A Republican Could Never Win In The Oakland-Berkeley-Richmond District, So They Recruited And Financed A Corporate Democrat, Self-Styled Buffy The Bernie Slayer

23% of registered voters in California's 15th Assembly district declined to state a party preference. 66% are Democrats. 6% are Republicans. Most of the district is Berkeley, Richmond and Oakland, along with smaller communities like Albany, Emeryville, Piedmont, El Cerrito, Hercules, Pinole, San Pablo, El Sobrante and Kensington. Trump managed to pull 7% of the vote there. The demographic make-up is a great mix:

• White- 39.4%
• Latino- 21.7%
• Asian- 19.9%
• Black- 16.3%

This year the primary for the open seat (incumbent Tony Thurmond is a candidate for State Superintendent of Schools) included 11 Democrats and a Republican. The Republican came in 6th with 5.9% of the vote, eliminating him from the general election and guaranteeing that it would be a Democrat vs Democrat race. That top two from the primary are a corporate big money Clinton type, Buffy Wicks, and grassroots progressive Berniecrat Jovanka Beckles.

Blue America concentrates on congressional races, but every year we look for exceptional men and women running for state legislative seats, candidates we think are potential superstars of the future. This cycle there are just 14-- and one of them is Jovanka Beckles. A few days ago Lee Fang and Leighton Woodhouse published a piece in The Intercept about the race: A Billionaire-Backed Democrat Is Facing Off Against A Democratic Socialist In Berkeley. And It's Getting Rough. "The battles within the Democratic Party," they wrote, "have played out in high-profile races this year, largely featuring well-heeled establishment figures with years of elected experience challenged by left-wing outsiders running with the support of a national grassroots movement. Amidst this fight, there has been a strenuous effort from party centrists to drain the question of any ideological content."

They explained that "Jovanka Beckles, the candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Sen. Bernie Sanders who has the governing experience and the support of leading local elected officials" is up against "Buffy Wicks, who has never held office before [and] is running as a business-backed Democratic operative pushing to disrupt a seat long-held by the progressive left. In the June primary, backed by a groundswell of money, largely from tech executives and Washington, D.C. politicos, Wicks took the most votes." At a recent forum audience members peppered Wicks-- formerly a a senior advisor to Rahm Emanuel’s campaign for Chicago mayor-- with questions about "why she isn’t working towards single payer health care and why she opposes the contentious Proposition 10 ballot measure to enable more rent control in California. For several educators in the crowd, they wanted to know how she could square her recent public criticism of charter schools with the fact that pro-charter groups were spending big money [hundreds of thousands of dollars] on her behalf." She ran Hillary Clinton's California primary campaign and her office featured a notorious "Buffy the Bernie Slayer" poster.

Beckles has served since 2011 on the Richmond city council, fighting a larger than life battle against the oil giant Chevron, which owns the 117-year-old refinery that has long cast its shadow over local politics.

The campaign has piqued national interest as wealthy donors have inundated the election with independent expenditures casting Beckles as an angry extremist unwilling to support a practical solution to the housing crisis.

The race is another sign of the economic and cultural changes that have utterly transformed the Bay Area in recent years as a result of the long technology boom-- changes that are uprooting the traditional, radical political culture of the region, pitting a longstanding leftist power base against an ascendent brand of technocratic, corporate-friendly Democrats.

...The extent to which influential Democrats [led by corrupt slime ball Gavin Newsom] and corporate donors have rallied around Wicks is an indication of how much the election has become a bellwether in the ongoing battle to define the heart and soul of the party.

“If a democratic socialist can knock off an establishment Democrat, you’ll have a slew of Berniecrats challenging mainstream candidates,” warned former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, now a highly paid consultant, in his regular column for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Those establishment Democrats and their allies have closed ranks around Wicks to a degree almost unheard of in a local race like the one in Assembly District 15.

For a relatively small California legislative seat being fought over by two Democrats, huge amounts of money are being spent, largely to elect Wicks. Independent expenditure groups have spent $1,191,389 on pro-Wicks efforts this year and another $244,160 in negative messages against Beckles. On the other side, a labor union-backed independent expenditure group has spent $391,831 in support of Beckles and $7,412 in opposition to Wicks.

In terms of direct donations, the contrast is similarly stark. Beckles has raised $386,887, which pales in comparison to the $1.3 million raised by Wicks.

The East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America launched a research-driven website highlighting the donors to Wicks and her attendant IEs, noting that many of the donors include right-wing billionaires and consultants for special interests. William Oberdorf, a major Republican donor, has given $150,000 to one group backing Wicks. Ron Conway, an early investor in Twitter and other name-brand tech companies, who has used his wealth to help moderate Democrats defeat a slate of progressives in San Francisco, has also given to Wicks.

The fundraising advantage has given Wicks an ability to hire a professional campaign operation, with modern polling, advertising, and an innovative get-out-the-vote operation that utilizes texting to encourage supporters to remind their friends and colleagues to go to the polls. The Berkeley Democratic Club, one of the local groups endorsing Wicks, received $6,000 from her campaign last week to send its endorsement slate mailer to city residents.

...Govern for California, one of the groups backing Wicks, is financed in part by one of the heirs of the Walmart fortune, an irony that somewhat blunts her campaign story of once doing battle with the retail giant.

One of the other groups, formed last month, is the “Coalition for East Bay Health Care Access, Affordable Housing and Quality Public Schools, supporting Buffy Wicks for Assembly 2018.” The group is principally funded by the two powerful healthcare lobby groups, the California Medical Association and the California Dental Association; as well as by EdVoice, a charter school PAC.

Chevron, the longtime nemesis of the district’s environmental and economic justice movements and of Jovanka Beckles in particular, also appears to favor Buffy Wicks. Local lobbyist Eric Zell, who has worked for years to influence local government on behalf of Chevron, recently sent an email to his contact list urging them to vote for her. In a sign of how malleable the term “progressive” has become in the Bay Area’s current political culture, the word was used in the email six times. “In the East Bay, we are united behind a progressive agenda,” the email from the oil lobbyist proclaims.

But it is the lawyers that registered and administer the Wicks IE that may raise eyebrows even more than its donors.

The group is run by attorneys from Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, a notoriously right-wing law firm that serves lobbyists and the Republican Party. The firm provided consulting work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, as well as many of the most conservative California Republicans, including Darrell Issa and Dana Rohrabacher.

Ashlee Titus, the partner whose name appears on the IE’s filing, is a board member of the California chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association and the president of the Sacramento Federalist Society. Her name appears on an October 3 letter advocating the swift confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. (Titus did not respond to a request for comment.)

...In opinion columns and in social media, supporters of the Wicks campaign have portrayed Beckles as an unstable radical, someone who can’t be trusted to effectively represent the district... Campaign fliers have swamped the mailboxes of district residents, claiming that Beckles has missed votes on the city council, played video games on her phone during council votes, and ignored the housing crisis... In one recent mailer, Beckles is quoted stating that, “We don’t suffer from a housing shortage crisis.” But the quote is cropped, leaving out her following statement, “We are suffering from a housing affordability crisis.”

...The barrage of attacks is nothing new for Beckles. She has fought for years as part of a grassroots effort called the Richmond Progressive Alliance to reshape the political reality in her community, which has long been dominated by politicians loyal to the interests of Chevron.

Since 2003, the RPA, as it is known, has worked to push back against Chevron influence in Richmond. They have fought Chevron’s efforts to skirt local taxes, called attention to flaring from the refinery, and demanded greater fines for the routine pollution that has sickened local residents.

That activism has sparked years of increasingly bitter political fights. In 2014 alone, the oil giant poured more than $2.9 million into an account used to smear RPA supporters, including Beckles, a shocking sum to influence a working class municipal race. A campaign consultant was hired to launch a blog mocking Beckles, falsely accusing her of dining excessively on city taxpayer money and not showing up to meetings. Chevron even hired a public relations expert to launch an entire news publication, the Richmond Standard, complete with bona fide coverage of local events, as a portal to advance political attacks on RPA politicians including Beckles.

Incredibly, the RPA has largely prevailed, despite some setbacks. The coalition, including Beckles, has won reforms in city policing and a $15 minimum wage, among other policy changes. Chevron-backed candidates have repeatedly lost close elections to RPA’s slate. Many of the RPA-backed ideas were eventually defeated, such as a radical proposal to use eminent domain to save homes from foreclosure and an effort to combat obesity through a soda tax.

The current legislative race has recast many of the old charges hurled at RPA candidates like Beckles: Too out of touch, too extreme. In past years, the establishment Democratic Party in Richmond used the wider network of party figures to tip the scales, with California Treasurer Phil Angelides and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), among others, working to help the Chevron-backed moderates campaign against the insurgent RPA.

The same strategy appears clear in the current race for Assembly District 15. Wicks has touted an impressive list of supporters. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), [corporate whore] Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom; and even Obama himself have endorsed Wicks. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has personally donated to her campaign, and former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) attended her launch party (Wicks’ husband is a former Giffords aide).

...In many ways, the race also reflects the fast moving shift of national-level Democratic operatives who have beaten the path from the campaign trail, to the Beltway, to the booming Bay Area after serving in the Obama administration.

Wicks’s fellow travelers include, most famously, Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, who took a lobbying job with Uber in San Francisco in 2014 and is now at the for-profit foundation of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. It also includes former assistant press secretary and National Security Spokesman Tommy Vietor, who moved to San Francisco to speech write for startup CEOs; former Obama Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, who joined GoFundMe; and former White House advisor Tom Reynolds, who was hired by Facebook, among many others. Plouffe, Vietor, Pfeiffer, and Reynolds are all Wicks donors.

“The generation of Obama staffers, their ideology was always kind of loosely defined in these non-ideological, aspirational ideals,” said Shant Mesrobian, who worked on the Obama campaign’s digital team in 2008 and who lives in San Francisco.

“When you define your politics so broadly about ‘doing big things,’ non-ideologically like that, it’s easy to see why you can make this transition to Silicon Valley, the Mecca of ‘doing big things.’ When you don’t define your politics by specific things like fighting inequality, corruption, things you can be held accountable to, at the end of the day you can justify anything.”

But supporters of Beckles hope to make voters aware that the vast amounts of money represent a wider power struggle in politics.

“The fact that Buffy Wicks is getting so much money from groups such as Govern For California’s IE, which represents the charter industry, this is all like new corporate money that’s coming in that attempts to change the face of the Bay Area, driving out people of color, working class people,” said Keith Brown, from the Oakland Education Association. “This wave is creating communities such as what we see in Oakland and Richmond between the haves and the have-nots.”

Monday's endorsement of Jovanka by Bernie and the rally he and Congresswoman Barbara Lee held with Jovanka, helped. "While in Berkeley," he wrote, "I had the chance to meet with Jovanka Beckles, and I was impressed by her commitment to progressive values. In the state Assembly, she will fight for Medicare for all, a living wage for all California workers, environmental justice and criminal justice reform. I'm proud to support Jovanka Beckles in the 15th Assembly district." The following day the SIEU released a new tracking poll by EMC Research showing Jovanka ahead by 4 points-- 42% to 38%. The poll shows that Beckles is leading among women voters 47-35%, with independent voters 46-33% and with voters of color 49-36%.