Seema Mehta in the Los Angeles Times writes that former Dodgers and Padres first baseman Steve Garvey is contemplating a 2024 run for the California Senate seat currently held by Dianne Feinstein. The seat will be open unless Feinstein dies or retires and is replaced by a Gavin Newsom appointee.
The good news: Garvey is well known, well spoken, he can probably raise a good deal of money, and he’s still craggily handsome at 74. As a ballplayer, he was a model of durability, consistency, and clutch hitting in October, and he helped lead the Dodgers to four pennants (one a World Championship) and the Padres to their first pennant. California Republicans are perennially so desperately hard up for statewide candidates that even getting somebody who can make the final November ballot is a win. Under California’s jungle-primary system, which pits the top two vote-getters against each other, 2022 was the first time in a decade that Republicans even had a Senate candidate on the ballot on Election Day. Combined with having an opponent for Newsom, that probably helped the party down the ticket, even though the Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates lost their races by 18 and 22 points respectively. If the GOP hadn’t gained three California House seats in 2020 and another in 2022, it wouldn’t have a majority today. The Democratic primary, headed by Adam Schiff and Katie Porter and featuring elderly radical Barbara Lee, promises to be crowded enough that if Republicans unite behind a single contender, they could get on the final ballot.
Mehta suggests that Garvey’s age could be an issue, but he’s the same age as Feinstein was in 2007, just after she was reelected in 2006; she has been reelected twice since then and only recently reached the point of being too decrepit to serve. Sixteen current senators are older than Garvey, and only three of them (Feinstein, Tom Carper, and Ben Cardin) have announced plans to retire. Garvey is still physically fit. I’d rather run a younger candidate, but his age is hardly a major concern.
The bad news: Garvey is ideologically vague and a rookie politician — both characteristics that he has in common with some of the most underachieving recent Republican celebrity candidates such as Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz. There’s also the sex scandals that collapsed his once-squeaky-clean image: “Among the controversies in Garvey’s past are fathering two children with different women shortly before he married a third.” All of this came out in 1989, shortly after his retirement from the game, two years after Gary Hart’s political career was ended by womanizing, Douglas Ginsburg’s Supreme Court nomination torpedoed by pot-smoking, and (it was thought at the time) Joe Biden’s presidential ambitions were permanently ended by plagiarism and fabulism. It was back when Donald Trump was still married to his first wife, and Bill Clinton was known mainly for giving a really long convention speech.
Had Garvey remained faithfully married to his equally photogenic first wife Cindy, it was widely assumed at the time that he’d probably have run for office by the mid 1990s. He was publicly musing about a run for high office as far back as 1981. Bill James, writing about the scandals in 1990, wryly referred to him as “Senator Garvey.” A lot of people have gotten elected to statewide and national offices since, after having been exposed for worse things than what Garvey has done, and it’s all extremely old news. But Republicans have gotten burned before by waving away the personal baggage of their candidates and should have learned by now the hard lesson that sexual immorality can’t be separated from character.
It’s also not the best of times for a man enduringly associated with the Dodgers to be running as a Republican. Garvey may find himself in need to denounce his former team — a hard thing to do, given how much the Dodgers cultivate a sense of family among their alumni — over the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence controversy. Moreover, my own pet theory is that the nature and politics of California’s multiracial electorate suggests that Republicans are most likely to win office next (if ever) by running a credible Hispanic candidate (or possibly an Asian-American candidate) and fracturing the Democrats’ identity-politics coalition — not by running a white guy who was famous as “Steve Garvey, All-American” in the 1970s.
Given how hard up the California GOP is for credible statewide candidates, Garvey deserves a serious look: more serious than would be warranted in a more competitive state. But on the whole, Republicans burned by the likes of Walker and Oz should not be cheap dates for celebrity candidates. He’ll have to make his case.