Any campaign press release typically should be read with many grains of salt readily available, but the latest blast from Republican Carly Fiorina’s Senate effort also should include a couple of asterisks.
Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer’s campaign fired out a release Tuesday, patting themselves on the back for raising more than $1.8 million in the quarter ending Dec. 31, their best showing of the election cycle.
Californians are writing those checks “because they understand we are fighting for the future of our state,” the senator said in the release.
Not so fast, said Team Fiorina. Those fund-raising numbers, combined with new poll numbers actually “spell storm clouds” for Boxer’s campaign.
“Not only did Carly out-raise Boxer in just 60 days to the tune of 2 to 1, but the polls are showing that, going into a tough election year, Boxer can’t earn the support of more than a majority of voters,” Julie Soderlund, Fiorina’s spokeswoman, said in the release.
Asterisk No. 1: Sure, Fiorina likely did double Boxer’s fund-raising (neither side will release their complete fourth quarter figures until later this month), but most of the thanks belongs to a $2.5 million check Fiorina wrote to her own campaign.
While Fiorina’s cash spends as well as anybody else’s, including it as part of a “look-how-great-our-fund-raising-is-going” celebration seems to miss – or at least stretch – the point.
In a “State of the Race Update” Tuesday by Marty Wilson, Fiorina’s campaign manager, the veteran GOP finance guy also said that the $1.1 million the former Hewlett-Packard CEO raised in the final 60 or so days of 2009, excluding her own contribution, “is probably some sort of a record.”
Or maybe not. That number works out to about $550,000 a month. But the $1.8 million Boxer raised in the full, 90ish-day quarter is about $600,000 a month.
Asterisk No. 2: “Boxer’s consistent inability to get past the 50 percent threshold in the polls reflects her vulnerability,” the Fiorina release added.
A Rasmussen Poll released last Friday showed Boxer with a 46 percent to 43 percent edge in a November match-up with Fiorina, a 46-40 lead over Irvine Assemblyman Chuck DeVore and a 46-42 margin over former San Jose Rep. Tom Campbell, the latecomer in the Senate race.
Those races are a whole lot closer than Boxer and her fellow Democrats would like to see, but it’s not the 50 percent mark that’s the main problem, since Boxer almost never pulls a majority in the polls until late in the campaign. In her case, the only poll that counts really is on election day.
In January 2004, for instance, a Field Poll gave Boxer a 48-35 lead over Secretary of State Bill Jones in a race she won that November with 57 percent of the vote.
The Field Poll showed her with a 42-16 lead over state Treasurer Matt Fong in February 1998 and losing to Fong, 44-48, in early October. She easily won re-election, 53-43.
What should concern Boxer in the new poll isn’t her inability to crack 50 percent, but the surprisingly small number of undecided voters. If it’s true that better than 90 percent of California voters already have made their choice in the Senate race, the 18-year incumbent could find herself working desperately to change those opinions come fall. And since Boxer has never been shy about going on the attack, whatever Republican makes it to November better be prepared for an avalanche of mud.
Of course, Boxer will have some help. The GOP primary race is guaranteed to produce plenty of muck of its own as the three contenders take aim at each other.
Fiorina and the other GOP contenders also are betting that it’s an anti-incumbent, anti-Democratic leadership crowd that goes to the polls in November. That view got a boost Tuesday night when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy.
Both Fiorina and DeVore are going to play up the win by a little-known Republican in a strongly Democratic state as a road map for what will happen in California. Boxer, not surprisingly, will disagree.
DeVore, however, is trying to get a three-fer out of Brown’s victory, using it to slam not only Boxer, but also Fiorina and Campbell, neither of whom he sees as representing true conservatives.
“What you saw in Massachusetts today is the pattern for 2010: conservative beats liberal, whether Republican versus Democrat or Republican versus Republican,” said Joshua Trevino, a spokesman for DeVore.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.