TL;DR – The outcome was pretty much what I expected.
California Assembly District 71 is a really conservative area. In fact, in the 2022 election, there wasn’t even a Democratic candidate—it was just three Republicans fighting it out. This year, it looked like there wouldn’t be a Democratic candidate again until the California Democratic Party (CADEM) decided they didn’t want to leave any race uncontested. So, at the last minute, they asked me to run, and I agreed.
Before saying yes, I crunched some numbers, looking at the voter registrations from November 2023 for both Orange and Riverside counties in my district. Only about 30% of the voters are Democrats, and this percentage holds steady whether you look at it by county or overall. Even if I got all the votes from the liberal parties (Democrats, Greens, Peace and Freedom) and my opponent got all the conservative votes (Republicans, American Independent, Libertarians), I would still need to win 85% of the no party preference (NPP) voters to come out on top. That’s a long shot, especially considering the challenge of running a campaign split by mountain ranges. Knowing this, I decided not to connect donations. Instead, I pointed potential donors to other, more viable candidates.
CADEM knew the odds and accepted the likely outcome. But running had its perks: it would show us for the first time how many people in this district would vote for a Democrat, even an almost no-name like me, and if my opponent couldn’t take office for some reason, I’d step in as the second-place finisher.
After the primary election, I ended up with 34.3% of the vote, and the Peace and Freedom candidate got 2.6%. From this, I guessed my final percentage would be between 35% and 40%. The day after the election, I had 38.1%, so my estimate was pretty spot-on. And this was with almost no campaigning—just three social media videos in October. This result is similar to my 2014 run for the 36th State Senate District (for the same purpose), where I got 34.3%.
Will I run again in two years? Probably not. There doesn’t seem to be a strong desire from the voters for a Democrat in this seat. My job here is done.
Addendum:
You might have been puzzled by “it would show us for the first time .” Every 10 years, the US does a census, and then California’s legislative districts are redrawn by an independent commission called the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. The new districts take effect two years later. This redistricting often creates oddly shaped districts, and this time, it split AD71 into two counties divided by mountains.