Congressional candidate and Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn on Monday released a "green" jobs plan, while her chief rival, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, touted a poll that claimed the race for a South Bay U.S. House seat is a dead heat with under a month to go.
Hahn said her plan, viewable here, would create 25,000 new jobs by leveraging federal funding, streamlining regulations and investing in clean energy, among other measures.
Hahn, a Democrat, has been crisscrossing the 36th Congressional District as the May 17 special election approaches, even showing up on the public officials' stage at events like the dedication of the Wyland Whaling Wall on the Redondo Beach waterfront.
All-in-all, Hahn is looking - or trying to look - less like an L.A. city councilwoman from San Pedro and more like the congresswoman she hopes to be.
To get there, she'll have to beat 15 other candidates, including Bowen, a Democrat who lives in Marina del Rey and represented much of the South Bay in the state Legislature for 14 years.
On Monday, the Bowen campaign shared results from a poll it commissioned through Washington-based Feldman Group that showed Bowen and Hahn tied at 20 percent each. The poll of 451 registered, likely 36th District voters between April 4-7 had a margin of error of 4.9 percent.
Coming in behind the pair was Redondo Beach Mayor Mike Gin, a Republican, who had eight percent of those polled. Six percent of respondents chose Democrat Marcy Winograd of Santa Monica. Winograd got 41 percent of the vote in last June's primary against former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), who resigned in February to lead a Washington think tank.
In a run-off matchup, the poll showed Bowen with a four percent lead over Hahn, 40 percent to 36 percent, with 16 percent undecided.
Hahn and Bowen are outstripping their competitors when it comes to campaign contributions in the short election season, according to the first reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Unless one candidate gets more than 50 percent in next month's primary, the race will go to a July 12 run-off between the top two vote getters regardless of party.
As a supporter of Marcy Winograd, I have contacted her former supporters to determine whether they still plan to vote for her. 9 out of the ll former supporters in my own precinct in the south end of Torrance still support her; that's about 80%. One voter is now choosing Hahn and the other possibly Bowen, though her spouse is staying with Winograd. If 41% of Democrats chose Winograd last time and 80% of them stayed with her, then one might expect at least 30% for Winograd this time, so I question how people sampled in the referenced poll http://bit.ly/fKOwXk poll were chosen.
Hahn is a latecomer to the green jobs issue, whereas Winograd has been researching this for several years: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcy-winograd/we-need-a-green-new-deal_b_374099.html This is not an easy problem, and Hahn does not seem to be specific about the numbers of jobs, the cost, and the duration. She could be advocating spending $2 billion or $1 trillion. The two estimates differ by a factor of 500. Furthermore, you have the ambiguity of duration: 25,000 jobs in one year, or in a decade or what? Based on the authors cited by Winograd above, you have to spend $88,000 per green job /year. So 25,000 jobs requires $2.2 billion. Now, California has about one tenth (0.1) of the US population, so if those 25,000 jobs were all in California, she advocates dedicating about $22 billion for the whole nation. If she means the 25,000 jobs were all in the 36th CD, we have a different total expenditure required. Based on the ratio of the US population to the population of the 36th CD, if you were a Congressperson that fairly represented the entire US, to create 25,000 green jobs in the 36th CD, you would have to advocate the nation spend $1 trillion. Sorry, but if the US spends $170 billion a year that is dreaming. $1 trillion is absurd.