When I covered Oakland City Hall, I hated ranked-choice voting. Not because it helped put Jean Quan into office, but because it created messy races with too many candidates. It s hard to get to the nitty gritty when there are 10 politicians all of whom are afraid to say anything negative about each other.
That s definitely not the case in the Mike Honda vs Ro Khanna race, even though there are five candidates — for now. I wrote this short story yesterday about an effort to keep super PAC money out of the race. Here are the comments I got from the camps:
From the Honda camp:
We have received the agreement and are reviewing internally. We remain extremely skeptical that Khanna would be willing to make this agreement or stick to it since he benefited from close to $800,000 in dark money spending on behalf of a superPAC funded by corporate millionaires and billionaires – $350,000 of this expenditure coming from an ex-Enron executive and his spouse.
From the Khanna camp:
We respect CounterPAC s efforts, and we don t need to be asked to keep special interest money out of our campaign. Ro Khanna is the only candidate in this race who has already voluntarily signed a pledge to not accept money from corporations, PACs, and lobbyists. Unfortunately, after accepting hundreds of thousands from special interests in his 2014 election, Mike Honda has refused to follow our lead, sign the pledge, and continues to allow special interests to fund his campaign in 2016.
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