☆ Can't buy me votes

Lbeaumont, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lance Christensen, Vice President of the CA Policy Center, offers his perspective on the strategic decisions that influenced the arc of Mayor Mahan's gubernatorial run. An exclusive Opp Now Q&A.

Opportunity Now: Matt Mahan raised a lot of money, got some big-time endorsements, and scored really exceptional media coverage, but it didn't translate into a big percentage of votes. What happened?

Lance Christensen: Matt Mahan entered the race too late, with a thin resume and not a lot of statewide recognition. Mahan needed to get above 10 percent of the vote to be viable going into the last few weeks of the election and his signals were all over the place.

He tried occupying the lane of the sane-progressive but couldn't distinguish himself from the other leading Democratic candidates. While his candidacy looked promising for people not intimately familiar with his time as mayor or his other private ventures, his policy prescriptions looked very similar to those of Republican Steve Hilton. And because Mahan's base are opposed to the Trump Administration, Mahan alienated a significant portion of his potential Republican voters by not staying consistently with the moderate middle, and being too critical of MAGA Republicans.

That was an unforced error that didn't get him any more support on the progressive left where the message is saturated.

ON: Mahan's coalition in SJ comprised moderate Dems, NPP's and Republicans. But local Republicans in particular have felt ignored since his first election, and went with GOP candidates for governor. Is this a structural weakness of the Moderate lane? Can it succeed without cross-party support?

LC: To the outside observer who has watched California politics closely for 25 years, Matt Mahan made a strategic decision to flirt with the center-right coalition, adopting a lot of their platform, talking points and free-market perspective without demonstrating the long years of building actual relationships or coalitions with the center-right.

Venture capital leaders in Silicon Valley believed that one of their own could transcend the left-right political continuum with Mahan, but this ignores several prominent and fully funded statewide campaigns in the recent past where the candidate abandoned their natural base to chase fleeting voters without allegiance to a party.

Besides the tens of millions of dollars in savvy campaign videos and tons of earned media, Mahan had no functional political machine. He and his team were working off of hope as a campaign strategy with financing gimmicks that may work in raising money for start-ups, but don't translate to politics, where parties are entrenched and unwilling to easily allow someone else into the fold.

We live in a political party world for now, and unless and until the moderate or independent voters can find a way to transmit their message to millions of undecided voters, unaffiliated moderates will be ignored until the general election get-out-the-vote operations begin and the two major parties in the state reflexively and tactically turn their sights on the middle ground.

ON: Are there even any moderate Dems left in California?

LC: There are no more moderate Democrats in elected office in California. Once they are elected, they are expected to toe the line and sing from the same hymnal. There is no ability to meander outside the Democratic Party politburo without being punished.

ON: What should Mahan do next?

LC: If Mahan is intent on improving San Jose, he should show Californians that his policy prescriptions can outlast his term in office and not look like he's running for governor again.

Ed. note: The above comments are Mr. Christensen's political observations, not prescriptions.