As Ro Khanna launches his second campaign to unseat fellow Democrat Rep. Mike Honda this Saturday, Silicon Valley voters might wonder what will be different this time around.
Experts say it could be very different indeed, thanks to a larger, more diverse electorate and hard-learned lessons from 2014’s costly and often nasty showdown. Khanna lost a bruising election by 3.6 percentage points, nipping at Honda’s heels as the incumbent held on for an eighth term.
“The biggest difference is that it’s going to be a presidential election year, so voter turnout would be higher,” said Melinda Jackson, a San Jose State political science professor. “It’s always tricky when you’ve got a Democrat-on-Democrat race … but my instinct is that a higher voter turnout will help Khanna because he will be able to appeal more to independent and Republican voters.”
Honda will dominate the smaller-turnout, Democrat-heavy primary, she said, but so long as Khanna can finish second there and advance to the general, he’ll do well by parking himself in the political center. Khanna’s “fresh ideas, new energy” mantra also might be attractive to the sort of young, often first-time voters whom Barack Obama mobilized so well in 2008, she added, but only if they’re sufficiently motivated to cast ballots.
Khanna and his supporters will launch his campaign at 11 a.m. Saturday with a rally at Santa Clara City Hall on Warburton Avenue. Honda “welcomes the challenge and believes his long history of serving the district honorably and with principle will outweigh the determination of the wealthy interests backing his overly ambitious challenger,” Honda campaign spokesman Adam Alberti said Tuesday.
Last year’s battle between Khanna, a former Obama administration official who lives in Fremont, and Honda, D-San Jose, turned ugly as both sides ended up talking more about accusations — whether a Republican was recruited into the primary merely as a spoiler, a mailer some said was racially charged, a sudden flood of super PAC money, and so on — than about policies affecting the district and the nation.
Khanna had raised record-breaking sums in 2011 and early 2012 for a run to succeed Rep. Pete Stark in the adjoining district, but Stark decided not to retire and was unseated by Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin, in 2012. Some critics said Khanna’s pivot to Honda’s district in 2014 showed he was driven more by ambition than by the district’s needs.
But now Khanna is touting the community work he’s been doing in Honda’s district, such as working with San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo on the city’s manufacturing initiative; standing with Santa Clara residents to urge the City Council to ask the San Francisco 49ers to pay fair market value on the parks and soccer fields around Levi’s Stadium; and working with Milpitas Mayor Jose Esteves to find a solution to the Newby Landfill’s odor issue.
It’s the kind of ground-level organizing that builds goodwill, the kind of leadership Khanna hopes some voters will see as congress-worthy. And it’s coupled with what once again looks like a formidable, tech-anchored fundraising base; Khanna raised $801,000 in the first quarter, mostly after C-SPAN aired footage of Honda seeming to doze off during a Feb. 27 House floor debate on homeland security funding.
“I don’t think that Honda can take it for granted, he’s going to have a fight on his hands,” Jackson said.
The Bay Area is still hung over from another, uglier Democrat-on-Democrat showdown: May 19’s special election in the 7th State Senate District, where Orinda Mayor Steve Glazer — with the help of independents and Republicans, not unlike the coalition Khanna wooed in 2014 — handily defeated labor favorite Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord.
But the Honda-Khanna race isn’t easily compared to that. The Glazer-Bonilla fight was a super-low-turnout special election in which Democrats didn’t make the best of their registration edge. And the Glazer-Bonilla fight was dominated by a tremendous amount of external independent spending by labor unions and business interests; the Honda-Khanna fight, if at all like 2014, is likelier to see most spending done within the candidates’ own campaigns.
Khanna’s intense name-recognition building effort and high-priced consultants caused him to blow through $1.1 million of his war chest by the end of 2013, long before most voters were tuned into the race; he then spent a big chunk of change running television ads before the primary, only to finish a disappointing 20 points behind Honda in that top-two vote and then run out of money weeks before November’s general election.
Khanna surely will be careful not to spend his money too fast this time, Jackson said, but he’ll also probably be more careful about the messages he spends it on. Focusing on Honda’s age could backfire if voters see it as mean-spirited, she said.
“Khanna has a fine line to walk — he wants to attack Honda’s record but he has to keep in mind that Honda is a popular incumbent with no scandals,” Jackson said. “You have to be careful about going too negative because that can backfire when you have a popular incumbent that looks like everyone’s sweet grandpa.”
Josh Richman covers politics. Follow him at Twitter.com/Josh_Richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.
