We ought to be able to find actual conservatives who aren’t also screw ups.
Since forming a chapter of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project in 2005 and winning election to the Assembly five years later, Donnelly has given voice to a strain of conservatism marginalized in a liberal state. His unlikely candidacy for governor is a test of the durability of that ideology and its standard bearer on California’s broadest stage.
At campaign stops in recent weeks, Donnelly has courted tea party activists and rural voters enamored of a candidate who believes that the government wants to take his guns and that the “cause of liberty” is at stake in this election. His supporters dread the effects of gun control, benefits for undocumented immigrants and protections for transgender students, and Donnelly – more effectively than most politicians – taps into their anxiety.
In 2011, he rallied at the Capitol with Russell Pearce, the primary sponsor of a nationally watched anti-illegal-immigration law in Arizona, and he orchestrated a referendum campaign, ultimately unsuccessful, to overturn a California law permitting undocumented immigrants to qualify for state-funded college aid. Last year, in what he now calls a “mistake ... going after people without a plan,” Donnelly participated in a highly publicized but ineffectual effort to recall a handful of lawmakers who supported firearms restrictions.
Calling government “the greatest threat to the very rights it was formed to protect,” Donnelly tells his audiences: “I want my freedom back.”
Neither Donnelly nor this year’s other main Republican candidate for governor, Neel Kashkari, is likely to unseat Gov. Jerry Brown, a popular Democrat seeking an unprecedented fourth term. But whoever finishes second in the primary election in June will advance to a runoff against him in November, and Donnelly, whose candidacy was once considered little more than a ruse, is squarely in the running.
Earlier this month, he won the endorsement of the conservative California Republican Assembly, and state party convention-goers who applauded Kashkari erupted for Donnelly in cheers.
“Tim! Tim! Tim!” they shouted.
More than two months before the June election, Donnelly’s ability to run a lasting race is uncertain. Severely underfunded and with little name recognition outside his district, his paid media consists almost exclusively of Web videos, and news coverage of his campaign is dominated by personal controversy, some of it fanned by Donnelly for the publicity it affords him.
Most notable are questions about Donnelly’s gun use, after he pleaded no contest to two misdemeanors related to the discovery of a loaded firearm in his carry-on at Ontario International Airport in 2012. Donnelly, who said he forgot he had the gun, believes the incident can only solidify support of Second Amendment advocates.
“If you’re a single-issue voter on the gun issue,” he told a gun store owner in Stockton, “you have now had my message communicated to you very effectively.”