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

LOS ANGELES — Republican former baseball star Steve Garvey is making a late-night effort to drum up Latino support in his long-running U.S. Senate campaign against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff for the California seat long held by the late Senator Dianne Feinstein.

This low-key contest has been largely overlooked nationally in a year when control of the Senate will rest in the hands of a handful competitive racing, also in Ohio, Michigan and Nevada. Republicans outnumber Democrats in California by a staggering margin — nearly 2-to-1 statewide — and a Republican candidate hasn’t won a Senate race in the state since 1988.

Voting is already underway — ballots have been mailed to each of the state’s 22 million voters by Oct. 7.

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

Although the race has not seen any drama, it marks a turning point in California politics, which has long been dominated by Feinsteinformer U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, former Governor Jerry Brown and a handful of other veteran Democratic politicians. The matchup also means that California will not have a woman in the Senate for the first time in more than three decades.

Garvey announced last week that he planned to spend $5 million on ads leading up to Election Day aimed at the Latino community, including a TV spot in Spanish, the campaign’s first statewide ad. It touches 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 this will do to change the trajectory of a lopsided race in which Schiff has had a lead in the polls and campaign finances. The last time a Republican candidate won a statewide race in California was 2006, nearly two decades ago, underscoring the Democratic advantage.

The race loosely followed the contours of the national battle for Congress.

Schiff has warned of GOP threats to abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court stripped away women’s constitutional protections for abortion in 2022, and of former President Donald Trump’s possible return 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 the San Diego Padres and was the National League MVP in 1974, has put Schiff and Democratic leaders on the spot over rising grocery and housing prices, a long-term homeless crisis and other living issues in a state that has seen its once thriving population decline in recent years.

Trump featured prominently in a testy and likely little-watched debate this week, in which Schiff portrayed Garvey as a Trump acolyte clad in a baseball uniform, while Garvey suggested Schiff was obsessed with partisan politics in Washington while addressing pressing issues in California ignored at home.

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

Political scientist Jack Pitney of Claremont McKenna College said Democrats are likely to benefit from higher turnout in a presidential election year with Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California U.S. senator and attorney general, in charge of the party. He noted that Republicans have struggled for years to recruit viable candidates for major office — voters could choose from just two Democrats for U.S. Senate in the 2016 and 2018 general elections. While Garvey is known to an older generation of baseball fans, he would likely be a symbol for many younger voters.

Given California’s political leanings, Garvey’s chances of pulling off an election day surprise 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 the age of 90 in September 2023. Laphonza Butler, a Democratic insider and former union leaderwas appointed and decided to the seat after Feinstein’s death not seek a full term of office this year.