Political Tales of the Weird: Five Takeaways from the Election

From Woody Allen aphorisms to AI slop, Tuesday's election provided a raft of results that offered surprise, confirmation of historic trends, and deep doubts about the future of democracy.

As every school child knows, Election Night in California is actually just the kickoff for Election Weeks - or sometime Election Months.

Estimates vary but there are well over a million votes out there yet to be counted statewide, which are unlikely to create seismic shifts in most of the results reported since polls closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday - but which could make a difference in extremely close contests.

Supporters of Tom Steyer are twisting themselves in mathematical knots to make the case that he could still slip into the November runoff for governor, but our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest the fall match-up is expected to remain between Republican Steve Hilton and Steyer’s fellow Democrat Xavier Becerra.

Then again, we barely passed Algebra II, so your mileage may vary.

While a weary state and nation hold their collective breath and await final numbers, here are five key takeaways from the June 2 primary.

Woody Allen was right. “Eighty percent of life is showing up,” a phrase famously if imprecisely attributed to problematic filmmaker Woody Allen, came to define the low-profile but high-stakes local race for Clerk, Recorder and Assessor, as aging incumbent Joe Holland dubiously sought a seventh term despite a chronic disease that has kept him out of the office for two years. Guided by über-operative Mary Rose, his chief deputy Melinda Greene combined boundless energy, a keen mastery of the stultifying details of the job, and a relentlessly sunny attitude to stomp her former boss, and send him into a much-deserved retirement.

A pox on rich guys. A quarter of a billion dollars is couch change to a guy like Steyer, but as long as he was setting money on fire in his campaign, it would have done more good for California if he’d just handed each of his one million voters $250 in cash, which is what his political investment works out to at the moment. Steyer is just the latest in a long line of rich and successful business types who failed as California political candidates — see Norton Simon, William Matson Roth and Al Checchi , Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Bill Simon , among others - self-financing billionaire blowhard know-it-alls who looked at the governorship or a U.S. Senate seat as entry level jobs and were rejected by state voters.

Who is Steve Hilton? As of now, the November run-off for governor looks like a run-of-the-mill partisan contest — except that Republican contender Hilton is not a run-of-the-mill candidate. Becerra’s between-the-lines biography as a political lifer is relatively well-known, but Hilton remains an enigma to voters, many of whom may be surprised when they get a load of his, um, colorful background as a former British political operative who “became the stuff of legend and frequent derision,” according to a Politico profile of his years as an adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron; among other things, he was “immortalized as the unbearably pretentious spin doctor Stewart Pearson in (the TV series) “The Thick of It,” purveyor of such pearls of wisdom as: ‘I like the plasmic nature of your data modeling.’” Read the whole thing.

We are an unserious people, living in a decadent society. It’s a common, if condescending, trope among the political class to view and forgive a vast swath of the electorate as “low information voters” - workaday folk too beset by day-to-day economic and family demands to pay much attention to the details of American civic life. But can’t we draw the line somewhere? The latest vote totals from the Secretary of State show that so far, 18,932 Californians have voted for Eric Swalwell, the disgraced former congressman and erstwhile Democratic front-runner who was driven from the race by some of the most revolting, substantiated allegations of sexual battery since Nero ruled the roost in Rome. Seriously, who are these people?

American politics, awash in slop. The race for the Fifth District Board of Supervisors race was jolted several weeks ago, when the Santa Barbara County Republican Party sponsored and released an AI-generated, racist ad depicting Democratic candidate Ricardo Valencia as a clueless clown stumbling around a dystopian Santa Maria landscape for which a Spanish-inflected narrator blames him. While local GOP hacks predictably defended the digital stink bomb with nothing-to-see-here gaslighting, its author - the son of Santa Barbara’s favorite Jan. 6 insurrectionist Karen Jones - stepped forward to promise much more is on the way, an unhappy development that aligns with growing evidence that California politics will be engulfed by such internet AI swill by November.

Did we mention we’re glad we’re old?