Democrats have a chance for a steal

I seem to be swimming against the political current when it comes to the strength of Jim Gilchrist’s campaign in the 48th Congressional District special election.

“I think the most surprising result is the level of Gilchrist’s support,” UC Irvine political scientist Louis DeSipio told the Pilot following last week’s primary results.

That was a popular reading of the vote.

In that vote, Republican state Sen. John Campbell received 45.5% of the vote; Gilchrist, who helped found the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project and ran as an American Independent, received 14.8%; Democrat Steve Young got 8.7%; Green Party member Bea Tiritilli got 0.9%; and Libertarian Bruce Cohen got 0.8%.

Second place in the race went to Republican Marilyn Brewer, who received 17.1% of the vote but doesn’t make the general election.

Now, nearly everyone has given the next vote to Campbell, but there’s a not-so-quiet buzz that Gilchrist could make the race interesting.

I wish it were true. Really. A tight race might mean issues get discussed and certainly would give us more to report.

But I just don’t see it happening.

And I still think it’s because the low voter turnout was especially pronounced among Democrats. (There was wildly low turnout across the board, of course.) Gilchrist simply didn’t make that big a charge; it just looked like it relative to the low turnout among one of the parties. His 13,423 votes weren’t all that much more than Cohen received in 2004, when he got 8,343, or 2.9% of the vote.

Now, I’ve heard -- and a few people have written to me -- that the low Democratic totals I cited last week (In the 2004 general election, more people voted for the Democratic candidate than voted in this month’s special election, a total of 32.2%.) was caused by some Democrats voting for Brewer.

It’s true she targeted moderate voters, including Democrats. And it’s true that if all of her votes came from Democrats, the total between her and the Democrats this time around equaled 33.5%. And that would be pretty much a wash.

But there’s no way that all of Brewer’s votes came from Democrats, which still leaves Democratic turnout particularly low and Gilchrist’s percentage of the vote artificially high.

We even can approach the numbers a different way. Much as Brewer ran to the left of Campbell, Gilchrist ran to his right. If you figure that mainly what Brewer and Gilchrist managed to do was leach away GOP votes, you can add all three candidates’ totals together to reach a 77.4% GOP turnout, plus an additional 4.6% for the rest of the Republican candidates.

That puts GOP-likely voters at 82% of the vote, nearly 20% above what former Rep. Chris Cox received in 2004. That difference has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is in the lack of voting by Democrats.

Even if you agree that some of Brewer’s votes came from Democrats, it still leaves ample evidence that Democrats saw no reason to show up for this vote. (As an aside, the Democratic Party should be ashamed of itself for allowing that to happen. Not only has it failed to support candidates here, but it isn’t even working to excite its own voters. What’s a party for, exactly?)

There is, of course, a compelling reason for Democrats to come out and vote: If the apathy shown already continues, Young could actually steal this election.

Keep in mind, there were more Democratic voters in the 2004 general election than voters in this month’s race. If even half of the Democrats who voted in 2004 show up on Dec. 6, and the rest of the district doesn’t get more engaged, then one of the most Republican congressional districts in the country will be represented by a Democrat.

That couldn’t happen, right? But it seems more likely than Gilchrist suddenly finding 30,000 or so more votes by December.

* S.J. CAHN is the managing editor. He may be reached at (714) 966-4607 or by e-mail at s.j.cahn@latimes.com.

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