We’ve talked a lot about one of the big state Assembly races, the epic 75th District contest between two Republicans, Andrew Hayes and Carl DeMaio. But there are other hot state races and one of them got a lot spicier this week: The 79th District battle between Democrats LaShae Sharp-Collins and Colin Parent.
Parent and Sharp-Collins have similar positions. They both have labor support. They both support a woman’s right to access abortion services.
But real estate agents really don’t like Sharp-Collins for some reason. This week, the California Association of Realtors sent out a strange mailer attacking Sharp-Collins for … playing poker?
“If she’s elected to the State Assembly, LaShae will help oversee billions of tax dollars in the state budget, funding for our schools, public safety and homeless services. But LaShae is hiding her gambling record from voters…” it reads.
And this pernicious gambling record? She’s played in poker tournaments.
I love playing in poker tournaments, so I took umbrage. It’s been a while for me. Coaching youth softball took over that part of my brain and free time.
But the whole mailer is absurd. It seems like a vehicle just to send out a photo of her, a Black woman, playing poker. The funniest part is that it hits her for not being particularly good at it, as though if she had won more tournaments, maybe she’d be acceptable.
Poker players get ranked on a flawed website called Hendon Mob. Some tournaments report results to Hendon Mob. But if you enter a tournament and lose, it never shows up on Hendon Mob. So if you see someone on it with big winnings, you have no idea how they actually have balanced out over time. The fact she even shows up means she’s won a little. Some tournaments hire writers and photographers to cover the event like it’s a news spectacle and the mailer’s designers either licensed or (more likely) simply stole the photos of Sharp-Collins.
I asked Sharp-Collins about the attack on her poker.
“It reeks of desperation. That’s me on my own time,” she said.
What’s at stake in the 79th: While Sharp-Collins and Parent have similar principles, they have vastly different backgrounds. Parent is a La Mesa City Councilmember and the executive director of Circulate San Diego, which advocates for public transit, housing and walkable neighborhoods. He founded the San Diego Leadership Alliance, a sort of incubator for young progressives that has a big roster of alumni by now.
Sharp-Collins used to be chief of staff to then Assemblymember Shirley Weber, who is now secretary of state. She’s been an adjunct professor at SDSU and had various roles in local education. While Weber once battled with teachers unions, Sharp-Collins has all their endorsements.
She said what’s at stake is the voice of the district.
“Our integrity is at stake. I will make sure our community comes first,” she said. In particular, she would show much more interest, she said, on education than Parent would.
“But also housing affordability. We have to make sure people have the opportunity to create generational wealth and they can afford to get into homes,” she said. Parent, she said, was more focused on investors and market strategies for housing and that’s probably what the Realtors like.
That’s probably the biggest difference: It’s a dynamic we see in several races. One candidate hits the other for supporting all home building or market-rate homes while emphasizing the need for only affordable housing, as though creating homes for the higher-income families has no impact on the lower levels of the market.
You see that in the San Diego mayors race and in the big county supervisor race between Republican Kevin Faulconer and Democrat Terra Lawson-Remer.
And it’s here. Parent has worked in firms dedicated to building housing that is set aside for lower-income families. He says that kind of government-subsidized building is important.
“But it’s also true it’s just not enough. We need more homes, more places for people to rent, more attainable for-sale homes for people who can’t afford $1 million sticker prices they see around their neighborhoods,” he said.
He did not cite education as a top priority but rather housing, homelessness and road repair. In particular, he said, he would make it a priority to pass laws that force the city of San Diego and others to spend the money they get from the state for roads more equitably.
He said as a La Mesa City Councilmember, roads weren’t nearly as high of a priority as they are in the conversations he has with residents of City Heights and Southeastern San Diego.
Notes
About the 75th: Our Deborah Brennan has a good update about the money pouring into a fund set up by firefighters to sink DeMaio. She has the news in there that the San Diego Republican Party chipped in $30,000 to the effort.
The Republican Party of San Diego County also sent out this mailer featuring Hayes as one of its two top candidates.
Both are signs of the impact of the falling out between DeMaio and Republican Party leaders we wrote about last month. They had a truce in place that GOP leaders say DeMaio broke thus freeing them to try to stop his election.
Not an endorsement: The San Diego Business Journal went out to subscribers this week with what looked like a giant, unusual political endorsement on the cover.
But the Business Journal is not actually endorsing Turner.
Publisher Kevin Leap told me that the paper does not endorse or oppose candidates. It only recently began accepting political advertisements.
“It’s not an endorsement and we’ve learned a few lessons after this how to better make that clear,” Leap said.
The Lincoln Club paid for the ad for Turner. It has now put $900,000 of the unexpected $1 million donation it received into the committee to support Turner.
The mayor’s team is responding: Stephen Cushman, who jumped into action to raise money to spend in support of Mayor Todd Gloria and Councilmember Stephen Whitburn, has collected $800,000 and $500,000 of that was going to television advertisements.
The U-T’s Michael Smolens had a good summary Friday.
“Here’s a smattering of some of the contributions to the committee: $175,000 from the California Apartment Association, $85,100 from the Coalition for Patient Access & Innovation sponsored by California Life Sciences, $85,000 from the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce PAC, $50,000 from the United Nurses Association of California, and $25,00 from the Building Industry Association of San Diego.”
The big question: So far, the Lincoln Club push for Turner has been all positive about Turner and nothing negative about Gloria. It seems like it would have to start going negative to really make a dent but we’ll see.
About independent expenditures: There was a funny moment where one of Turner’s ads came on during the San Diego City Council meeting Monday. I did a video segment with KPBS about it to help explain how independent expenditures work. You can watch it here.
If you have any comments or feedback (or mailers!) for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.