Caitlyn Jenner ‘has a real shot’ at taking California

Caitlyn Jenner is hogging the early coverage in the race to be the next governor of California.

Caitlyn Jenner at the 2016 Vanity Fair Oscar party in Beverly Hills, California. Picture: AFP

On the night of August 7, 2003, Sean Walsh was backstage at America’s top-rated talk show when Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was going to enter his first political contest.

A crowded field was already assembling but “once he put his name out there, it tended to suck all the oxygen out of the air”, said Walsh, a Republican political consultant who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations before steering Schwarzenegger’s run for governor of California.

Two months later, at the end of a circus-like campaign that brought global attention to the state’s first gubernatorial recall election, the bodybuilder-turned-movie star won by a landslide.

Now a second recall election is looming and another celebrity is hogging the early coverage: the Olympic decathlon champion-turned-reality TV personality-turned-transgender Republican politician, Caitlyn Jenner, 71.

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Picture: AFP

California is the most heavily populated and economically powerful state in America , with almost 40 million residents and GDP similar to that of India. Campaigning there is like “running, basically, a national election”, Walsh said.

Since 1911 it has given voters the power to recall governors and state officials with whom they are dissatisfied. A referendum is triggered once a petition musters a specified number of signatures. A majority vote is then required to remove the official from office.

The state confirmed this week that Republicans seeking to recall the Democratic governor had gathered more than 1.6 million signatures, enough to set up a probable electoral showdown this year. The ballot paper will ask two questions: should Gavin Newsom go, and if so who should replace him?

Walsh, who is not involved with any candidate so far, believes that Newsom, 53, holds advantages that did not apply when Schwarzenegger toppled Gray Davis in 2003, including a healthy state budget and the “euphoria” of the pandemic subsiding.

But he also thinks that Jenner - or more likely a candidate who has yet to emerge - has a fighting chance of upsetting the odds. “That’s the great thing about a race like this,” Walsh, 58, said. “It’s a wildcard.”

Newsom was elected by a comfortable margin in 2018 but his handling of the coronavirus crisis has angered many voters in the strongly Democratic state. Californians were infuriated by his hypocrisy when, despite urging them to stay at home, he was caught attending an extravagant birthday dinner with lobbyists at the French Laundry, the state’s famous restaurant. Even so, defeating Newsom will be “an uphill climb”, Walsh said. “Now that said, once the dam breaks, meaning that the [recall] initiative is qualified, you never know what can flow out.”

Current California governor Gavin Newsom. Picture: AFP

A recent opinion poll showed that 40 per cent of voters supported recalling Newsom, and the right rival candidate could change the race quickly.

Before the recall election in 2003, Walsh and a team of veteran conservative operatives had spent four years “very meticulously and very thoughtfully planning out how to unleash Schwarzenegger in the political world”, yet on the afternoon of his talk show appearance Schwarzenegger had no campaign infrastructure in place and was still undecided about entering. “He, in my view, did not make up his mind to run until he literally got in the chair at The Tonight Show,” Walsh said. “In the wings he was rehearsing jokes with Jay Leno about getting out of the race.”

Instead Davis was ejected by a 10 per cent margin and Schwarzenegger won more votes than the five other leading candidates combined.

Jenner is less famous, with less broad appeal and less political credibility than Schwarzenegger had in 2003. But, Walsh said, “it’s basically a campaign to fire a sitting governor. If you can’t make that case, full throated, then you’re not going to be elected.”

“Ruthless message discipline” is vital because there is no time to convey more than one or two themes. In 2003 the brevity of the race helped because “we could run faster than the media could catch us”. Allegations that Schwarzenegger had groped or made unwanted sexual advances towards more than a dozen women surfaced too late to make a difference. “The other thing that was critically, critically important was having a Democrat run in the race.” It undermined the argument that the whole thing was a Republican plot.

Walsh can envisage one potential candidate, whose party allegiance is unclear, who would terrify Newsom. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, 48, Hollywood’s best-paid actor, once said: “I can’t deny that the thought of being governor, the thought of being president, is alluring.”

He has not commented but if he ran “he could bring the resources and the likability” to upend the race, Walsh said. “He could be very interesting.”