Bad polling. The pandemic. Hyperpartisanship. Enthusiasm from President Donald Trump’s base.
These are some of the factors Reps. Gil Cisneros and Harley Rouda are citing as they’ve had time to analyze what went wrong with their reelection campaigns.
“I think what happened wasn’t really a reflection of me,” Cisneros said.
Two years ago, Democrats Cisneros and Rouda were elected as part of a blue wave that swept Orange County and the House nationally. But last month, Cisneros, D-Yorba Linda, lost his bid for a second term in the tri-county 39th District to Republican Young Kim by 1.2 percentage points, or 4,109 votes. And Rouda, D-Laguna Beach, lost his coastal 48th District seat to Republican Michelle Steel by 2.2 percentage points, or 8,376 votes.
With just a couple weeks left in office, Cisneros and Rouda hope to cap off their one-term legacies with votes on another bill to bring pandemic relief to the American people.
They’re also looking to the future, with Rouda already back in the race for the CA-48 seat in 2022 while Cisneros is taking his time deciding what’s next.
Looking back
Heading into Election Day, forecasters expected both Cisneros and Rouda to narrowly keep their seats. But Stephen Stambough, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton, said it doesn’t seem that many of the models used accurate turnout expectations.
The 2018 election was big for Democrats, Stambough noted, with a president who helped motivate his opponents but was not on the ballot to bring his own voters to the polls. But, he said, “as Southern Californians, we know that when a wave comes on shore, it will also go back out to sea. The wave receded… and that turned several close wins for the Democrats in 2018 into close losses for the Democrats in 2020.”
Cisneros noted that Trump galvanized his base in pockets of CA-39 where Republican registration still is high. In his hometown of Yorba Linda, for example, Cisneros said his team expected turnout of maybe around 75%. Instead, turnout was an unprecedented 90%.
Rouda said political parties and campaigns made decisions about on allocating resources based on flawed polling data. So, while he had a surge of late financial support to help him flip the seat in 2018, that same level of support didn’t materialize to help him defend a seat he was expected to hold.
Both Rouda and Cisneros said the pandemic also forced them to forgo door-to-door canvassing, which they felt had been very effective in 2018.
Some specific controversies also might have helped tip the scales.
In Rouda’s race, for example, his opponents latched onto a story about Democratic Party of Orange County vice chair Jeff Letourneau sharing a Facebook post that praised Ho Chi Minh, the late communist leader of Vietnam. Steel supporters distributed mailers in Vietnamese that linked Rouda to those comments. Fred Smoller, political science professor at Chapman University, said that couldn’t have helped Rouda’s performance with the significant number of Vietnamese American voters in CA-48.
Smoller believes both men also were hampered by calls from the progressive left to “defund the police,” which he believes hurt Democrats in purple districts.
Cisneros said he isn’t taking the loss personally. He recalled a story about a veteran who called his office for help. A friend told him the veteran was so happy with the assistance he got that he said, “I wish Gil was a Republican so I could vote for him.”
“Some people are set in their ways,” Cisneros said. “They didn’t dislike the job I was doing. It was just, no matter what, they were going to vote Republican.”
Cisneros said helping residents of his district is his proudest accomplishment from his term in office. He noted that he was listed as the freshmen representative who handled the largest number of constituent cases. In a Dec. 8 farewell speech on the House floor, Cisneros said he’s also proud of holding more than 30 town halls over the past two years, and authoring or supporting legislation that addressed issues such as affordable health care, gun safety and veteran benefits.
Rouda touts a wide-ranging legislative effort during his first term, including getting three bills signed into law during his first year. He said he’s most proud of his work around climate change, and of the millions of dollars he was able to bring back to the district to help with pandemic relief, education, veterans and more.
In their last weeks in office, Cisneros and Rouda said they hope to approve another round of coronavirus relief. But when asked if they’re optimistic about getting a new relief bill passed in the next two weeks, both expressed frustration with how politics have held up discussions, with Cisneros placing the blame squarely at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s feet.
What’s next?
After Rouda leaves office, he plans to take some time off through the holidays with his family. Then he plans to hit the ground running with a campaign aimed at winning back his seat, having announced in his Nov. 10 concession statement that he intends to run again in 2022.
Next time around, Rouda said he hopes the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and others will recognize that CA-48 remains very much a swing district and will focus resources accordingly. He also hopes to do a better job at micro-targeting voters in his district, recognizing, for example, that there are major differences between groups within the Latino and Asian American communities.
Cisneros’ future is less clear. The congressman, who’s financially secure thanks to a $266 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot in 2010, said he hasn’t even started to weigh his options.
“Everything is on the table. This seat is definitely a possibility to run again. We didn’t lose by much.”
Meanwhile, Cisneros also plans to spend time with his family, taking his kids to school, having dinner together and eating his wife’s pancakes on Christmas morning.
“Right now, I’m not in a situation where I’m feeling pressure to decide what I’m going to do. I have a lot of options available to me. After the holidays, I’m going to sit back and see what’s out there.”
It’s too early to tell what the odds look like for Rouda and Cisneros in 2022, Stambough said, with too many moving parts. Most importantly, district boundaries are set to be redrawn next year based on the 2020 census.
“The districts are pretty competitive in the registration numbers,” he said. “Any shift could help one party or the other.”
Another key factor in 2022 is how Kim and Steel perform over their first terms, and how the Joe Biden Administration and Gov. Gavin Newsom are perceived as having handled the tail-end of the pandemic and recovery efforts.
Rouda is optimistic that Biden’s leadership will ease political divides and make people grateful for a “return to something normal.” And he hopes that will help down-ticket candidates such as himself in 2022.
