California’s gubernatorial election of 2010 was one of many other off-year elections held nationwide. Candidates running for governor in California faced daunting challenges, most of which derived from the state’s dire financial situation, symbolized by the $25.4 billion budget deficit. Providing for public safety, funding education, keeping state parks open, attracting business and investment, and other key governmental functions as well were all tied to the financial condition of California in a time of recession. Unemployment ran at 12.4 percent, well above the national rate of 10 percent. Naturally, this kept the housing market, plagued by mortgage foreclosures, depressed. The flagging economy was the campaign’s central issue. The field of candidates running to replace Schwarzenegger eventually narrowed to two: Margaret Cushing (“Meg”) Whitman and Edmund Gerald (“Jerry”) Brown, Jr. Their rivalry made for a high-stakes election in at least two ways: record amounts of money were spent, and to many it seemed that the state’s near future rode on the outcome.
The two leading gubernatorial candidates presented a contrast to voters. Republican Whitman, a New Yorker by birth and upbringing, graduated from Princeton and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. After having held a number of high-level corporate positions, eBay, an online auction site headquartered in San Jose, California, hired her as CEO in 1998. Moving to California, Whitman took what she described as a “no-name Internet company” with fewer than two dozen employees and remade it into the online
Marketing giant and Fortune 500 Company it has since become. In the process she became a billionaire. Democrat Jerry Brown, age 71, was a California native and a leading public intellectual who at one time hosted a Bay Area radio program, We the People, with a national listening audience; he interviewed scientists, religious thinkers, poets, educational reformers, and others working for societal change. Though coming from a prominent political family, he did not possess great wealth. Brown had spent decades in public office, including two terms as a former Golden State governor (see Chapter 13) and, among other positions, had served a stint as mayor of Oakland.
A Field Poll taken in October 2009 showed Brown well ahead of Whitman by a margin of 50 percent to 29 percent, but by mid-2010 the frontrunner’s lead had dwindled. Whitman pumped an estimated $160 million of her own money into the governor’s race, mainly for television ads. One such ad portrayed Brown as an opportunist who publicly denounced Proposition 13 until it passed in 1978, immediately after which he described himself as a “born-again tax cutter.” Without the funding resources to run counterattack ads, Brown repeatedly challenged Whitman to televised debates, to little avail. Her ads and scripted speeches to select audiences worked; a Field Poll in September 2010 showed them tied at 41 percent each. Consequently, she agreed to a maximum of three debates.
In these televised encounters, Whitman attacked President Barack Obama’s health-care plan as too costly, pledged to shrink the size of government, complained the capital gains tax was a jobs-killer, promised to lower taxes and rein in regulations, and tried to explain why she supported Arizona’s harsh anti-immigration law while holding that that law was inappropriate for California. She praised Proposition 13 for limiting property taxes. Brown supported President Obama’s health-care plan as “a framework to bring in children and to bring in people who have no other way of getting their health insurance.” He said eliminating the capital gains tax would be great for billionaires but not for the citizenry at large, and minimized talking about Proposition 13. Brown charged Whitman with being too hard on immigrants in her support of the Arizona law, and, unlike her, pledged to support the California Dream Act in order to give undocumented students educational opportunities.
As important as all of these issues were in the campaign, none ignited as much media attention and controversy as the revelation that Whitman had hired and later fired her undocumented housekeeper. The longer prime time coverage dragged on, the lower her poll numbers dropped.
On November 2, 2010, voters elected Jerry Brown to his second tenure as governor by the substantial margin of 53.8 percent to Whitman’s 40.9 percent. The contest for California’s governorship was the costliest race of its kind in American history. That election also resulted in passage of Proposition 25, which ended the previously required two-thirds legislative majority to pass budgets; thereafter, a simple majority would suffice. In other results, Democratic U. S. Senator Barbara Boxer was reelected, and all of the highest state administrative offices went to Democrats. In nearly all other states the 2010 elections resulted in Republican victories. California’s Democratic sweep did not mean that that party could govern as it wished. Brown’s ability to lead in Sacramento would be limited significantly by the challenge of gaining the constitutionally required two-thirds super majority needed to raise taxes.
World History
