Will California's 25th District Get Cenked?

By Robert Wenzel

I am making another political call/warning.

Readers will recall that I identified Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as trouble even before she won the Democratic primary in 2018 for New York's 14th congressional district seat. I wrote before the June  primary:

There is a very dangerous political race in the Bronx.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appears to be a very, very skilled demagogue, making promise after promise to voters and no analysis of how the promises are going to be paid for. And for good measure, she promotes a broad-based hate of the rich.

This was well before most of mainstream media even knew who she was.

Now, I am warning about California’s 25th district special election race to fill the seat vacated by Kate Hill.

The married Hill resigned in October 2019 following the release of nude photos of her with a female staffer. She admitted to an "inappropriate relationship" and is gone.

The vote to fill the vacated Hill seat will take place on the same day as Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020.

Here is how it will work:

For this special election, if a candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, he or she will be automatically elected. More than a dozen individuals have declared their candidacy.

If no one gets 50%, a runoff election will take place on May 12, 2020, between the top two vote-getters.

Regardless of what happens in March/May, the regular election for the seat will take place in November but, obviously, whoever takes over the seat, because of the special election, will have a strong chance of winning in November.

It looks to me that Cenk Uygur has a very strong chance of winning the March 3 election-possibly with 50% or more of the vote. Thus eliminating the need for a run-off. As in the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez race, there are no polls taken but he is a very strong charismatic personality à la AOC.

He is smart, and here is the problem, he is a lefty.

Smart  + lefty = Dangerous.

In addition, he is already well known to some degree on a nationwide basis. He is a former MSNBC personality and founder of The Young Turks.

If elected, he would probably out AOC in national media attention.

But he does have a potential Achilles heel, Politico highlighted it:

Over the last two decades, Uygur has denied the Armenian genocide, used the n-word gratuitously on air, penned a series of sexist blog posts (well into his thirties) and displayed an affinity for rating women based on their appearance.

Uygur, 49, has since apologized for and disavowed many of his most derogatory comments as the stuff of a past life from which he’s matured.

But Uygur might be the Trump of the Left when it comes to this stuff. The hard left likes him and except for a few they will probably ignore his past life "from which he has matured." The establishment left, though, will use it as a hammer to attack him. State assemblywoman Christy Smith is the establishment choice.

As for his positions, he supports Medicare for All, a higher minimum wage and environmental justice.

He clearly lacks an understanding of basic economics. "The one thing that everyone can agree on regardless of political party is that wages are too low," he has said. This means he doesn't understand how wages are established on the free market.

And with regard to Medicare for All, he says "You wouldn’t need private insurance anymore because you would have better insurance!" This means he doesn't understand the fundamental problem of placing a sector of the economy under a centrally planned command and control system.

On climate change, he says, "The planet is on fire. And we don’t have a second one. My district is on fire. Our politicians fiddle while we burn. We must take action right now." This means he doesn't understand that according to Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and  professor emeritus of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Willie Soon, a physicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he doesn't make scientific sense.

Bottom line: Most of his positions are lefty dangerous but he appears smarter than AOC and it might be possible to nudge him on some issues. But if he sticks with his lefty positions and wins the 25th District seat, he is going to be a dangerous agitator for central planning and he will pick up a massive nationwide following.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.comand Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bankand most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.