Steve Glazer’s victory in state Senate District 7, which includes a large swath of Contra County County and Alameda County’s Tri-Valley, sent a loud message to the Democratic establishment: We can choose legislators that reflect our communities instead of your whims.
In Glazer, voters opted for a centrist, problem-solving Democrat who was willing to challenge public employee unions and their grip on the California Legislature. He achieved a solid 9-point victory over Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, the establishment favorite.

The outcome of this special election continues a recent trend in suburban Bay Area politics, where big-name endorsements and big-union spending have been unable to prevail against candidates who were more open to balancing business concerns against party orthodoxy and taking on labor on matters such as pension and labor reform.

Glazer smartly and effectively worked another issue into the mix that many of his Democratic brethren would not dare touch: the incongruity of building a region dependent on mass transit and then leaving its key system, BART, vulnerable to shutdown in labor disputes.

The politican spinmeisters for the party and the unions immediately tried to dismiss the result as an aberration. But the elections to the state Assembly of Democrat Marc Levine in 2012 and Republican Catharine Baker in 2014 over heavily union-backed candidates suggest are looking for more independent voices in Sacramento.

The special election closed a $9-million assault of mailers, television ads and radio commercials that led to the victory of a Democrat backed by Republican interests over his own party’s weightiest ally, organized labor.

Unions argue that it was less a defeat for them than a victory for Glazer’s deep-pocketed allies, a consortium of billionaires, millionaires and education reformers who salvaged his Senate bid with independent campaigns on his behalf. But organized labor put Glazer in their sights years ago, so his victory — a year after they helped defeat him in an Assembly race — shows the limits of their power when both sides wield all the weapons that money can buy.

Not surprisingly, Bonilla and Glazer at times seemed secondary actors in their own play, as spending by independent committees working for the candidates dwarfed the financial resources of the two running for the seat.

Just one of the myriad independent committees backing Bonilla, an effort by service employees and teachers unions dubbed Working Families, had spent more than $3.3 million before election day, according to calculations by the nonpartisan California Target Book. Other labor groups each kicked in hundreds of thousands more.

And the millionaires and billionaires who back charter schools and other changes to the state’s education policies — including Southern California businessman Bill Bloomfield — poured in $4 million for Glazer. An additional $1.1 million was contributed by JobsPAC, the business community behemoth.

And the astonishing level of spending may have reinforced the low turnout that troubles all special elections. The latest returns showed that about 110,000 ballots had been counted — with more outstanding — out of nearly 490,000 registered voters.

The intriguing asterisk, though, is whether the Glazer race provides a specific road map under the state’s relatively new electoral rules that thrust the top two primary finishers, regardless of party, into a runoff.

Had Glazer been playing under the old rules — in which each party selects its nominee for the general election — he wouldn’t have been in the runoff at all. His victory relied on the absence of a strong Republican candidate, which made the top-two runoff a wholly Democratic fight.
Under that construction, Bonilla was the Democratic establishment favorite. Glazer — ironically, considering his 40-year record in liberal Democratic politics in the state — was the insurgent who coalesced independents, Republicans and a minority of the Democratic vote to forge a victory.

Since the Senate district mirrors the state in voter registration, it’s not hard to see the allure of his path for someone like Steve Westly, the former state controller and unsuccessful 2006 gubernatorial candidate who has been looking at a 2018 run for governor.

If Republicans forward a smattering of weak candidates for the governor’s race, as they have for the 2016 U.S. Senate race, that increases the odds that the finalists will be two Democrats. And it increases the odds that someone like the wealthy Westly could elbow his way into a second slot behind the Democratic establishment favorite — at this point, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom — with the same groups of voters that put Glazer over the top. (Westly, notably, endorsed Glazer.)

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Glazer-victory-sends-message-to-public-employee-6277575.php
and
http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-labor-state-senate-democrats-20150520-story.html#page=1