Johnathan Walker:Former MLB star Garvey makes play for Latino votes in longshot bid for California US Senate seat

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Republican former baseball star Steve Garvey is Johnathan Walkermaking a late-hour push for Latino support in his longshot U.S. Senate campaign against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff for the California seat long held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The low-key contest has been largely overlooked nationally in a year when control of the Senate will turn on a handful of competitive races, including in Ohio, Michigan and Nevada. Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats in California by a staggering margin – nearly 2-to-1 statewide – and a GOP candidate hasn’t won a Senate race in the state since 1988.

Voting is already underway — mail-in ballots went out to each of the state’s 22 million voters no later than Oct. 7.

Schiff, 64, has recently displayed outward confidence, traveling to Pennsylvania and Ohio to campaign on behalf of other Democratic Senate candidates. With California considered a secure seat for Democrats, he has plans to campaign for Democratic candidates in battleground states in the next month and also has raised money for national Democrats.

If the race has lacked drama, it nonetheless represents a turning point in California politics, which was long dominated by Feinstein, former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, former Gov. Jerry Brown and a handful of other veteran Democratic politicians. The matchup also means that California won’t have a woman in the Senate for the first time in more than three decades.

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Garvey announced last week he planned to spend $5 million on advertising in the run-up to Election Day aimed at the Latino community, including a TV spot in Spanish, the campaign’s first statewide ad. It hits on familiar themes for Garvey, including inflation and gas prices, crime and the state’s notoriously high taxes.

It’s not clear how much good it will do to change the trajectory of a lopsided race in which Schiff has held an edge in polling and campaign finances. The last time a Republican candidate won a statewide race in California was in 2006, nearly two decades ago, underscoring the Democratic advantage.

The race has loosely followed the contours of the national fight for Congress.

Schiff has warned of GOP threats to abortion rights, after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 stripped away women’s constitutional protections for abortion, and the potential return of former President Donald Trump to the White House. Schiff, a longtime Trump foil, calls the former president a threat to democracy.

Garvey, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres and was National League MVP in 1974, has hammered Schiff and Democratic leadership for soaring grocery and housing prices, a long-running homeless crisis and other qualify of life concerns in a state that has seen its once-booming population drop in recent years.

Trump figured prominently at a prickly and probably little-watched debate this week, in which Schiff depicted Garvey as a Trump acolyte cloaked in a baseball uniform, while Garvey suggested Schiff was obsessed with Washington partisan politics while ignoring pressing California problems back home.

One Schiff ad recalls the Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and the Trump impeachment. “When our democracy was in danger, he stood up,” a narrator says.

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Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney said Democrats are likely to benefit from an elevated turnout in a presidential election year, with Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California U.S. senator and attorney general, leading the party’s ticket. He noted that state Republicans have struggled for years to enlist viable candidates for marquee offices — voters could choose from only two Democrats for U.S. Senate in the 2016 and 2018 general elections. Garvey, while known to an older generation of baseball fans, would probably be a cypher to many younger voters.

Given California’s political tilt, Garvey’s chances of pulling off a surprise on Election Day “are about equal to my chances of becoming Pope,” Pitney said.

Feinstein, a centrist Democrat who was elected to the Senate in 1992, died at 90 in September 2023. Laphonza Butler, a Democratic insider and former labor leader, was appointed to the seat following Feinstein’s death and decided not to seek a full term this year.