The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is running an audaciously cynical voter suppression in Orange County’s Assembly District 68, where two Santa Ana City Council members – David Penaloza and Jessie Lopez – face each in the the general election.
While both are Democrats, they are very different kinds of Democrats. Penaloza is a fairly conventional centrist of the type that was once very common among Democrats: pro-law enforcement, respectful of property rights and balancing pro-union views with the recognition that it’s free enterprise that creates jobs and opportunities to rise, especially for immigrants.
Lopez hails from the progressive-Left/DSA-adjacent wing of the party: fans of heavy government regulation, hostile to law-enforcement and property rights, steeped in racial identity politics and elevating the so-called “marginalized” such as the homeless above the needs of the general working population.
They’re technically from the same political party, but might as well be from different planets ideologically.
Which brings us to the SEIU’s voter suppression effort.
SEIU is one the largest unions and most powerful special interests in California, and one of the most left-wing in its politics. It’s membership is just over 700,000 workers concentrated in healthcare, government, home care and long-term care, and property services. It spends millions and millions of dollars on elections to support their supplicants and destroy their opponents.
The union paid for an independent expenditure in AD68. In their mandatory campaign filing, it is marked as opposing Penaloza. The SEIU’s mailer is branded as a “Republican Voter Alert” informing GOP voters that Penaloza is a Democrat.
Political mailers typically aim to get voters to vote for someone or something – for example, a mail piece to Democrats and left-leaning independents saying “David Penaloza isn’t a real Democrat – vote for jessie Lopez”.
In this case, SEIU’s goal is convincing Republicans not to vote at all in the AD 68 contest.
Republicans – to the extent they know her record and beliefs – are not going to vote for leftist Lopez, who – for example – supported left-wing billionaire (only in the modern Democratic Party) Tom Steyer in the gubernatorial primary. Penaloza, n the other hand, can find common ground with GOP voters on a number of issues and appeal to those voters as the better alterative, since the choice is between two Democrats.
SEIU knows that – hence, their voter suppression campaign to convince Republican voters not to leave the AD68 portion of their ballot blank.
The ironies here abound. SEIU – one of the most left-wing unions in the state, the union currently pushing the Prop. 40 wealth tax initiative that is so far economically destructive that even Gavin Newsom and the California Teachers Association are opposing it.
SEIU did the same thing to former state Senator Josh Newman, a moderate Democrat.
Jessie Lopez has been the SEIU’s political handmaiden on the Santa Ana City Council. Clearly they want to continue that relationship in the Assembly. And they don’t won’t a pesky centrist Democrat with cross-over appeal to get in the way.
We’ll see if their tactic works in AD68
