Posted on 02/26/2011 9:19:42 AM PST by americanophile
Former Republican lieutenant governor and state legislator Abel Maldonado may run for Congress next year against longtime incumbent Democrat Lois Capps of Santa Barbara.
The Federal Elections Commission confirmed Friday that Maldonado, who represented Monterey County as state senator from 2004-10, has filed the paperwork that will allow him to form a committee and collect money.
The contest between the two veteran state politicians should ensure a lively race in a district that has been safely Democratic.
Capps is "prepared for a competitive race regardless of who her opponents will be," said her spokeswoman, Ashley Schapitl.
Capps will run on her record, as well as on creating jobs and fighting efforts to repeal health care reform, Schapitl said.
Maldonado could not be reached for comment.
(Excerpt) Read more at montereyherald.com ...
This guy is so far to the left that he makes most RINO’s look like a re-run of Barry Goldwater. More Dims will vote for him than Republicans....
This clown being on the ballot in Nov. may have cost the GOP hundreds of thousands of votes. Definately a worthless POS!
I guess Maldo thinks Capps is too right-wing for the district.
We lived in Santa Maria when Abel first ran for city council, then mayor. He was a very nice young man and quite conservative then - he must’ve become Arnoldized.
He could always be counted on to be the vote the RATS needed to pass their budget. He’s a true POS!
It's a Dem seat and Lois Capps, 73, has been in since 1998 when she took over from her dead husband, Walter Capps.
Walter Capps himself had recaptured the seat he lost to a "conservative" swept in during the 1994 "revolt." What's most interesting about Walter Capps regaining the seat in 1996 is this:
Seastrand, a conservative, was targeted for defeat by a coalition of labor unions. The Capps campaign was an indirect beneficiary of an 18-month campaign to defeat Seastrand that saw the labor unions spend an estimated $3.2 million, an amount that exceeded the warchests of the Capps and Seastrand campaigns combined.
Historically, that's what you're up against for this seat. Can your nameless "conservative" get that kind of money to mount a viable campaign?
He's a RINO. The perfect fit for the 5% in the district whose family income is above $200K
He's a cultural bigot. The perfect fit for a district whose electoral plurality is derived from unregulated Mexican immigration.
The new California primary process will guarantee him success. He'll have a large slice of the independents, many die-hard Republican partisans, a vast majority of Mexican anchor babies and a fair amount of Democrats. The perfect, political strategy.
If conservative partisans in the 23rd treat his cultural bigotry as a third rail, they're toast.
is he going to run as a democrat or a republican?
are they gonna have to run in a newly re-drawn district and one that isn’t an elongated monstrosity? not sure the new commission will have much of anything done by next election tho.
as to Maldonado, No.
And what makes you think anyone else can? More importantly anyone who is attracted to Maldonado's ideology is probably already happy with Capps. So why waste a dime on his campaign?
Michael promptly decided he was "bored" with being a mere congressman, and took on the powerful Dianne Feinstein for the Senate in 1994. Needless to say, she cleaned his clock, but good.
In the meantime, Andrea Seastrand won the House seat, only to be slaughtered in '96 by Big Labor's support of Walter Capps, who dropped dead after less than a year in Congress. His widow, the terminally insipid Lois, has been squatting in the House ever since.
With redistricting taken out of the legislature’s hands, there will be opportunities opening up. What was once known as the Gold Coast of California (Santa Barbara, Ventura) is not conservative, but is willing to vote Republican on occasion.
Walter Capps never had that seat prior to his win in ‘96. But I do lay the blame for the destabilization of the seat firmly in the lap of Mike Huffington. Bob Lagomarsino could’ve probably held the seat for us clear up until (at least) 2002. Andrea Seastrand just didn’t have enough time to get established in the seat. As for Huffington, I wouldn’t describe his challenge of Feinstein in ‘94 as “getting his clock cleaned.” Indeed, if you consider the amount of Democrat voter fraud that goes on in CA, more than likely he actually won the Senate race. As it was, he lost by the narrowest margin for a Senate race in decades in the state. Feinstein only got 46.7% of the vote. Add in Huffington’s vote along with the Libertarian and Conservative American Independent candidates, and it added up to 48.5%.
Something they don't share in common with Maldonado.
I wonder if the new map will have it more like the old districts before they took the coastal part of Capp’s original district (carried by Dole even as her husband won/stole it, Bush in 2000 as well I think) and combined it with the coastal part of Elton Gallegly’s seat, that made it much more rat.
As it stands the current district is more rat-leaning than the State at large. And RINO loser Maldonado just lost statewide.
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