Republican Senate contender and former baseball All-Star Steve Garvey is getting a campaign boost from an unlikely source — Democratic Rep. Adam B. Schiff, a top rival in the race for the seat once held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Schiff’s campaign released a new ad portraying Garvey, a political novice considered a long shot to win the coveted seat, as his greatest competitor in a close 2024 Senate race that features two other top Democrats: Reps. Katie Porter of Irvine and Barbara Lee of Oakland.
“Two leading candidates for Senate. Two very different visions for California,” a narrator intones, noting later that Garvey “is too conservative for California” and voted for Donald Trump twice.
While the message will turn off Democratic voters in the state, it may increase the former baseball player’s appeal to Republican voters — as it is designed to do, according to two political strategists.
“It’s pretty clear Schiff is trying to bolster Garvey’s credibility as his opponent in the runoff and then Schiff can take the rest of the summer off,” said Democratic political consultant Garry South, who ran Gov. Gray Davis’ successfull 2002 reelection campaign.
Because of Democrats’ overwhelming voter-registration edge in the state and California’s open-primary system, where the two candidates who receive the most votes in the March 5 primary move onto the November general election regardless of party, the race for the Senate is effectively over if Schiff and a Republican take the top spots on March 5.
Porter, who is battling with Schiff to win a spot in the general election, criticized the ad as a political ploy.
“Adam Schiff knows he will lose to me in November. That’s what this brazenly cynical ad is about — furthering his own political career, boxing out qualified Democratic women candidates, and boosting a Republican candidate to do it,” she wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “We need honest leadership, not political games.
Schiff’s campaign argued that voters need to know about Garvey’s record given his recent rise in the polls. In the latest UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, which was co-sponsored by The Times, Garvey finished in third with support from 13% of likely voters. He trailed behind Porter and Schiff, who had 17% and 21% support, respectively.
“Steve Garvey will be a rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s extreme agenda if elected,” said Schiff spokeswoman Marisol Samayoa. “California voters deserve to know the differences between the two top-polling candidates.”
Similar efforts have been successfully used in past California campaigns, including in the 2018 gubernatorial race. Democrat Gavin Newsom’s campaign elevated little-known Republican John Cox’s gubernatorial bid by ostensibly criticizing him over his support for Trump and his anti-abortion views in an ad.
Republican voters coalesced behind Cox, giving the businessman a strong enough finish in the primary to edge Democrat and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to finish second and face off against Newsom in the November election. Newsom trounced Cox in that election.
Mike Madrid, a GOP strategist who worked on Villaraigosa’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, called the Schiff campaign ad a “smart move. The best way in this top two primary system in California we have is to elevate one Republican.”
He expected the move to be successful in boxing Porter and Lee out of the race.
“Increasingly what’s happening is the Republican is just becoming a pawn in Democratic primary games to check mate the person in second place,” Madrid said. “That’s what happened with Antonio, and it appears to be happening with Porter and Lee at this point.”
