What Would Electoral Success for the Lincoln Club Mean for San Diego?

Recently, it was reported that San Diego’s Lincoln Club received a million-dollar donation from a single wealthy attorney to help aid their efforts to elect Mayor Todd Gloria’s opponent, “Independent” Larry Turner, in the November election.  After two debates and a brain-numbingly idea-free campaign, it is abundantly clear that Turner is running simply to say “no” and return San Diego to the good old days of plutocratic rule where the affluent could be free to enjoy the San Diego sun without fear of social change, taxes, or having the unwashed masses move into an ADU next door to them. 

As Gregg Robinson pointed out last week in his column, the operating principle behind saving San Diego from the specter of change boils down to a simple sentiment: “F*** Jack I got mine.”  This noble ideal has traditionally been driven by what some political observers have described as San Diego’s shadow government of private interests bent on enjoying access to the public trough just as long as they didn’t have to pay for it. 

Historically, a key player in the effort to preserve the hegemony of San Diego’s shadow government that deserves attention is the Lincoln Club, a stealthy nexus of economic and political power.  In essence, the Lincoln Club is a political entity bent on maintaining what was San Diego’s de facto private government led by the local power elite in perpetuity by any means necessary. 

That was the case at least until the Democratic interlopers crashed their party in recent years and let in other players with different priorities once they won control of local government.  Hence, the Lincoln Club’s efforts this election to unseat Terra Lawson-Remer on the County Board of Supervisors, return that board to its rightful Republican owners, and make what would have been a relatively easy win for Gloria into a real contest, is essentially a revolt of the old guard seeking to take back what they see as their proper place atop the local political pecking order.

What has changed to upset the apple cart for the traditional lords of San Diego?  Labor and Environmental groups have a say for the first time in San Diego’s history. As a Politico report on the San Diego Supervisor’s contest observes:

The rise of labor, district elections, shifting power from low-turnout primaries to November elections and changing demographics helped Democrats get a foothold and eventually put the city out of Republican reach. The council is now dominated by Democrats, whose divisions are not ideological but turn on members’ fealty to the Democratic mayor, Todd Gloria. Term limits helped Democrats flip the county board, and Lawson-Remer, who ran an outside group to elect Democratic Rep. Mike Levin in 2018, surprised many with her victory two years later.

“Things have gotten better, but there’s still a lot of work to be done because you had to dismantle decades of Republican leadership and how that filtered down to the staff,” the labor leader Browning said of the county’s relationship with unions. “They feel like the tone and the respect has been a lot better. They are treated more as partners than as adversaries.”

Nicole Capretz, founder and chief executive of the Climate Action Campaign, said “there’s been a 180-degree difference” on land-use issues and the environment.

“We have had to learn from the ground up how the county operates because it had been such a black hole — such a well-guarded fortress.

“These new supervisors are very ambitious,” Capretz added. “We’ve been feeling a little bit of an earthquake, but no ship can move that fast.”

But moving the ship of San Diego in a more progressive direction is not on the Lincoln Club’s wish list.

While most folks are familiar with the goals and retrograde agenda of the Republican Party U.S.A., the Lincoln Club (which historically does much of the local right’s bidding come election time) is still relatively unknown outside of political circles. Hence a little review might be useful.  As Kelly Davis noted of the local branch of the club in a 2014 piece in the now defunct SD City Beat:

If money equals power, the Lincoln Club wields it like no other local political organization. Its 400 members, whose annual dues provide a guaranteed source of money for the group’s political action committee, are a who’s-who of lobbyists, developers, Republican-backed elected officials (and their staff members) and high-profile business owners—the people behind Mossy Nissan, Jerome’s Furniture and Coles Carpets sit on the club chairman’s special advisory committee. Though the Lincoln Club describes itself as nonpartisan and focused on “pro-prosperity” candidates and issues, what and whom it chooses to support is almost always partisan.

But, of course, the reach of this exclusive “club” goes far beyond San Diego.  As investigative journalist Matthew Fleischer tells us, the Lincoln Club has a long and influential history in right wing California politics. In addition to serving as the hitman of the Republican Party, the club has also functioned as a king maker and was instrumental in bringing us the notorious Citizens United case:

Since the days of Richard Nixon, the Lincoln Club has been the Matrix-like ideological birthing chamber of California Republicanism, whose grandees and arbiters once guided Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, George Deukmejian and Arnold Schwarzenegger when their political careers were in their larval stages. That same Lincoln Club gave us the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court victory—which paved the way for Super PACs and unlimited, anonymous corporate donations—and, over the past year, had been instrumental in pushing [anti-union] Proposition 32 onto the California ballot.

And the ultimate goal of the Lincoln Club is far from moderate or even vaguely democratic. Simply put, it is not so much a tool of the GOP as it is a weapon of plutocratic interests bent on buying our democracy lock stock and barrel from D.C. to San Diego.  John MacMurry in the LA Progressive  hits the nail on head:

The Lincoln Club . . . by opening up campaign contributions to individuals and groups who can give unlimited amounts of anonymous dollars, gets the undying gratitude of billionaires and large corporations, and the ability to buy control of any government in California—or all of them.

And for those of us who are neither billionaires nor large corporations?

It’s a lot like the old Jerry Reed song about who gets the gold mine and who just gets the shaft. And for most of us, the Lincoln Club has worked hard to make sure that not too much of the gold mine is headed our way.

Here in San Diego, the local right’s strategy in the not-too-distant past was to elect the former mayor, Kevin Falconer, as their tool in the mayor’s office so they could continue to use the initiative process as a way around our representative government by funding ballot measures aimed against the Barrio Logan Community Plan, the affordable housing fee, and the earned sick day/minimum wage ordinance recently passed by the City Council.  Back then, they won every time and succeeded in neutering the power of representative government when it strayed from serving elite interests. 

Of course, this was an ironic perversion of the initiative process, which was originally devised as a way for “the people” to go around unresponsive government, as it was then being used by moneyed interests to subvert the democratic process. This strategy was executed in a politically effective albeit ruthlessly Machiavellian fashion to check any perceived “excesses” of our elected representative democracy that might threaten the interests of our local “shadow government” in any way.

The aim here is the same old story: for the interests that support and benefit from the activities of the Lincoln Club, anything that impinges on corporate power or profits for the public good is a “jobs killer” or an assault on “neighborhoods,” while siphoning taxpayer money from the public trough for private gain is unquestionably sound policy.

Thus, the kind of San Diego the Lincoln Club envisions is a city where the moneyed downtown interests have the gold and the rest of us get the shaft.  The individual players may come and go but the economic and ideological agenda remains the same year after year.  The aim of this system was keeping the revolving door between government and the elite private sector functioning properly.  It was the farm system that supplied the halls of power with like-minded friends of plutocratic interests. 

And increasingly, if we look at the big picture, this phenomenon does not necessarily have to follow party lines. As we are seeing at the statewide and national level, partisan labels become less important when moneyed interests can find some Democrats keenly interested in feeding at the corporate campaign trough or getting paid to do their bidding elsewhere. 

The election of Democrats to the halls of power did not immediately upend this legacy, as forces like the Chamber of Commerce and other big business interests still have serious game, but it did open the door both for more influence by labor, environmental, and community groups.  The hope in those circles has been that, with more long-term organizing, the needle will continue to be pushed in the direction of a local government that better serves the interests of all San Diegans, not just the most well-heeled. 

For the Lincoln Club, however, this constitutes a grievous loss of power and influence for those they represent. Therefore, it needs to be stopped.  As Doug Porter wrote in his recent column of the Club’s efforts to regain power in San Diego, the idea is to make use of fear and loathing of the dispossessed to reverse the Democratic gains of recent years. 

That defines reactionary. 

The most important take away is this: if the Lincoln Club and their allies succeed and the Democrats lose their majority on the Country Board of Supervisors and the mayor’s office while local revenue measures, which they also oppose, go down as well, hopes for a more progressive, inclusive democracy in our region will take a big step backwards as scarcity and divided government will make such progress an uphill battle as it had been for most of the history of our region.