At long last a Democrat vying for local office appears to be on the brink of doing what San Bernardino County’s down home Republican politicians have been doing for a generation or longer: utilizing the money provided by self-interested donors to buy her way into office in a trade-off of her future decision-making authority for the wherewithal to capture the office she is seeking.
Kim Knaus is a political neophyte who has come, essentially, out of nowhere to become the frontrunner in the race for San Bernardino Fifth Ward Council position. Her opponent is Henry Nickel, a two-term former councilman who was upset in his bid for reelection in 2020. In March, Nickel, who unsuccessfully vied for mayor in a seven-candidate primary race in 2022, made an even more determined effort at a comeback in this year’s Fifth Ward contest, challenging the man who beat him four years ago, incumbent Ben Reynoso. Also in the March primary race was Knaus; another former Fifth Ward Councilman, Chas Kelley; and Rose Ward. Once the votes were counted, Ward, with 162 or 4.18 percent of the total 3,878 votes cast; Kelley with 490 votes or 12.64 percent; and Reynoso, with 812 votes or 20.94 percent, were also-rans, finishing, respectively, fifth, fourth and third. In San Bernardino, a candidate vying for municipal office who captures a majority of the vote – at least 50 percent plus at least one additional vote – is declared the winner. If, in a contest involving more than two candidates, no competitor captures a majority of the vote, the two hopefuls with the most votes face each other in a second contest, held in that year’s general election. Nickel and Knaus, as the two top vote-getters in March, qualified for the November run-off. While Nickel had avenged his 2020 loss to Reynoso, finishing second, with 974 votes or 25.12 percent, he was bettered, by a substantial margin, by Knaus, who garnered 1,440 votes or 37.13 percent.
On the basis of Knaus’s better than 7-to-5 outpolling ratio over Nickel in the March primary alone, by the metrics applied by most political handicappers, she would appear to be the favorite going into the November race.
There are a few peculiarities in San Bernardino’s Fifth Ward and the general trend in politics throughout San Bernardino County, however, that might have evened the odds in the race.
Nickel, for starters, is a far more experienced campaigner. In addition to the two previous races in the Fifth Ward that he won and the one that he lost, he also ran for mayor and he has twice vied, albeit unsuccessfully, for the California Assembly twice.
Moreover, Nickel is a Republican, a distinction which in San Bernardino County has for decades – indeed, for more than half of a century – represented an advantage, generally, over Democrats such as Knaus. Since the mid-1960s, San Bernardino County has been a Republican County. That was the case six decades ago, at which point registered Republicans simply outnumbered registered Democrats, and it has continued to be the case since 2009, when the number of registered Democrats eclipsed the number of registered Republicans.
While throughout the Golden State overall the Democrats since the 1990s have been in ascendancy such that three out of the last five governors were Democrats and for two decades running the lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state superintendent of schools, insurance commissioner, controller and state treasure positions have been held overwhelmingly by Democrats, and the Democrats as well for nearly a decade have enjoyed supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, there are five pockets throughout the state that remain as Republican bastions. One of those is San Bernardino County. In San Bernardino County, the local Republican and local Democrat parties are controlled by their respective central committees. The central committees are composed of members that are elected every four years in voting held during the presidential primary election, with Democrats voting for their central committee members based upon residency within the Assembly Districts in the county and the Republicans voting for their central committee members based upon residency within the county’s five supervisorial districts. In addition, both central committees have what are refereed to as ex-officio members, those being ones who are not elected to the central committee directly but rather those members of the respective parties who are elected to vie for state legislative office. Thus, a Republican who ran for California State Senate or the Assembly, whether he or she was successful or not, would be an ex-officio member of the Republican Central Committee for a term of, respectively, four or two years, corresponding to the length of state senate and assembly terms. Likewise, the Democrat candidates for the State Senate or the Assembly would also be honored with membership in their county central committee based upon their candidacies for the state legislature.
Both the Republican Central Committee and the Democrat Central Committee are devoted to ensuring the success of the members of their respective parties during elections, those held during the gubernatorial primaries in June in California and presidential primaries in March of leap years and both the gubernatorial and presidential general elections held in in November.
By law and observed tradition in California, federal legislative, state legislative and state constitutional offices such as governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and so forth are partisan, meaning political parties such as Democrats, Republicans and a whole host of others – American Independent, Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom and other even more obscure parties – can hold elections during the primary restricted to just their party members to nominate members of their party to be candidates for state and federal office in the November election. On the ballot, those running for these offices are identified in terms of their party. By law and mostly observed tradition in California, local governmental offices – such as county positions such as supervisor, sheriff, district attorney, treasurer or assessor and city posts such as mayor or council member – are nonpartisan. In this way, those running for local office are not identified as members of any party, even though most have a party affiliation. Thus, in most counties in California, party affiliation is not, or is supposed to not be, a defining issue in local elections. In San Bernardino County, however, local elections are shot through-and-through with partisan political implication.
Historically, or at least over the last 50 to 60 years, the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, with only the rarest of exceptions, has demonstrated itself to be much more energetic, focused, cohesive, creative, dynamic, efficient and effective than the San Bernardino County Democratic Central Committee.
San Bernardino County Republicans, as a rule in virtually every election cycle going back to the beginning of the latter third of the Twentieth Century, have raise more funds to support Republican candidates than San Bernardino Democrats have raised to support Democrats running for office. What is more, once the Republicans have had that money in hand, they have made a far more consistent practice than their Democrat counterparts in applying that money efficiently by conducting polls to ascertain the prevailing attitudes of voters, carrying out opposition research, formulating a message or series of messages and then executing on a campaign using billboards, television ads, radio spots, handbills, mailers and phone banks to promote their party’s candidates and producing attack ads or “hit pieces” to trash the reputations of their Democratic opponents.
Further, the San Bernardino County Democratic Central Committee, to the extent that it has participated in fundraising and used whatever money it has obtained to promote Democrats seeking office, it has generally drawn the line at providing that support to Democrats seeking legislative positions, either in the U.S. Congress or the State Senate or the Assembly. Rarely, meaning virtually never, has the San Bernardino County Democratic Central Committee involved itself in promoting the candidacies of members of the board of supervisors or district attorney or sheriff or assessor or mayor or council member or school board member or water board member. The Republican Central Committee, however, has more than held its own in matching or exceeding the Democrats while pushing the candidacies of those running for Congress or the state legislature. At the same time the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee has gone further, substantially further, in running or assisting campaigns of Republicans seeking county or municipal or local agency offices, including candidates for school board or water board or fire board. While some coordination of resources at a grace roots level takes place in which Democrats help Democrats in trying to get elected, those efforts are not ones that involve the Democratic Central Committee and its resources and machinery.
An indicator of Republicans’ ability to to hitch up all of its horses to the same side of the wagon to have them pull in unison and in the same direction and the comparative dysfunction of the local Democratic Party can be seen in looking at the county’s overall numbers in terms of voter registration and then contrasting that with who the holders of political offices in San Bernardino County are.
Over the entirety of San Bernardino County and its 1,197,840 registered voters, those who self-affiliate with the Democratic Party, 475,955 or 39.7 percent, convincingly outnumber registered Republicans, at 363,984 or 30.4 percent. Still, engaged Republicans outhustle engaged Democrats and do a far better job of convincing their less active party colleagues to get out and vote than do their Democrat rivals. Of the five positions on the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, four are held by Republicans. On the 22 city and two town councils among the 24 incorporated municipalities in San Bernardino County, 17 have more Republican members than Democrats. Eighteen of the county’s 24 mayors are Republicans. While the assembly members and state senators representing San Bernardino County in the California legislature and the members of Congress representing San Bernardino County in Washington, D.C. are evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, that is because several of those districts overlap into Los Angeles, Orange or Riverside counties, where the Democrats are more dominant. In San Bernardino County, the lion’s share of the votes for state and federal lawmakers go to Republicans. All of this is despite the clear advantage in sheer numbers the Democrats have over Republicans in San Bernardino County terms of registered voters.
In San Bernardino’s Fifth Ward, Democrats hold a decided advantage over Republicans in terms of sheer numbers. Of the ward’s 17,555 registered voters 7,785 or 44.3 percent are Democrats, a number which dwarfs the district’s 4,614 Republicans, who represent just over a quarter, some 26.3 percent, of the jurisdiction’s voters. Nevertheless, Democratic voter turnout in the Fifth Ward lags significantly behind that of Republicans. In the 2020 election, 87.36 percent of the Republicans registered to vote in Ward 5 voted. In the same election, 53.47 percent of the Democrats in Ward 5 eligible to vote voted. And that turnout was an anomaly over what normally occurs in Ward 5. Reynoso, with 1,295 votes out of 5,083 cast in the six-candidate March 2020 Primary Race in Ward 5, trailed significantly behind Nickel and his 1,802 votes, at that time, placing second with 25.48 percent of the vote to the incumbent’s 35.45 percent. Reynoso, a young and upcoming political activist and relatively recent college graduate, utilized a strategy of registering college students living on campus or near campus at Cal State San Bernardino, which lies within the Fifth Ward, to make up for the difference between him and his opponent in the March 2020 Primary Race and overcome Nickel in the November 2020 General Election. This artificially boosted the Democratic turnout in that election.
Accordingly,