Swalwell: I Don't Get It

So the stanmdard take on Congressman Eric Swalwell dropping out of the California governor primary race is that it was cooked up by the Democrat establishment to avoid having two Republicans win the top two positions in the state's jungle primary.

Under California’s voting system, the top two vote-getters in the primary will proceed to a general election in November, no matter what party they’re from. If the primary were held today, according to the most recent polling, that would mean two Republican candidates, each pulling in just 14 percent of the primary vote, battling it out for the governor’s office in the fall. A lot could change before primary day, but the Democratic Party is increasingly nervous.

The two Republicans are Chad Bianco, Riverside County Sheriff, and Steve Hilton, a Fox News host. The top Democrat until he pulled out of the race was Swalwell, who had been polling at 12%, compared to Bianco and Hilton, who each polled at 14%. So the story goes that people like Speaker Emerita Pelosi, Sen Schiff, and Speaker Jeffries decided to push Swalwell out of the race to concentrate the Democrat field and try to get enough support for at least one of the also-ran candidates to make the top two.

But I'm scratching my head:

Before the bombshell news, Swalwell had trailed the Republicans at roughly 12%, just 1 point ahead of billionaire Tom Steyer, who garnered 11%, and former Rep. Katie Porter with 7%. Candidates Xavier Becerra, Matt Mahan, and Antonio Villaraigosa each held 4% of likely voters, while Betty Yee and Tony Thurmond followed, each attracting just 1%.

. . . Still, if Swalwell had emerged from the primary as one of the top two vote-getters, he had extremely good odds of winning the general election and succeeding Gavin Newsom as governor in a state where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans nearly two to one.

Now, Steyer and Porter must scramble to catch up with less than two months before the June 2 primary. Porter was considered an early frontrunner until her campaign imploded after videos surfaced of her berating her staff. Steyer, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist, has spent more than $100 million of his own money on a series of expensive television ads, yet remained stuck in third place among Democrats and fifth overall before Swalwell’s sexual scandal broke.

Let's think about this for a moment. Straight white males don't fare all that well among 21st century Democrats. Swalwell's most visible problem at the moment is that he's a little too straight and a little too male; we'll just throw the white part in at no charge. But even if the Democrats had been able to keep the rape bit out of the news for another seven months, he still would have been a straight white male. The two big Democrat winners in last year's governor races were, after all, attractive white women.

This suggests to me that Swalwell's problem wasn't all the groping, schtupping, and so forth, but that as a straight white male, he wasn't going to rally enough Democrats either in the primary or the fall. But who are the next runners-up in current polling? Tom Steyer, a straight white male billionaire, seems unikely to resonate with California Democrats:

Billionaire hedge fund founder turned environmental warrior Tom Steyer, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, is facing mounting questions about how he earned his wealth — notably investments in private prisons that are now being used to house undocumented immigrants facing deportation.

Some of the most vicious political attacks come from his Democratic rivals and Sacramento special interest groups as the June 2 primary election fast approaches, but Steyer has been dogged for years about his past, controversial business ventures and how they help fund his unbridled campaign spending.

That leaves Katie Porter, a former congresswoman who in fact had been the overall front-runner for the election as of last summer, but several incidents last fall eventually put her behind both the Republicans and Steyer. The video embedded above from last summer, when she was briefly front-runner, encapsulates the problem: she's overweight, dowdy, shrieky-squeaky, and abusive. As one commentator notes, first impressions matter. It seems unlikely that Steyer will move the needle; he ran a similar self-funded campaign for president in 2020, but he dropped out before the primaries.

So why did the Democrat elders decide to dump Swalwell? It appears that his sexual misconduct had been an open secret for years:

The women described a similar pattern of events: Swalwell, who is married and has three children, showed close interest in their lives when they were in their twenties and finding their footing professionally, making them feel special and even starstruck. Then, they said, he would send them increasingly sexual messages. Many said they reciprocated and engaged with him in part because of his position of power. In some cases, those inappropriate exchanges escalated to alleged unwanted physical touch or sexual assault, often tied to episodes of heavy drinking.

. . . But several of the women who made allegations about Swalwell said that the congressman’s actions had long-term implications on their lives, leaving them confused, distraught and scared. They said they decided to come forward after hearing rumors that they were not alone in their experiences with the congressman.

“I always felt like if I came forward, I was going to suffer the consequences because he was so powerful,” the former staffer who accused Swalwell of assaulting her said, adding, “I’ve lived in fear every single day.”

But all of a sudden, it's now OK to trash Swalwell? What puzzles me is that a strategy of eliminating Swalwell to consolidate support behind some other candidate could well work if there were a credible candidate among the others -- but so far, the best prospect seems to be Katie Porter. The two most prominent non-sraight white male contenders, Sen Alex Padilla and Kamala Harris, announced they would not run last year. Given less than two months remaining before the June 2, primary, it's unlikely either would change their mind.

So, why did the Democrat elders choose to greenlight the me-too attacks on Swalwell, who might well have been able to surge if he chose to represent his candidacy as a referendum on Trump? Gavin Newsom turned the Proposition 50 redistricting referendum campaign which originally looked like a loser, around on exactly that basis. Instead, Pelosi, Schiff, et al chose to trash their front runner by making it suddenly OK to accuse him of sexual stuff, when they'd previously kept the victims fearing for their careers and reputations if they uttered a peep.

I'm scratching my head.