GOP State Controller Candidate Ashley Swearengin May Vote For Jerry Brown

GOP Mayor Swearengin to Support Brown?

The rats are jumping from the sinking California GOP ship.


It was a double indignity for Neel Kashkari this weekend when not just one but two fellow Republicans on November's statewide ballot declined to endorse his campaign to oust Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.

When Kashkari reached for an analogy Saturday to describe the party fracture, he invoked the Costa Concordia cruise ship that ran aground off Italy in 2012, killing 32 people.

"When a ship hits the rocks, it's a human tendency to run for a lifeboat," he said. "I understand that. I'm trying to keep everyone in the ship, and right the ship, and get the ship moving again," reports the Los Angeles Times.

Such was Kashkari's fate as California Republicans met in Los Angeles for a convention that was supposed to celebrate the party's unity.

The gathering opened on a sour note Friday, when the evening's keynote speaker, state controller candidate Ashley Swearengin, told reporters she was still mulling whether to vote for Kashkari or Brown. "I'm looking at the two candidates like other Californians are," she said.

Part-time James Bond villain and former Obama
supporter Neel Kashkari.

And Pete Peterson, the Republican running for secretary of state, said in an interview that he was not endorsing Kashkari — or anyone else on the statewide ballot — and did not plan to vote a straight party ticket.

The extraordinary display of disunity led Ron Nehring, a former state Republican chairman and underdog candidate for lieutenant governor, to vent his fury in a profanity-tinged email to party brass just before midnight Friday, after news organizations began reporting the dust-up.

"This does NOT help the party, and it distracts from the efforts made to convey a positive theme," Nehring wrote. "The coverage is not of a party expanding its reach. It's about a party that isn't unified because its candidates can't get it together and get on the same page."

Party leaders played down the disagreement. "A lot is being made out of a few tea leaves there," said state party vice chair Harmeet Dhillon.

But for both Swearengin and Peterson, distance from the party could prove to be an asset in a state that has largely favored Democrats for two decades.

Swearengin, the mayor of Fresno, said California "needs some independence when it comes to watching the treasury."

Swearengin has rebuffed Kashkari's efforts to campaign together and broken with him on his signature issue, the bullet train that Brown wants to build between Los Angeles and San Francisco. She supports the project as an economic boost for the Central Valley; Kashkari calls it "the crazy train."

The friction is also partly personal: Kashkari irked Swearengin by not giving her advance warning that he was going to spend a week posing as a homeless man in Fresno in an effort to spotlight poverty and joblessness on Brown's watch.

For his part, Peterson said he was declining to publicly back Kashkari because a secretary of state needs to run state elections in a nonpartisan fashion. He also suggested that Republicans should reclaim the progressive reform traditions of the Theodore Roosevelt era.

"I'm not running for a lifeboat," he said.

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California voters gather around to see
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