If you happen to’re in California and occur to be close to a TV, you may need seen a really involved lady peering into the digicam and discussing her help for abortion rights.
“You may name me Eleni,” she says.
That might Eleni Kounalakis, the state’s lieutenant governor.
Kounalakis would very very like to be California’s subsequent governor, and her fretful look within the 30-second spot may be very a lot part of her technique to make that occur in November 2026.
Authorized abortion isn’t remotely in danger in California. A girl’s proper to have an abortion is enshrined within the state’s Structure and buttressed by the Democratic Social gathering’s hegemonic maintain on Sacramento.
However abortion is an uber-hot challenge, Democrats’ hoped-for salvation in opposition to Republicans this November, and a topical means for somebody like Kounalakis, with no specific position within the election, to wedge her means into the political dialog.
The Democrat is emulating a tactic efficiently utilized by Govs. Gavin Newsom and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who piggybacked their gubernatorial ambitions on a marketing campaign challenge as a method of boosting their electoral prospects.
Kounalakis can also be the newest in a protracted line of rich men and women with a mountain of money on the prepared as they pursue California’s high political job.
Most — Meg Whitman, Jane Harman, Al Checchi, to call just a few — failed in grand trend.
Kounalakis’ said mission this marketing campaign season is easy sufficient. She has fashioned a political motion committee to mobilize “pro-choice” voters within the presidential battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada and to spice up Democrats in a number of aggressive Home races in California.
As a part of that mission, she seems in a campaign-style advert crammed with ghostly photographs of a number of right-wing avatars — Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Clarence Thomas — who give Democrats the night time sweats.
It’s plainly a gubernatorial marketing campaign spot, regardless of the concentrate on abortion rights.
“The commercial is pitching Eleni,” stated Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a retired USC professor and longtime scholar of California politics.
After all, it’s just about as much as Kounalakis how she spends her cash, or any marketing campaign contributions she collects. If she needs to construct a bonfire and burn $100 payments on the Capitol garden — having, in fact, obtained the mandatory allow — deliver on the marshmallows!
What’s not good or wholesome is for Kounalakis to purchase her means into the governor’s workplace, the way in which she used an outsized pockets to flatten opponents and win the lieutenant governorship in 2018.
On the time, Kounalakis’ foremost political credential was having given tons of cash to Democratic candidates and political causes. Sufficient that it set her up for appointment by President Obama as U.S. ambassador to Hungary.
When Kounalakis turned her eye to elected workplace, oodles of money once more cleared her pathway.
She benefited significantly from the tens of millions that her father — a rich Sacramento developer — showered on Kounalakis’ candidacy by a political motion committee selling her marketing campaign. (There are authorized limits on how a lot a person may give to a candidate. Not so for political motion committees.)
Kounalakis topped that off with a number of million extra in private spending.
That made her certainly one of a number of prosperous candidates who’ve procured down-ballot workplace in California — state controller, insurance coverage commissioner, lieutenant governor — by sinking a part of their wealth into their races.
“No one is aware of a lot about these candidates,” Jeffe famous, so it’s straightforward “to purchase identify recognition, to form their picture” in methods which might be rather more tough in a contest for governor.
Since taking workplace, Kounalakis hasn’t precisely bowled Sacramento over, although she did win reelection in 2022. George Skelton, my columnizing colleague who has coated the capital for nicely over half a century, as soon as described Kounalakis as “probably the most obscure lieutenant governor I’ve ever seen.”
Her marketing campaign staff says that view wrongly overlooks her many accomplishments. Possibly so. Kounalakis may have a year-plus to make her case to voters, as soon as the presidential marketing campaign ends and the main focus turns to California’s open-seat race to succeed Newsom.
Voters will likely be introduced with an unusually giant and different area — and an opportunity to make political historical past of some kind.
Toni Atkins, the primary lady to have led each the Meeting and state Senate, and former Controller Betty Yee are working alongside Kounalakis, giving Californians the chance to elect the state’s first feminine governor.
Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta can be California’s first Filipino American governor if he runs and will get elected. State faculties chief Tony Thurmond is bidding to turn out to be California’s first Black and Latino governor. Atkins would even be the state’s first overtly LGBTQ+ governor.
Whoever wins the job ought to accomplish that on benefit, not due to their race or gender.
And definitely not owing to their household fortune.
