The March 3, 2020 primary election will be a smorgasbord for Marin political junkies offering a main course of presidential politics accompanied by plenty of tasty local side dishes.
Since California moved up its primary date by three months, the state is expected to play a much larger role compared to 2016 – when California was among the final states to vote – in determining who the Democrats choose as their candidate for president.
At the local level, Marin’s representative in Congress, Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, and the state Assembly, Marc Levine, D-Greenbrae, both face re-election. The terms of three of the county’s five supervisors are ending, and one of them, Kate Sears, has already announced that she won’t run again in 2020.
A total of 10 municipal council seats will be in play in the March election. In Mill Valley, the terms of three council members are ending and another council member, Jessica Jackson, resigned in October to take a new job in Washington, D.C.
And there is likely to be several consequential initiatives on the ballot, including a controversial measure aimed at returning golf to San Geronimo.
Although California has moved up in the Democratic primary order, it is not the leadoff hitter. Iowa will get things started with its caucuses on Feb. 3 followed by primaries in New Hampshire on Feb. 11, Nevada on Feb. 22 and South Carolina on Feb. 29.
California’s primary comes next on March 3 but it is just one of a dozen states holding their primaries on what has been dubbed the new “Super Tuesday.” California with 416 delegates, however, has far more delegates than its closest rival on Super Tuesday; Texas ranks second with 228 delegates.
Eric Schickler, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said if no candidate dominates the early primaries, “Then California will be one of the bigger prizes on Super Tuesday and could play an important role, even if it isn’t decisive.”
Paul Mitchell, vice president at Political Data, a bipartisan political data company based in Norwalk, in Los Angeles County, said, “I think ultimately California will have a big impact.”
Mitchell said due to the large number of Californians who vote by mail, candidates can’t count on momentum from early primary wins to attract votes here.
“Our final election day is March 3 but our voting starts on Feb. 3 the same day as the Iowa caucuses,” Mitchell said. “Iowa has maybe 150,000 people going to the caucuses; we have 15 million ballots being sent to voters on the same day.”
Paul Cohen, chairman of the Marin Democratic Party and a local campaign consultant, said, “It’s possible that people will be holding onto their ballots longer because of the risk of wasting their vote. If you vote the first weekend and then the Iowa and New Hampshire results come out and your candidate drops out, you can’t get your ballot back and vote for someone else.”
Mitchell, however, said a typical voter doesn’t view politics in this strategic way.
“It’s almost like somebody saying I’m not going to root for my home team until I know they’re going to make the playoffs,” Mitchell said. “Our research shows that three-quarters of those voters getting absentee ballots are planning on voting early, in the first 10 days. So by the time you have a vote in South Carolina, a quarter to a third of California voters will have already turned in their ballots.”
Locally, at the top of the ticket, neither Huffman nor Levine have faced a well-funded opponent in either a primary or general election since being elected to their seats, and there is little reason to expect that to change.
Likewise, the six-year terms of three judges on the Marin Superior Court – Verna Adams, Mark Talamantes and Beverly Wood – are ending; but challenges to sitting judges are rare.
The terms of three Marin County supervisors – Kate Sears, Katie Rice and Dennis Rodoni – are ending. Sears, who was appointed to her position by then Gov. Jerry Brown following the death of Charles McGlashan in 2010, announced in July that she wouldn’t be running again. Sears won re-election in June 2016 defeating challenger Susan Kirsch of Mill Valley. Kirsch has not said whether she plans on running, but Mill Valley council member Stephanie Moulton-Peters has announced her candidacy.
If any of the supervisorial candidates on the March ballot receive a majority of the votes cast, they will be elected; otherwise the top two candidates in each district will face off in the November general election.
Moulton-Peters’s decision to run for supervisor and Jessica Jackson’s resignation means there will be a maximum of two incumbent Mill Valley council members – Jim Wickham and Sashi McEntee – competing in the race for four seats on the Mill Valley City Council in March. So far, two people have declared their candidacies: Urban Carmel, chairman of the Mill Valley Planning Commission, and Max Perrey, a former aide to Supervisor Katie Rice.
Mill Valley isn’t the only Marin city or town with council members whose terms are expiring. In Ross, the terms of Elizabeth Brekhas, Rupert Russell and Beach Kuhl are ending. In Corte Madera, the terms of James Andrews and Sloan Bailey are expiring. And there will be one opening on the Tiburon Town Council since Jim Fraser, who was elected to his third term in November 2018, resigned in October.
So far only one local initiative is officially on the March ballot. According to the ballot language, the measure would amend “the San Geronimo Valley Community Plan and the Marin County development code to require voter approval for any change in the primary golf course use of the San Geronimo Valley Golf Course property.”
But Brendan Moriarty, a project manager for the Trust for Public Land (TPL), which owns the property, wrote in an email Friday, “The measure would not bring golf back to San Geronimo. It does not mandate that the landowner operate a golf course on the property nor does it change the underlying economics that caused the course to shut down in the first place.”
Moriarty said “a broad and expanding coalition of local organizations and individuals” are organizing a campaign against the measure. TPL has contributed $25,000 to a campaign committee formed for that purpose. A rival campaign committee reported contributions totaling $1,390 in July 2019; the year before it reported about $6,500 in contributions.
Two other high profile measures are also almost guaranteed to be on the ballot: an 11 cent-per-square-foot parcel tax to raise $20 million annually over the next 10 years for wildfire prevention and a measure to extend the quarter-cent sales tax that funds Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit to April 1, 2059.
Other possible measures include: a Novato Unified School District parcel tax measure that would replace and renew the current tax; a Tamalpais Union High School District parcel tax measure that would renew the current tax rate for another 10 years and increase it $190 per parcel to a total of $645 per parcel in the first year; and a Mill Valley School District bond measure to finance building upgrades. No details have been made available on the bond measure proposal, and it seems the least likely to make the ballot.
Marin’s Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers (COST) has endorsed the parcel tax for fire protection but it has said it will not support another flat parcel tax increase at Tam Union. Mimi Willard, COST’s founder, said there are several reasons to expect a large number of tax measures on the March and November ballots in 2020.
She said, “Typically, there is a feeling that large turnout elections tend to be more friendly to taxes.”
