The unlikely rise of Steve Garvey, decades after his baseball heyday

Months after Steve Garvey joined the race for the Senate seat formerly occupied by Dianne Feinstein, California voters were only vaguely aware that he was running. The former Major League Baseball star, a Republican long shot in a deeply Democratic state, appeared to be courting tens of millions of Californians in stealth mode: little press. Vague points of view. No ads to talk about.

Then Representative Adam B. Schiff intervened.

On Tuesday, after a series of campaign ads that essentially allowed Schiff to pick his opponent in the general election, voters in California’s primary put the 75-year-old Garvey in a November runoff for a prized Senate seat that represents the state’s most populous represented the country. He will face Mr. Schiff, 63, a Los Angeles-area Democrat who has raised more than $30 million and has been the front-runner for months.

Mr. Schiff is a 12-term congressman who led the prosecution in the first impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Garvey is a career .294 hitter with 272 home runs and 1,308 runs batted in during 19 seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mr. Garvey was known as a clean-cut role model in his heyday in the sport and has since cemented his reputation by appearing in infomercials, giving motivational speeches and recording $149 Cameo Greetings. He has long expressed a desire to run for public office, despite the hurdle of some highly publicized marital, financial and legal problems in his past.

He was late to the Senate race, announcing his candidacy in October, long after Mr. Schiff had begun campaigning and won the support of the state’s Democratic establishment, including the backing of Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House. the House of Representatives. By then, the conventional wisdom was that the primaries would result in Schiff facing another Democrat in the November general election — either Rep. Katie Porter or Rep. Barbara Lee — to fill the office that Ms. Feinstein held for more than thirty held for years.

In California, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2 to 1, and voters have not elected a Republican in a statewide race since Arnold Schwarzenegger was re-elected governor in 2006. But Republican Party leaders were eager to field a big-name candidate at the top of the ticket. anyway, to mobilize and help the state’s conservative minority in some competitive down-ballot elections.

Mr. Schiff, meanwhile, faced the prospect of a formidable Democratic opponent in the general election if Ms. Porter were to reach the California primary, in which the top two voters advance to the general election regardless of the circumstances. party. For the Schiff campaign, Mr. Garvey was someone who could rally enough Republicans to knock Ms. Porter out of second place in the primaries.

So Mr. Schiff and his allies — including labor unions, Native American tribes and tech executives — unleashed tens of millions of dollars in ads portraying Mr. Garvey as the conservative choice and an acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump. The ads were a way to signal to the state’s Republican voters — almost all of whom are conservative — that Garvey was their candidate.

The maneuver worked. In a race with nearly 20 candidates in total, the three veteran Democrats split most of the votes among them on the left, while Mr. Garvey had the votes on the right mostly to himself. Ms Porter came third overall, putting her out of the race; Ms Lee ran a distant fourth.

“Schiff executed a perfect strategy,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political strategist from California. “He took advantage of his large war chest to elevate himself in the second round against an opponent who cannot compete with him in November.”

Mr. Stutzman acknowledged that the math of party registration alone makes Mr. Garvey’s chances of victory in November very slim. Moreover, he said, Garvey’s reliance on bare-bones talking points has fueled questions about his willingness to rise to power.

“But he has a wonderful opportunity to prove the doubters and naysayers wrong — to come out and adopt a specific issue platform,” Mr. Stutzman said.

Mr. Garvey is not the first California candidate to rely less on political experience than on celebrity. Ronald Reagan was a Hollywood actor before rising to the governor’s office and then to the White House. Before Mr. Schwarzenegger became governor in the 2003 recall election, he was an A-list movie star.

Both men spent long hours teaching state policy before running for office, said Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild and, as a labor leader, was familiar with state institutions. And in 2003, Mr. Schwarzenegger received a much-publicized series of tutorials on governance from policy experts at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution — a crash course he dubbed “Schwarzenegger University.”

Both men led the state in a less partisan era, when Republicans made up a larger share of California’s electorate than they do today. When Mr. Schwarzenegger was re-elected in 2006, it was partly because he had moved to the middle of the political spectrum after losing an embarrassing battle with the unions in his first term. And in those days, a single gaffe was far less likely to destroy a candidate’s political aspirations than it is in today’s social media age.

Mr Garvey, sensing the risk, has reduced his policy proposals to broad strokes. On homelessness, he said he plans to “find out what works and what doesn’t by auditing the money spent on this crisis.” On the Middle East, he has said he prefers Israel “yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

He has said he does not condone abortion but would not support a national ban because “Californians have spoken.” He is not in favor of a further increase in the minimum wage.

His availability to the news media is carefully controlled and rationed, with interviews limited almost exclusively to local television stations and friendly conservative media. He appeared at three debates and was the only candidate to leave afterward without speaking to reporters. During the first televised debate in January with Mr. Schiff and the other top Senate candidates, the moderators were so frustrated by Mr. Garvey’s lack of policy talk. that at one point one of them pointedly asked why he was running, given his rudimentary positions.

Mr Garvey responded that “policy for me is a position – I have taken strong positions,” and then recited a list of conservative slogans, such as “let’s get back to energy,” “let’s close the border” and “let’s finance money’. the police.” Later, when Representatives Schiff, Lee and Porter asked whether he would vote for Trump for president this year, as he had done in the past two elections, Mr. Garvey squirmed and would not answer.

Reviews were scathing.

“Describing Garvey’s actions as a deer in the headlights is a disservice to the real deer in the headlights,” wrote Jack Ohman, columnist and political cartoonist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

Campaign experts said this week that it was not unusual for a political novice to tread carefully on policy issues. Mr. Garvey did not have much experience, they added, because Mr. Schiff’s advertising strategy had made it unnecessary for him to campaign.

“Until now he has been in ‘do no harm’ mode,” said Mr. Stutzman, a top adviser to Mr. Schwarzenegger during the 2003 recall campaign. He said that if Mr. Garvey hopes to be taken seriously, he will have to reach beyond conservative Californians without alienating them and “demonstrate that he understands the issues.”

“There is a lot of specificity in things like the history of NATO and the obligations of the treaty,” he said. ‘On immigration. For foreign policy.”

On the first evening, Mr. Garvey made light of it with fans at a resort near his Palm Desert ranch, “Casa de Garvey,” and his live-streamed speech was full of baseball analogies and nostalgia.

“Welcome to the California comeback,” he shouted to the crowd at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa in Palm Springs, borrowing one of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s old slogans. “What you feel tonight is what it feels like to hit a walk-off home run.”

He invited the public in person and online to join his campaign if they were concerned about gas prices, urban crime and “career politicians who are more concerned about their next job in Washington than your next job here in California.” ‘

“They say we will strike at the general election,” he said. He then channeled another baseball great, Yogi Berra.

“It’s not over until it’s over,” he exulted.

The crowd roared.