Dick Spotswood: Party central committees continue to highlight ideological fringes

By state law, each California county has an official organization for each political party that’s recognized by California’s secretary of state.

Called “party central committees,” they are augmented by official caucuses at the state Assembly or county level. Those caucuses select members of each party’s state central committee.

Marin has a Democratic Central Committee chaired by Pat Johnson and vice chaired by Paul Cohen and Dottie LeMieux. The Marin Republican Central Committee is chaired by Jack Wilkinson and backed up by vice chair Tom Montgomery. There are usually 20 members of each central committee, five from each of Marin’s five county supervisor districts.

Each committee’s members are, in theory, elected by each party’s registered voters in the supervisorial district. Contested elections are rare, as most central committee seats go unchallenged. That presents an opportunity for those who believe their political party has gone astray in recent years. There is no filing fee or specific qualifications. The next series of elections for county central committee posts is in the March 2024 primary.

These political posts have little real political power. In California, parties don’t run campaigns for partisan offices; the candidates do so themselves, raising their own campaign financing, buying advertising and setting their strategy without any influence from the official parties.

Marin Democrats do make local candidate endorsements. The theory is that, in non-partisan races, some candidates might benefit if their partisan identity was known. That makes little sense in Marin, where 62.25% of voters are Democrats (as are most candidates). To voters, the differences between one Marin-style liberal Democrat or another running the school board or a city council are insignificant. It makes the party’s official endorsements irrelevant.

While the Marin GOP makes endorsements, they are not publicly disseminated. With only 12.29% of Marin voters registered as Republican, a public endorsement could do more harm than good for a local Republican candidate who needs broad-based support to win.

The few GOP registrants who, in the last election, tried but failed to win Marin city council and school board posts were politically hampered by support from Marin Freedom Rising, a far-right group of mostly Republican, anti-vaccine activists.

Marin’s electoral system would be improved if both parties adhered to the spirit of California’s non-partisan elections for local posts.

There are two practical roles that party central committees can play: leading voter registration efforts and aggressive efforts to get sympathetic voters to cast their ballots. That takes motivated and disciplined volunteers to get out on the streets and talk to average voters.

Below the radar party central committees tend to attract the ideological fringes of each party.

The Marin GOP has only two committees. One does voter registration. The other is the Election Integrity Committee. It’s a crusade related to “the Big Lie” that Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 presidential election fair and square.

According to writing on MarinGOP.org, the Voter’s Choice Act is “part of the process of enabling fraud by watering down the process and creating more vulnerability in our systems.”

Essentially, the committee appears to be opposed to voting by mail, a process proved repeatedly to be fraud free.

Organized Democrats share the same tendency to veer off into the fringe. An example emerges in the current contest to elect delegates to the Democrats’ Assembly district caucuses.

Apparently, the terms “men” and “women” are no longer acceptable to some on the left. So the two general identity categories mentioned on the explanation page at adem.cadem.org are “self-identified female” and “other than self-identified female.”

They’ve lost touch with the rank and file. Imagine going into a union hall and asking all the “other than self-identified females” to line up for the extra board where overtime work is assigned.