LOS ANGELES — The party was already teetering on the brink of disaster in one of the year’s most pivotal House races when the feuding between two millionaire California Democrats reached its bizarre peak.

In the contest to replace retiring Rep. Ed Royce, Andy Thorburn in April released a voicemail message of someone threatening to “go negative” on him — and alleged it was his rival, Gil Cisneros. Cisneros, in turn, hired a cybersecurity company to rebut the claim, arguing the voice on the message did not belong to him.


It was a bitter moment in an acrimonious primary, yet within weeks tempers had cooled and the two rivals shook hands after a ceasefire brokered at an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles.

An aggressive, multimillion-dollar effort by the California Democratic Party and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — designed to steer the outcomes of House races in the state’s unusual, top-two primary — made it happen.

Faced with the prospect of getting locked out of the November ballot in several competitive districts, party officials embarked on a desperate, no-expense-spared sprint to ensure that Democrats didn’t blow a handful of races that were critical to the party’s bid to retake the House.

On Tuesday night, those efforts paid off. Though large numbers of absentee and provisional ballots still hadn’t been counted as of Wednesday, a Democrat was running in second place in each of seven Republican-held House districts Democrats are targeting this election cycle, ensuring competitive general elections in the fall.

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“It was mutually assured destruction,” Dave Jacobson, Thorburn’s campaign consultant, said Wednesday. “You had Andy Thorburn and Gil Cisneros, both of whom had a sizable war chest. If we’d taken the gloves off fully with paid communications and attacked each other. … The ceasefire I think did avert a top-two disaster where Democrats would have been locked out.”

The stage for a potentially ruinous primary season for Democrats here was set in early January, when Republican Reps. Darrell Issa and Royce announced they would not seek re-election. While Democratic activists cheered the retirements and credited themselves with chasing two vulnerable Republicans from their districts, national Democrats began to worry that large fields of Democrats seeking to replace them might cannibalize one another in the primary.

Democrats began sounding the alarms about a potential top-two lockout in January, and the DCCC moved the following month to intervene. Before California’s filing deadline, in February, the DCCC conducted internal polling on the races and shared results with candidates, pressing lagging Democrats to drop out. The effort involved direct appeals in telephone calls from sitting House members and state party officials.

“We knew that we needed to act, so we had conversations, we presented that polling to all of the Democrats running in those two seats,” Drew Godinich, a spokesman for the DCCC, said of the Royce and Issa districts.

The effort had mixed success, with several trailing Democrats — but not all — dropping out in the two races. In cases in which Democrats managed to winnow the field, the impact of the departures was significant.

Citing internal polling, Godinich said two relatively strong Democrats who dropped out in Royce’s Southern California district, Jay Chen and Phil Janowicz, would have splintered the vote enough Tuesday that no Democrat would have advanced.

“That would have been the difference between second and third place,” Godinich said.

But Democrats’ fears remained even after the candidate fields were set. And the list of worrisome districts for Democrats expanded when Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher drew an intraparty challenge from another prominent Republican, former state Assembly member Scott Baugh.

By late spring, the DCCC and other outside groups had begun pouring money into the primaries to steer their outcomes — the DCCC alone ended up spending more than $7 million.

While moving to elevate two favored Democrats — Cisneros in Royce’s district and Harley Rouda in Rohrabacher’s — the DCCC simultaneously aired ads attacking top Republicans. In Issa’s district, where a moderate Republican, state Assembly member Rocky Chávez, was leading in early polls, the ads appeared particularly effective. Chávez dropped precipitously and was running a distant sixth as of late Wednesday.

In one of the most unusual ad buys of the election season, the DCCC spent more than $100,000 promoting a little-known Republican, John Gabbard, in Orange County, hoping that with elevated name recognition he might bleed votes from Rohrabacher and Baugh.

Meanwhile, outside Democratic groups also got involved. In Issa’s district, House Majority PAC, the flagship pro-Democratic group, placed ads casting Baugh as a “law-breaker,” while other Democratic groups continued to distribute polls designed to coalesce activist support behind top-running Democrats in each field.

“Hindsight’s always 20-20, and you certainly could look at our race and suggest that the [DCCC’s] effort did yield some dividends,” said Democrat Mike Levin, who ran second to Republican Diane Harkey in Issa’s district. “It’s hard to determine exactly what led to the outcome, but I think it was important they played a role.”

“Ultimately,” he said, “it yielded the desired outcome.”

The DCCC’s challenges were in part self-inflicted, the product of an aggressive candidate recruitment effort that contributed to the overcrowded Democratic fields. In the race against Rohrabacher, the DCCC recruited Hans Keirstead, a pioneering stem-cell researcher, before throwing its support to Rouda, a rival Democrat.

Keirstead, though, held the endorsement of the state Democratic Party. And when the DCCC chose to back Rouda instead, it drew California Democrats’ ire. State party chairman Eric Bauman warned the DCCC in a statement that attacks on Keirstead would “likely strengthen the resolve of our endorsed candidate’s supporters.”

On Wednesday, Rouda and Keirstead were locked in a race for second place to move on to challenge Rohrabacher, with fewer than 100 votes separating them -- still a positive outcome since it guaranteed at least one Democrat will make the November ballot. Cisneros finished second in his own district, and three Democrats were bunched up behind the leading Republican, Diane Harkey, in Issa’s. In all cases, Democrats appeared all but certain to move forward.

“If there hadn’t been a wide variety of interventions by the California Democratic Party and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, we would have gotten boxed out in multiple races,” Bauman said.

Bauman bristled at what he called a media narrative “that we were going to get shut out everywhere,” saying that the party “had to constantly reinforce that the way for us to win in these districts” was to drive up Democratic turnout.

While top-two shutouts are rare in California, the party has fallen victim to them before, when two Republicans finished ahead of the top Democrat in an Inland Empire district where Democrats appeared to hold an advantage in 2012.

Six years later, at the height of this year’s primary — and with the risk of another top-two shutout at its highest — Bauman was the one playing peacemaker with Cisneros and Thorburn and their campaign advisers over appetizers and Scotch whisky at Vitello’s in Studio City.

“Those two candidates made a decision that was incredibly difficult to do,” he said. “No candidate wants to give up the best tool you have in a race like this, which is to be able to pulverize your opponent.”

Bauman added, “Both of those men and their consultants agreed to do the right thing for the right reason, and so I have to say, I thank them both and I’m very proud of them, and I think it made the difference in us getting across the finish line.”

