CA-Sen: Senator Barbara Boxer Wins Re-Election Over Carly Fiorina

After monitoring results overnight, Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina conceded defeat Wednesday morning after her hard-fought race with Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, stating that she was proud of every moment of her campaign.

Speaking to reporters and a small group of supporters with her husband at her headquarters in Irvine, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive said the experience had been a privilege and that she had been touched by every person she met across California. She said she ran because she was concerned that attaining the American dream had become too hard for too many people and that she was still worried about out-of-control spending in Washington.

“We had an exceptional campaign,” Fiorina said. “In the end we could not overcome the registration that Democrats have, and in particular in L.A. County.”

Demographics played a role (look at the California map) but so did the relentless negative advertising by Barbara Boxer who portrayed Carly Fiorina as a greedy corporate executive who laid employees off by shipping their jobs offshore and enriched herself at the same time. The late in the campaign ads which featured outsourced Hewlett-Packard employees was devastating to Fiorina – particularly in populous Los Angeles County where the ads played ubiquitously in the last two weeks of the campaign.

I was at the Irvine, California Fiorina headquarters yesterday afternoon through the early morning hours. Here are some photos which I snapped:

Radio talk show host of Salem Communications Dennis Prager

California Board of Equalization member Michelle Steel being interviewed

Liz Mair, Flap and Dan Blatt

So, one has to consider whether it was worth the Carly Fiorina effort to challenge Barbara Boxer in “deep blue” California, raise, plus spend, the millions of dollars in campaign cash and come out with a loss that is about what Matt Fong experienced in 1998.

Somehow I think it was, since Boxer herself acknowledged that this race was “the toughest and roughest campaign of my life.” Plus, Boxer had to utilize the full resurces of her incumbency to fight back Fiorina, including multiple President Obama fundraising events. Boxer spent $ millions which could have been redistributed to other states for other Democrat campaigns. And, she spent like a drunken sailor on television ads the last month of the campaign.

But, with this said, California Democrats who have a massive registration advantage, pretty much swept the California election board and shellacked the GOP – from Jerry Brown’s election as Governor to Loretta Sanchez’s re-election to the House. Even GOP favorite California Attorney General candidate Steve Cooley is in a close race which will be decided by absentee ballots (counted over the next few weeks).

I doubt whether the national GOP will place as many resources into California to win a statewide race (such as Senator Diane Feinstein’s re-election in two years) anytime soon – or my lifetime.

California is the new “Solid Blue” Massachusetts, New York or Maryland.