If you’re an ordinary voter in local elections — as opposed to a rabid partisan or campaign worker — you may care first and foremost this election season about protecting your mailbox and your speaker controls. You might ponder just how many political ads you can stand.
A not-so-subtle change has taken place that will start to be evident over the next week or so: Increasingly, campaigns are timing their negative pieces early so that they hit near the time that absentee ballots arrive — this year, around Oct. 11.
The effect? You’re likely to be subject to a long back-and-forth that will take up space on your mobile phone and in your mailbox. Politics is one pursuit that doesn’t shun snail mail. But don’t be surprised if you see more activity on your Facebook page or email account.
This has been true for a long time in national politics. In advance of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, the Republican National Committee put out a nasty broadcast ad that attacked Democrat Tim Kaine for having represented heavy-duty criminal defendants as a lawyer.
In tone and words and ugly pictures, it resembled nothing so much as the infamous Willie Horton ad put out against Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Now we’re starting to see a more polite version of that kind of attack locally, as politicians attempt to define the flaws of their opponents before voters fill out the first absentee ballots. Sometimes the effort has a whiff of desperation about it.
On Monday, San Jose Councilman Ash Kalra, who is running for the 27th District Assembly seat, held a news conference to denounce the “billionaires’’ who support his opponent, ex-Councilwoman Madison Nguyen. Kalra singled out the California Charter Schools Association.
Of course, Kalra has taken special-interest money himself, including contributions from unions. He just has less of it: The latest figures show that Nguyen has outraised him by approximately $1 million to $500,000. She was the easy leader in last June’s primary.
U.S. Rep. Michael Honda, who finished behind fellow Democrat Ro Khanna in the 17th Congressional District primary, has warmed over a discredited line of attack, accusing Khanna in a flier of being “Republican lite.” The piece accuses Khanna of putting “Wall Street bankers ahead of middle-class families.’’
Given that Khanna is for a wealth tax on billionaires’ capital gains — and wants to create the “carried interest’’ of venture capitalism as ordinary income — it’s hard to make this case stick.
But you understand the clock that is driving these political attacks: With more than 70 percent of voters in Santa Clara County now registered to vote by mail, politicians understand that they need to grab the attention of voters early or risk losing it.
That changes the dynamics of an election, much like artillery that invites a response. The opponent who is being attacked early needs to answer early: The result? Your mailbox will receive more of the so-called “inoculation’’ pieces meant to answer a charge.
I’ve been around long enough to have seen some of the great and infamous last-minute hits in Santa Clara County — the Susan Hammer mayoral campaign’s hit on Shirley Lewis in 1990 over development policies (generally unfair) and the Tom Campbell congressional campaign’s hit on Jerry Estruth in 1995 over the Garden City case (generally fair).
Those kind of hits haven’t disappeared from the landscape. Nobody has taken a pledge to be a pacifist. But we’re likely to see them earlier now. Don’t be surprised if it begins in earnest next week.
