How Do You Know When A Candidate With A "D" Next To His Name Isn't Really A Democrat?

The "special election notice" you're looking at was a mailer sent to every registered Republican in CA-34 just before the special election last week. Notice on the bottom who it was paid for, not the Republican Party and not the former head of the Republican Party, Shawn Steel, who wrote it. It was paid for by the official, FEC-registered Ahn for Congress congressional campaign. "Fellow Republicans," it reads, "vote for Robert Lee Ahn for Congress this Tuesday. This inner city district is only 9% GOP! If you don't vote for Robert Lee Ahn, a left wing fanatic will likely be your congressman. Please don't waste your vote!" Steel was warning Republicans not to vote for the actual Republican in the race but to vote for Ahn instead. Ayn, after all, is a wealthy conservative Republican opportunist who wanted to get into L.A. politics so he switched his party registration and-- voilà!-- a new-born Democrat! Steel knew better. He claimed that Ahn, a crook who owns some sketchy car washes and mortuaries, is a "successful businessman." We'll revisit that in a couple of weeks while we gather some interesting evidence about that.

Meanwhile, what's important to remember is that Republicans aren't much of a factor in CA-34. The actual Republican in the congressional special election who Steel didn't want GOP voters to waste their vote on, William Morrison, came in 8th, with 1,349 votes (3.35%) behind the Green Party candidate, Ken Mejia who took about 600 more votes. Romney only got 14.1% of the vote in 2012 and Trump did far worse-- just 10.7%. CA-34 is, arguably, the most progressive congressional district in Los Angeles. It is, after all, the only congressional district the city where Bernie beat Hillary in the presidential primary.

Hard to imagine that Ahn is using Steel as someone to vouch for him. Steel is hard right and fringe and if you know anything about him, it's easy to understand why he and Ahn decided to use pejorative Republican slang to describe CA-34 as an "inner city district" (as in low-income or filled with non-white people). For one thing, Steel was a former President of the California Young Americans for Freedom, was a co-founder of the California chapter of the Club for Growth and has an ugly, hate-filled twitter feed that only a fake Democrat like Robert Ahn would view as something worth being associated with. Normally someone like Ahn-- an "ex"-Republican, stinking of corruption and conservatism-- would be perfect for the DCCC. But Ahn is even too much for them and they're not going to endorse him. I bet it really pains them not to.