^{Note: The views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and are not intended to reflect those of MCBA nor is this column an endorsement of any candidate.}

MARIN’S LOCAL ELECTIONS

This was supposed to be a big election locally, in terms of number of races, since there will be no more odd-numbered year regular local elections. Several dozen local races have all finished their enforced migration to even-numbered years, but most of them are migrating to the November election, so our primary election (in March this year, and presumably henceforth), which always had a few local elections, now simply has a few more. But this year, the races were surprisingly devoid of races expected to be close, and indeed, most results were widely predicted.

COUNTY SUPERVISOR RACES

In District 2 (Ross Valley, and Southern San Rafael), incumbent Katie Rice ran unopposed.

In District 3 (Southern Marin, including Mill Valley, Tiburon, Belvedere, and Sausalito), Kate Sears is retiring at the end of her term at the end of this year, and overwhelming frontrunner Stephanie Moulton-Peters, a popular three-term Mill Valley Councilwoman (a rarity in Mill Valley), beat two challengers—both of them unknown and inexperienced, and poorly funded, except for the newspaper ads of one of them—well, overwhelmingly.

In District 4 (West Marin, Greenbrae Boardwalk, the Canal District of San Rafael, and outlying pieces of Novato and Mill Valley), incumbent Dennis Rodoni also won handily against yet another poorly funded challenger, albeit one who has run for this and other offices before.

CITY COUNCIL RACES

Ross re-elected two of the three incumbents whose seats were up—Elizabeth Brekhus and Beach Kuhl—and a new candidate, Bill Kircher, for a total of three attorneys winning the three seats.

Tiburon held a special election for a two-year seat caused by a councilmember’s recent resignation, and the apparent winner, with a slight lead so far, is Jack Ryan (who has run before) despite another candidate being endorsed by the Marin Democratic Party, and the other being endorsed by the Marin IJ.

Mill Valley had one of its incumbents step down, another (Jim Wickham) ran unopposed for a two-year seat caused by a colleague’s recent resignation, so only one incumbent, Sashi McEntee, ran for one of the three regular four-year terms. She won, along with new candidates Urban Carmel and Tricia Ossa.

Corte Madera did not have a contested election, as only two candidates, Fred Casissa and Charles Lee, both new, filed to run for the two available seats.

SANITARY DISTRICTS

There were two sanitary districts with scheduled elections: a large one (Ross Valley, with incumbents Mary Sylla and Doug Kelley), and a small one (Almonte, with incumbents Kelley Kious, Robert Cox, and Anne Lahaderne), with all incumbents running for re-election and no challengers, so they didn’t even get put on the ballot.

COUNTYWIDE BALLOT MEASURES

The big one, the Measure I SMART train tax extension for 30 years (starting in nine years when the original one expires), lost badly, with barely a majority (and surprisingly, better in Marin than Sonoma, the opposite outcome of the original Measure Q in 2008), far short of the required 2/3 vote. The measure, which is sure to be seen at least once more on a future ballot, with or without changes, received unexpected million-dollar campaign contributions on both sides, resulting in a half dozen full-sized mailers from each. I heard criticism of SMART, generally regarding the annoying train horns during testing (sometimes, inexplicably, all night long), even though that was a Federal Railroad Administration requirement, not SMART’s decision. Critics of the entire commuter rail concept here continue to complain, with some justification, about the dismal ridership numbers and high public subsidy, although SMART has different opinions. SMART also appears to many to be a hide-bound bureaucracy whose autocratic general manager doesn’t make basic information publicly available (until recently, under pressure), like daily ridership numbers and trends.

Measure C, the new wildfire prevention tax, was barely over the required 2/3 vote at last count, so we’ll have to wait a couple weeks or so for final results. I heard a number of presentations on this measure, and comments about it, indicating that this was a first-class campaign, and very inclusive with lots of public input, on a subject near and dear to people’s hearts—more than ever in recent years. The usual “no taxes ever” folks opposed it, but there was no organized opposition, and even the relatively new taxpayer association—COS—supported it.

Measure D lost by 20 points, needing a simple majority but getting only about 40%. It attempted to specify golf as the only allowable use of the former San Geronimo Golf Course property (absent a future countywide vote for some other use), which would jeopardize local community plans by subjecting them to countywide votes for any changes. The measure was widely opposed by a long list of prominent public officials and organizations, including environmental organizations.

ARE VOTERS BECOMING LESS SUPPORTIVE OF TAXES?

California voters generally, and Marin voters especially, have always been pretty generous about passing tax measures the vast majority of the time (especially for schools), but maybe that’s changing now—even in Marin. Not only did the SMART tax extension go down to defeat badly (with about 50% of the vote, when 2/3 was required), but so did both the Novato School District’s and the Tamalpais High District’s parcel tax measures, getting 60% and 50%, both well short of the required two-thirds. Even the statewide bond measure for school facilities, a staple every few years and usually handily passed, is barely ahead with a simple majority, with many (provisional) ballots remaining to be counted in Marin and statewide.

CONGRESSIONAL AND LEGISLATIVE SEATS – AND TURNOUT

Unsurprisingly, Marin Congressman Jared Huffman (a recent speaker at an MCBA lunch) and Marin Assemblyman Marc Levine, both Democrats, skated to easy victories over their multiple but nominal challengers, both with over 60% of the vote and huge leads over their distant second-place finishers, who now have the honor of getting to do it again in November with similar results. Volumes have been and will continue to be written about legislative and congressional seats nationally, and even in California, but suffice to say that Democrats have continued for a decade or two now to expand their legislative majorities in California to the point where they are now 2/3 supermajorities, and in 2018, flipped seven of California’s 14 Republican Congressional seats (out of 53 total), so there may not be too many more they can flip, if any; the Republican registration edge in those few districts is pretty high. However, I think Republican boasts to take back some of those seats flipped in 2018 probably will not succeed.

Some say that the expected youth turnout increase did not occur this month, locally or nationally, so Bernie Sanders didn’t do as well as his supporters had hoped, and it bodes poorly as well for Sanders’ chances of beating Trump if Sanders is the Democratic nominee (which after looking suddenly very likely in February, now looks unlikely—see below on the presidential race).

THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE

Few people would have predicted the magnitude of Joe Biden’s resurgence February 29 (South Carolina) and March 3 (Super Tuesday), after being a somewhat weak and faltering frontrunner throughout last year, finally even losing his frontrunner status late last year and early this year—first to Elizabeth Warren, and more recently to Bernie Sanders. Biden also had surprisingly low fundraising numbers compared to other top candidates, and did so poorly in the first three caucuses and primaries that people talked about him dropping out after or even before Super Tuesday. Especially after Sanders won Nevada by a larger margin than expected, for his third straight win (or co-win) out of three. It (briefly) looked like Sanders was running away with it, and Biden would soon be gone.

But then Biden won South Carolina by a much larger margin than expected (largely credited to the large percentage of African-American voters who think fondly of Biden as Obama’s V.P.), and that momentum—along with sudden anti-Bernie desperation amongst several other candidates, including major ones who endorsed Biden just before Super Tuesday—propelled Biden a few days later to win 10 of the 14 states on Super Tuesday, far more than expected (including Texas and Maine, which Sanders was expected to win). Even California’s win for Sanders, among his four wins that day, was not as large as predicted; in Marin, the top finishers were Biden, Sanders, and Bloomberg, each between 21% and 25% of the vote. Other factors included major candidates like Pete Buttigieg (tied with Sanders to win Iowa’s caucuses, but faltered thereafter) and Amy Klobuchar (third-place finish in New Hampshire with 19%, even though she’d never polled in double digits anywhere), dropping out a day or two before Super Tuesday and endorsing Biden, in a seemingly desperate attempt to stop Sanders’ momentum. (And, I suspect, preserve their own future viability by giving them a way to “explain” their coming low vote totals on Super Tuesday). It worked, as they had enough supporters who trusted their judgment, resulting in increased turnout for Biden, who now has a modest delegate lead over Sanders. And the trend continued just after Super Tuesday, with Bloomberg dropping out and endorsing Biden too.

The coming two weeks will feature another half dozen states’ primaries each week, with mostly medium to large populations, so many more delegates will be awarded. Some think Sanders will win 50 more delegates than Biden in the first week’s states, bringing them to a tie in the delegate count (I disagree), but even those people might guess, based on how Sanders did against Hillary Clinton in those states four years ago, that Biden is positioned to win most or all of the second week’s states, giving Biden both a substantial delegate lead, and momentum, for a lead he may well never relinquish.

This Democratic presidential race, with an unprecedentedly large number of mostly very good candidates, didn’t change frontrunners every month (sometimes it seemed like each week) the way 2016’s Republican primary did. But it did feature some slow and gradual shifting among the top few over the past year, and while the movement and momentum shifts (and desperate anti-Bernie moderate dropouts) in the week before Super Tuesday were remarkable, it’s a lot less likely that there will be more such shifts, given that it’s now seen as a two-person race, with Biden the clear favorite, and he may well have a majority of the delegates locked up going into the convention in July (and if not, it will be a strong enough plurality that neither Sanders nor anyone else will be able to deny him the nomination).

The poor showing of Warren, whom many would say was the former frontrunner, was surprising, in the first four states and then Super Tuesday, resulting in her dropping out two days after Super Tuesday. She’d nearly always been in the top three, and some polls showed her leading nationally and in key states in yet another surge in recent months, but she ended up coming in third in her home state of Massachusetts on Super Tuesday.

Bloomberg had a poor showing in virtually every Super Tuesday state (his first contests), despite spending more than all the other candidates combined in a relatively short few months. Apparently money not only can’t buy you love, it seems unable to buy you the presidential nomination of a major party, at least if the product is no good.

It’s a little early to predict how big Biden’s lead could grow, and when he’ll “clinch” the nomination, but it may not be too early to speculate about V.P. choices, and maybe cabinet members. Nominees usually choose a V.P. who will balance the ticket geographically (ideally able to bring home a state that otherwise might not be won), ideologically (as long as they’re not too different, and the VP agrees to go along with the nominee’s policies), and now, maybe even gender.

Being a former presidential candidate looks good to voters, having been subjected to thorough public vetting, and shows that neither the nominee nor the V.P. has any hard feelings, and that someone who firmly considered themselves capable of being president is in the number-two slot. Plus, it starts to look like Lincoln’s Team of Rivals, and I’ve always thought that many of the candidates this past year would make good cabinet members.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar fit many of those criteria, as does Warren, as well as now-long-departed Kamala Harris and possibly others. Despite the obvious charisma and appeal of Buttigieg, his mayoral experience pales compared to, say, Klobuchar’s Senate experience, and her recent rise in national prominence as a presidential candidate. An extremely solid woman like Klobuchar could be a very good V.P. pick indeed.

My dream would be for him to pick Elizabeth Warren. I admit it’s unlikely because she is in her early 70s, did so poorly in in the first four primaries and on Super Tuesday, and is too liberal for many. And although it is sexist, some people clearly see her as just too school-marmish.

But she’s an extremely intelligent and capable policy wonk, and most importantly, could bridge the ideological wings of the Democratic Party like no one else. I think Sanders is too old to be V.P., and may chafe under Biden, and may not want the job because in his case it probably wouldn’t lead to being president because of his age, whereas Warren is nearly a decade younger.

Some potential candidates may want to continue to serve in the Senate, which they can do for as many decades as they’d like, rather than serve in a cabinet position for perhaps only a short time—and eight years at most (and even that is rare). But they may make a different choice if they are offered the V.P. slot, as it may line them up to be the nominee four years from now, given that Biden may, by choice, be only a one-term president because of his age.