Former baseball player Steve Garvey leads the race for U.S. Senate from California ahead of the March 5 primary, beating Rep. Adam Schiff (D), according to the University of California Berkeley Institute of Government Studies poll.
However, the news is not necessarily good for Republicans: if Garvey is one of the top two finishers in the primary, along with Schiff, the heavy Democratic advantage in the state means that Schiff will likely be the next U.S. Senator.
The poll, which was conducted online February 22-27 among thousands of registered and likely voters, has a margin of error of 2% at the 95% confidence level. It shows Garvey with 27%, ahead of Schiff with 25% (a statistical tie for first). Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) has 19%, while Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has 8%, shaping up the race as a Garvey-Schiff runoff.
(The poll also shows Donald Trump beating Nikki Haley in the state’s Republican primary, 75% to 15%.)
The reason for Garvey’s rise, the Los Angeles Times notes, is not a surge in Republican enthusiasm, but rather a heavy advertising campaign by Schiff, who has cast the race as a contest between two candidates from rival parties, knowing that a Republican candidate will be easier to beat than a Democrat — especially a female Democrat, as all of his main Democratic rivals are women.
Ads have blanketed the state attacking Garvey for voting for Trump and backing other conservative policies — which has rallied Republican voters to Garvey, even while also rallying Democrats to Schiff.
Schiff is best known for leading the efforts to accuse Trump, falsely, of “collusion” with Russia, and to impeach Trump in 2019-2020.
He faces new criticism in Peter Schweizer’s new book Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans. over his silence over the fentanyl crisis, which may have to do with donors who have “financial connections to individuals involved with criminal networks … tied to money laundering and the drug trade.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
