Steve Garvey talks baseball, common sense and cross-party appeal

By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire

When baseball All-Star Steve Garvey left the Los Angeles Dodgers for a far more lucrative offer from the San Diego Padres, it was such a shock to Dodgers fans that Girl Scouts picketed the stadium while Padres season ticket sales soared by 6,000.

It was 1982, and the first baseman had just helped the Dodgers win a World Series title the year before. Garvey went on to play four years with the Padres, breaking the National League record of consecutive games played his first year and helping the team win their first National League pennant in 1984.

Last year during the playoffs, when the teams played each other in Dodger Stadium, Garvey says Dodgers fans embraced his attendance at their games as a lucky charm. Then when he attended games at Petco Park, Garvey had a similar reaction from Padres fans.

“Garvey’s here for us – so we’re gonna win,” he recalled both teams’ fans telling him.

This week, as the baseball great jumped into a crowded field of candidates vying to succeed the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, he’s hoping he can translate his ability to maintain loyal fans from rival sports franchises to generating cross-party appeal.

Though his entrance into the race was expected for months, Garvey, 74, says he made a final determination to run after Giants fans started coming up to him to say, “God, we hate the Dodgers, but we’ll vote for you.” “So maybe that was a precursor for running for office,” Garvey told RealClearPolitics Tuesday, declining to say which team he now roots for the most. “I mean, trying to be a man for all people.”

It’s a message Garvey hopes resonates among a broad swath of voters and one that will help him stand out among a deeply partisan slate of candidates that includes Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, Barbara Lee, and potentially Laphonza Butler, the longtime labor leader and abortion-rights advocate Newsom appointed last week to fill the Senate vacancy.

Butler, 44, hasn’t said whether she would mount her own campaign for the seat, but Newsom didn’t rule it out when announcing the selection.

Washington isn’t functioning, Garvey says, because of the “rancid animosity” between the two parties.

“That’s not what the people of California and the United States want,” he argues. “They want these elected officials to build coalitions and build cohesiveness.”

In a video announcing his campaign, Garvey underscored his commitment to a “common sense,” not partisan agenda.

“I never played for Democrats or Republicans or independents, I played for all of you,” he intones. “Now I’m running for the U.S. Senate in California … It’s going to be a common-sense campaign. It’s going to be difficult, but we can do this together – you and I.”

The baseball legend has his work cut out for him.

No Republican has been elected to statewide office in California for nearly two decades. The last was former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a larger-than-life body builder and international movie star who won office in the 2003 gubernatorial recall the same year his blockbuster "Terminator 3" came out in theaters. Schwarzenegger was reelected in 2006.

More recently, Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, a well-known Republican, attempted to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom during his 2021 recall, but that campaign quickly fizzled and was never very serious to begin with.

Other deep-pocketed Californians made it to the general election ballot only to be trounced on Election Day. Billionaire Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO, lost to Gov. Jerry Brown 41% to 54% in 2010. Former Hewlett-Packard chief Carly Fiorina ran an unsuccessful campaign for Senate the same year and, despite a strong showing in presidential primary debates, lost her bid for the GOP nomination six years later.

Despite these long odds, Garvey says California’s steep decline when it comes to crime, fentanyl overdoses, homelessness, education, and a mass exodus of residents provides an opening for a candidate who isn’t a partisan foot soldier or a career politician.

When it comes to abortion, Garvey says he opposes it but would represent the majority opinion in California and not vote for federal legislation restricting abortion rights.

On spikes in violent crime and smash-and-grab robberies across the state, Garvey says the state should start by enforcing the laws already on the books instead of allowing criminals who steal merchandise from stores under a $950 threshold to escape prosecution and punishment.

After a recent ride-along with police in Coachella Valley near his home in Palm Desert, Garvey says the officers described the biggest challenge and most demoralizing aspect of their job as the many times they arrest people only to see them walking away from the station by the time they’ve finished their police reports.  

“We have to support law enforcement – and you do that by confining these criminals and bringing them to justice,” he said, criticizing California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to release more than 150,000 inmates from state prisons during his time in office.

“I can’t imagine leaving 100- to 200,000 criminals out on the streets and feeling like this in any way is going to help our society, our cities and neighborhoods,” Garvey remarked.

Instead of funneling more taxpayer dollars to curb homelessness after the state has already spent $20 billion on the effort under Newsom, Garvey said he would bring fresh ideas to the table, including private-sector solutions.

“I think the private sector should get involved in helping to solve the homelessness problem,” he said. “I think hedge funds could do a tremendous amount of good for this country and for the streets of California and the United States.”

Garvey suggested that the hedge-fund executives could voluntarily fund facilities to transition homeless people off the streets and into safe rehabilitation centers to help “stabilize their lives and address the real bottom line, and that’s drugs and mental health.”

On the epidemic of fentanyl overdoses in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and across the country, Garvey said Washington needs to get tough on China’s sourcing of the drug.

“You need to go to the source and cut the head off, so to speak,” he said. “If it’s China, then do what you need to do on a constrained basis – whether it’s tariffs on trade – or whatever it needs to be. Let’s start to get serious. Let’s quit pandering to our enemies and get tough on them … because Americans are dying and the flow into the country has not stopped.”

When it comes to national Republican politics, Garvey plays down his GOP pedigree. The word “Republican” is absent from his campaign website.

But in a state where Donald Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by 5 million votes, Garvey’s past support for the former president is a heavy liability.

Garvey acknowledges voting for Trump twice but won’t say whether he would vote for Trump again next year if the GOP presidential frontrunner becomes the party’s nominee. He also has said he has no opinion on who is responsible for the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“When I vote for somebody, I look at their opponent and I weigh both of them and their policies and what kind of heart they have – are they in this for the people or are they in this for business or the branding [part] of it?” he explained. “I’ll look at who the final candidates are, and I’ll judge them.”

In a world of focus-group refined talking points and canned responses, Garvey’s easy affability and self-deprecating manner are a refreshing mix.

At one point in the interview, Garvey referred to himself as a political “rookie” who would hire the best policy team to come up with novel ways to tackle the state’s and country’s most vexing problems.

The campaign is already relying heavily on the state’s baseball nostalgia to appeal to voters across the political spectrum. His campaign logo features a red-white-and-blue clad baseball player sporting a No. 6 on his back – the number Garvey wore for both teams.

“It’s time to get off the bench, it’s time to put the uniform on, it’s time to get back in the game,” he says in his just-released first campaign video. 

But athletes-turned-political candidates have had spotty success running for office in recent years. Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is a former beloved football coach at Auburn University, but former star professional football player Herschel Walker lost a close contest last year for Senate. Walker’s sexual relationships with several women became a liability in the final weeks of the Georgia race.

While still playing professional baseball, Garvey’s positive public image was sullied by revelations that he fathered children with two women after a highly publicized divorce. It’s difficult to tell whether that past could impact his ability to run in California. The controversies are now more than four decades old, and the nation has since elected two presidents dogged by episodes of infidelity, including Trump, who has been indicted for allegations involving hush payments to an ex-lover and also has been accused of rape.

Instead, Garvey’s biggest campaign hurdle may be his decades out of the limelight and lack of name recognition among younger voters. A September Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll showed Schiff with a lead at 20% support and Porter just behind at 17%. Garvey pulled in just 7%, the same as Lee and James Bradley. Republican Eric Early was at 5%, yet nearly a third of California voters, 32%, were still undecided.

“Trying to capitalize on a major league baseball career that ended 37 years ago is kind of a reach in my view,” Garry South, a longtime California Democratic political consultant, told RCP.

Still, Garvey still has decent odds of making it onto the general election ballot because the state’s jungle primary allows the two top vote-getters in the March 5 primary to move on to compete in the November general election.

“If he can spend a few million dollars ahead of the primary, I think he has a shot to make the runoff against Schiff, there’s an opportunity for him to raise money from Republican small donors across the country,” said Rob Stutzman, a GOP campaign consultant who served as a top aide to Schwarzenegger. “I don’t see a scenario where he can win, but he could be the best GOP California statewide campaign in over a decade.”

If Garvey is daunted by the naysayers, he’s not showing it.

“You and I know that polling can be subjective, and the most important thing is the personal poll among the citizens of California as to who they know I am – the currency we’ve had together over these 50 years, and the times of playing in San Diego and Los Angeles, every day for seven and a half years,” he told RCP.  

Garvey also stresses that his commitment to finding a middle ground with Democrats in the state and Senate is sincere.

He recalls a memorable evening spent at a state dinner for the prime minister of Ireland with then-President Ronald Reagan and legendary Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Massachusetts Democrat. Garvey was seated at a table with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and James Brady, who served as Reagan’s assistant and became permanently disabled from a bullet intended for Reagan in an attempted assassination.

Reagan greeted him and recalled that during his time as a sports announcer, he had worked in Des Moines, Iowa.

“And he went on for 10 minutes describing a game between the Cubs and the Cardinals that came down to the bottom of the ninth and the bases loaded,” Garvey said.

O’Neill suddenly interjected, cajoling Reagan to get to the point and finish the story.

The two started to banter back and forth like competitive schoolmates.

“They were diametrically opposed in terms of politics, yet they respected each other,” Garvey recalled of the friendly political partnership.

“I would like to approach politics like they did – to have your convictions and your beliefs but to work for the common good.”

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.