Most of tonight’s elections did not have a lot of drama. One of the biggest question marks was the California Senate race. California uses a jungle primary, in which only the top two finishers (regardless of party) advance to November. In a Democrat-dominated state, that has frequently resulted in two-Democrat races. 2022 was the first time in a decade that Republicans even had a Senate candidate on the November ballot, and that probably helped turnout in key House districts crucial to the current House Republican majority.
The open race to fill the seat formerly held by Dianne Feinstein yielded a scramble between three prominent House Democrats, two of them heavyweights: Resistance star Adam Schiff, progressive darling Katie Porter, and antiwar activist Barbara Lee. Republicans had a bunch of low-name-recognition candidates until the field was joined in October by former Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres star Steve Garvey. The 75-year-old Garvey is well-known and well-liked in the state, but a political amateur with a lot of sex-scandal baggage from the late 1980s.
Schiff has pursued a ruthless strategy of advertising aimed at talking up Garvey as a conservative, which served the dual purpose of elevating Garvey over other Republicans and thereby boosting him over Porter. It seems to have worked. At this writing, with 38 percent reporting, Schiff has 37 percent of the vote, Garvey 29 percent, Porter 15 percent, Lee 7 percent, Republican Eric Early 3 percent, and other minor candidates the rest.
With Garvey more than 400,000 votes ahead of Porter, it appears that he will advance to November. That’s great news for Schiff individually, because he could conceivably lose to Porter but is all but certain to beat Garvey. For Garvey, well, as the old saying goes, you gotta be in it to win it: His odds of beating Schiff may be infinitesimal, but they’d be zero if he wasn’t on the ballot. But after years of Democrats playing in Republican primaries for their own self-interested reasons, this one could help Schiff while hurting the party, because a Schiff–Garvey race will help motivate Republican voters (who loathe Schiff) to come to the ballot box. If the House comes down to a few seats in California, Steve Garvey may have one last clutch hit in his bat.