California Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado doesn’t particularly like “moderate.”
“Pragmatic Republican,” he corrects.
Oh, OK. How about “maverick?”
“Yes – ‘maverick’ is good,” he says, seemingly unmindful of the associations with Sarah Palin’s ill-fated campaign. “A reformer with results.”
Whatever term you use, it seems to be working for Maldonado, a Central Coast Republican whose political star is not so much simply rising, but skyrocketing, faster than Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger can say, “He’s a great choice for California.”
Through a combination of luck, strategy and backroom dealing, Maldonado has survived angering GOP party bosses by voting with the Dems – twice – to approve a state budget and managed to get his pet cause, Proposition 14, on the June ballot. Voters overwhelmingly approved the “open primary” act.
Meanwhile, former Lt. Gov. John Garamendi left the post after winning a U.S. House seat, and in November, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tapped Maldonado for the gig – in typical Ah-nold theatrics, announcing his choice during a taping of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Republican voters confirmed the governor’s pick in the recent June primary, which sets Maldonado up to do the impossible in November: Beat San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, a Dem, in an election for lieutenant governor that’s widely considered Newsom’s to lose. If the stars continue to align for Maldonado, he just might pull it off.
Not a bad ride for a 42-year-old son of immigrant farmworkers.
American politics thrives on compelling storylines, and Maldonado has been able to exploit his life story to the max. He plays the self-made card as a rising star in Latino politics, appealing to the socially conservative base of Hispanic voters while signaling his sympathies with voters he wants to reach in the center – and reminding Tea Party “patriots” that, pre-voting with Dems on the budget, Howard Jarvis himself would have loved Maldonado.
He sells his family’s story as the American Dream.
“It is a testament to America, because this is the land of opportunity,” he says. “Where else but in this country [do] you get a poor man or woman who comes to America to work hard, to save, to plan and to eventually see the fruits of all of their ambitions, their son the 47th lieutenant governor of the state of California. Only in America. And yes, I do pinch myself once in a while. But I never let it get to me because I’ve never forgotten where I come from.”
• • •
Maldonado – the oldest son of immigrant field workers who, as a child, picked strawberries to help support his family – has got the Cinderella narrative. He uses it well, and it’s a good one; the kind that can make voters feel good about themselves, that they’re the kind of people they want to be: Hopeful. Hard working. Color blind.
“Like many other immigrants, his father came to this country with little more than the shirt on his back,” reads Maldonado’s website. “Abel’s father believed that through hard work, his family could share the American Dream. The Maldonado family is a family of sacrifice, saving, planning, and investing for the future.”
Maldonado attended Santa Maria High School and then Cal Poly, where he majored in crop science. Upon graduating, he brought his studies back home, to help grow the family farm from a half-acre of strawberries to more than 6,000 acres.
He first ran for political office because the Santa Maria City Hall stalled his family’s permit to build a 35,000-square-foot cooling facility on the property. Disillusioned with local government, he ran and was elected to the City Council at the age of 26. Two years later, he defeated the incumbent mayor and took the helm of Santa Maria.
Fast forward two more years, to 1998, when Central Coast voters elected Maldonado to the state Assembly. Maldonado’s TV campaign ads featured the youthful candidate strolling through his family’s strawberry fields.
Three years later, Maldonado caught a break when Republican and Democratic legislative leaders agreed to redraw the state Senate districts. As a result, then-Assemblyman Fred Keeley – who was widely assumed to be the next state senator representing Monterey – was drawn out of a seat in Sacramento, and a lesser-known assemblyman from Santa Maria was literally drawn into the 15th Senate District. (Political junkies speculated the Dems ditched Keeley because he didn’t kowtow to Senate President Pro Tem John Burton’s wishes and run for state Senate in 2000.)
Maldonado became a state senator representing Monterey and the Central Coast in 2004. The young Santa Maria legislator quickly buddied up to fellow GOP moderate Schwarzenegger, chairing his reelection campaign and appearing with him in photo ops. The previously unknown assemblyman quickly became the GOP’s belle. But he may have forgotten who brought him to the ball.
• • •
GOP ideologues don’t like Maldonado. He’s earned a rep as a flip-flopper, and his budget votes don’t sit well with fiscal conservatives.
Maldonado’s relationship with the right started to sour in 2007, when he bolted from the Republicans – and broke the budget deadlock – to support a deal reached by Schwarzenegger and legislative Democrats.
Two years later, Schwarzenegger and the Dems again looked to Maldonado when they needed three GOP votes to pass a tax increase that would supposedly fix the $42 billion budget crisis. This time, the stakes were higher for Maldonado, who was already looking beyond his state Senate seat – he ran and lost in the 2006 Republican state controller primary to a more conservative candidate.
He subsequently signed a No New Taxes pledge along with fellow Republicans. He wanted to run for a statewide office again in 2010, and a pro-tax vote would hurt his chances in a Republican primary.
“I’m having some real hesitations for voting for this budget,” Maldonado told reporters in 2009. “I’ve bolted from my party on other issues, but I’ve never been in a position where there’s a $15 billion tax increase to the people of California.”
Just days later, Maldonado said he’d support the budget plan after all, but his vote would come at a price: putting Prop. 14 on the ballot. Ultimately, lawmakers rejected the budget deal, but Maldonado accomplished a double feat. Despite the Republican right’s fury about the betrayal, Schwarzenegger rewarded Maldonado’s loyalty by appointing him lieutenant governor. Voters approved Prop. 14, and Maldonado reached out to a broader base for the next election – and perhaps the one after that.
Maldonado is exactly the type of politician – moderate, pragmatic, willing to cross party lines – that open primaries favor. Although critics denounce the new primary system, and call Maldonado’s support for it opportunistic, he says it’s not about his political future; it’s just good government.
“Prop. 14 is my proudest accomplishment to this day,” he says. “Here we have 3.5 million Independent and decline-to-state voters who will be allowed to participate freely in an independent election.”
He also denies it will silence third-party voters.
“How many Greens do we have in the state Senate? Zero. Congress? Zero. How many Green mayors? Twenty – the city of Marina has a Green mayor. This notion that it will silence them is totally fabricated by party bosses trying to put a spin on the initiative, and they are wrong.”
“WE RARELY SEE HIM IN WATSONVILLE. HE’S NEVER DONE A TOWN HALL, AN OPEN HOUSE… HE DID A FUNDRAISER ONE TIME.”
Maldonado’s budget vote infuriated Republican leaders, who threatened retaliation and vowed he would never hold another elected office.
But as usual, he has escaped serious consequences for his defection. And Prop. 14 seems to have wrestled primary control away from party hardliners and into more middle-of-the-road politicians, which bodes well for Maldonado’s future political aspirations – like a 2014 gubernatorial run.
“I can’t think that far ahead right now,” he demurs. “Right now I need to win the lieutenant governor race, and then I need to work for four years, work hard for the people of California. Those decisions will be made down the road.
“What I do know: The governor nominated me. I was confirmed lieutenant governor of California and I am prepared to be governor today if something, God forbid, happened.”
• • •
The November match-up between Newsom and Maldonado may be a preview of the 2014 race to the governor’s mansion. The lieutenant governorship is largely ceremonial, without any legislative power, though many consider it a stepping stone for the governor’s race. Both men have their eye on that prize, but depending on the outcome, one may be out of politics for good.
Although Newsom’s the superstar in this race and California’s a largely Democratic state, Maldonado may pull off an upset. Neither campaign has done any polling – yet – but political insiders say a moderate Latino Republican stands a good chance against a liberal San Francisco Democrat.
“I personally think [Los Angeles City Councilwoman] Janice Hahn would have been harder to beat than Gavin Newsom,” says Keeley, the current Santa Cruz County Tax Collector and a veteran Sacramento politico. “The best circumstances, from his perspective, have unfolded. Maldonado can help Meg Whitman try to bridge over to the communities of color. But mostly he’s got this fellow running for lieutenant governor who didn’t show much of a statewide base of support when he was running for governor, and is probably more liberal than the state is at large.”
On Halloween, Newsom withdrew from the governor’s race. He didn’t have the money or the political momentum of Jerry Brown. He’s got the celebrity status – the hair, and the magazine photo shoots – and, in some circles, he’s worshipped for championing gay marriage. But in others, this makes him the devil, and the GOP is likely to pounce on both Newsom’s and Brown’s ties to San Francisco, with its perceived left-wing politics and values.
Newsom’s got higher hopes than becoming California’s lieutenant governor. There was a time his name was mentioned as a possible Democratic presidential candidate, but more recently, he couldn’t compete for governor against Jerry Brown – even before Brown declared his candidacy. If he is to have a political future, he must handily beat Maldonado.
“Abel has to overcome a motivated Newsom, who understands that his political life is on the line,” Keeley says. “Second, Abel has to prove that he can raise money in a statewide race where he’s already got the nomination. He raised money for controller, and didn’t [win]. This is the first real test of whether he can run statewide as a Republican.”
Maldonado gets this.
“I have to raise money to get my message of being a nonpartisan problem solver out,” he says, “someone who puts people before politics, someone who has created jobs in the past and will continue to create jobs, someone who understands the importance of economic stability.”
He raised just under $500,000 in the primary, but this is where Whitman’s war chest could come in handy. She spent a record amount to beat Steve Poizner in the Republican primary, paying out more than $80 million, including $71 million of her own money. A $100-million Whitman campaign looks good to Maldonado, provided Whitman calculates he’ll help her win the seat.
Voters are looking for change – in small, familiar amounts – and a Whitman-Maldonado ticket could fly.
“The theme to go with is: If you’re looking for change in California, this is not even a close call,” Keeley says. “You have a woman, a person of color, an outsider and an insider played like an outsider, versus two people whose entire lives have been tied up in politics, from a liberal enclave, two liberal white guys coming out of San Francisco. If voters are looking for change, here it is.”
However, Whitman appealed to the far right to win the primary, denouncing Democrats’ tax increases and saying she opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants and, if elected, would be “tough as nails” on the issue of immigration.
Maldonado, by contrast, supports a guest worker program: “Because in 1963, and in ’64 and ’65, my father was a temporary worker until 1966, when he was such a good temporary worker that America gave him a green card. Actually, no, he earned a green card. The system worked then, and it can work again.”
Whitman might decide a Latino lieutenant governor can help her race as she runs to the center in the November election. Or she could cut him lose.
“If Abel isn’t helping her with her base or with decline to state, he has to do this essentially on his own,” Keeley says. “In this scenario, he runs as loud as he can, as much as he can, [as] the guy who broke the rules of Sacramento. He’s going rogue for California.”
• • •
There’s also the question of how Maldonado will play with Latinos, who traditionally vote Democratic.
Watsonville Mayor Luis Alejo, a Democratic candidate for state Assembly who’s endorsed Newsom, says Maldonado has been “notably absent” in the northernmost part of the Central Coast Senate district.
“We rarely see him in Watsonville,” Alejo says. “He’s never done a town hall, an open house… He did a fundraiser one time.”
Alejo says Maldonado’s voting record is questionable on Latino issues.
“Latino voters look beyond someone’s ethnicity,” Alejo says. “Maldonado has a questionable record [on] anything that matters to Latinos. Immigration, protecting Healthy Families, cuts to education, drivers’ licenses [for undocumented workers], these are really core to Latino families, working families all across our state.”
But state Assemblywoman Anna Caballero, a Democratic candidate for state Senate, thinks Maldonado has a shot at winning state office. “If the Republicans were smart, they’d realize that Latino immigrants have a philosophy much closer to the GOP on the social issues,” she says. “Latino immigrants are not very progressive, but the Republican Party participates in an agenda that isolates and marginalizes Latino voters. Abel can overcome that – but he’s going to need a very big campaign budget. If he gets out and presents his message quickly [in] a way that resonates with people, he’s a formidable opponent.”
In an only-in-California role reversal, the GOP could position itself as the party of change, Caballero adds. “A woman and a Latino – it’s outside the blueprint for Republicans. If Whitman and Maldonado got together and put together a platform of change, that would be very powerful. I don’t see Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom doing that.”
Other pols are more skeptical.
Central Coast Assemblyman Bill Monning criticizes Maldonado’s trading his vote on the budget in exchange for getting Prop. 14 on the ballot, but praises his offshore drilling stance. (As lieutenant governor, Maldonado sits on the State Lands Commission, which votes on offshore drilling projects.)
“He did oppose the PXP offshore drilling plan in Santa Barbara,” Monning says. “It was his commitment that he could continue opposing drilling that helped me to reach the point to support his nomination as lieutenant governor.”
Asked what he’s done for Monterey County voters, Maldonado touts California’s minimum wage increase, which he authored back in 2006, his vote to cut $2 billion of the gas tax and crossing party lines in Sacramento: “I didn’t let the state go into bankruptcy. I’ve always put California first.”
Then he returns to his message as a compassionate reformer. “I like to tell the voters of Monterey that by voting for Prop. 14, they’ve allowed Sacramento to start working again because Sacramento is broken. I hope that they understand that’s one of the reasons I put Prop. 14 on the ballot: to reform government.”
Now he’s got to make good on his promise. But first, he needs to win.
Given Newsom’s lackluster performance in the early gubernatorial race, Maldonado may just find himself Abel to pull it off. If he wins the lieutenant governorship, he could line himself up as a strong candidate for the 2014 governor’s race. It sounds improbable, but stranger things have happened in California politics. Ask Arnold.