jim Sills at SD Rostra shares his musings on the top wins:

Conservatives take all the "Big 5" races in San Diego’s election showdown____

So, What Do We Do Now?… Much was made during the election — at least by the proponents — of the sheer devastation the City of San Diego would face if the Prop D sales tax increase failed.… Read More

This isthe followup to mycomments of last Thursday.

As bad as it was for Republicans Tuesday, one can see that, still, voters on one hand, are for limited and accountable government. What am I talking about? The election in California was a total wipeout. Yes, of course it was on the statewide offices. But we look to the propositionsand one can see the roots of a conservative, keep-government-off-my-back mentality.Now the logic of placing the candidates in statewide office in that same election that defy those tenets of limited and accountable government, is the voter schizophreniathat election experts and party officials are always trying to get a handle on. So it happens again in California as it appears 8 or even all 9 statewide elections will go to Democrat candidates.Even then,several good propositions passed and bad ones were stopped.

My own favorites were that Prop 20 passed and Prop 27 was soundly defeated, meaning the redistrictingprocess will be at least 90% cleaner than it has been with… Read More

It was a Republican tsunami nationwide, that turned into a riptide when it hit California, and sucked the Republicans in this state into the ocean. The question is why? How could a year that began with so much promise fall apart so completely?

The loss was complete. Even if Steve Cooley is able to pull out of his embarrassing showing against the weakest Democrat ever to run for Attorney General, it is no great victory. $140 million for Governor, and other millions for the various other seats. Never has so much been spent on so few to accomplish so little. We could have all gone home, watched football, saved the money, and still done just as well as we did in this election. What went wrong?

I have my own theories, and they begin with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Meg Whitman began her campaign sounding like Schwarzenegger, and ended up losing. Schwarzenegger has given the Republicans a bad name in California. The country showed its dislike of Obama by voting against his candidates throughout the country. The state showed its dislike of Schwarzenegger by voting against Republicans.

On a national… Read More

As we all know, when we all went to bed last Tuesday night, the Attorney’s General Primary between Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris was too close to call. Since that night, Harris has held a slim lead over Cooley. Well, not any more… AG UPDATE – COOLEY LEADS AGAIN! TO: Interested Parties FR: Kevin Spillane, Senior Consultant, Steve Cooley for Attorney General 2010 DT: November 5, 2010… Read More

From today’s Wall Street Journal opinion page…

The Two Left Coasts: Why the GOP wave didn’t wash over New York and California. Tuesday’s GOP landslide didn’t spare many Democrats, but it did stop at the state lines of California and New York. These coastal exceptions deserve some explanation, because they illustrate the difficulties Republicans will face if they fail to reform entitlements, taxes and public spending. In California, Senator Barbara Boxer cruised handily to a fourth term, defeating Carly Fiorina by nine percentage points and change. Democrats also notched a victory with Jerry Brown’s restoration to the Governor’s mansion; he… Read More

Earlier this afternoon, at a meeting of the incoming Assembly Republicans (which is to say retiring "seniors" were not there, and incoming but-not-yet-sworn-in freshman were) — a change in leadership took place. Assembly Republicans elected Connie Conway of the Central Valley as their new leader. Conway was just re-elected to her second term on Tuesday.

It is not unusual to see a change in legislative leadership when seats (or in this case a seat) are lost in an election. Garrick will have been one of the shorter-tenured leaders, having been elected to his post earlier in the year.

Conway made an attempt to displace Garrick during the state budget drill, which was not successful. Subsequently Garrick released her ("you’re fired!") from her role as Caucus Chairman. While we don’t know who the new Caucus Chairman will be, it’s a safe bet it won’t be Garrick…

Senate Republican Leader Bob Dutton is secure in his… Read More

Gone are the old days when candidates and political onlookers alike went to bed on election night with final election results. On the contrary, unless a candidate has racked up a substantial lead by evening’s day end, it will be days (or maybe even weeks) before final results are known. This played itself out in the primary for Assemblyman Mike Villines who ultimately won the GOP primary for State Insurance Commissioner but didn’t know that for literally weeks after election day had passed. Now it is Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris’ turn to wait it out as the slow process of waiting for all of the ballots to be counted continues to take place.

Locally here in Orange County where I live, Neil Kelly, our Registrar of Voters, said that some 30% of the total votes to be counted in the general election were still being processed. I live in a small town in South Orange County called Rancho Santa Margarita. In our local city council races, the differential between several candidates is so small (less than a hundred votes) that the outcome is completely up in the air — with over 4,300 ballots yet to be… Read More

The Fresno County Clerk’s Office needs to be investigated. Victor Salazar, who ran unopposed this year, has made a mess out of the entire voting and ballot counting process. The Fresno Bee has an opinion piece on the mess here, and you can read this news story here.

Like most government officials, they blame their incompetence on lack of funding. But that is not going to change anytime soon, and they knew about budget cuts 6 months ago. The real problem is a complete lack of creativity, entrepreneurial thinking, and planning for right sizing government. We have all had to do this in our business lives, but the Fresno County Clerk evidently doesn’t have the capacity to operate without unlimited funding.

Salazar had 6 months to create a volunteer brigade, engage students, lower the poll worker stipend, and communicate the polling place consolidation plan to the community, and he didn’t do it. Now, given the problems, we can’t… Read More