By JOHN FUND

The New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races aren’t the only contests in which Democrats are feeling pressure from the growing unpopularity of President Obama’s policies. A GOP upset may also be in the making in a California House special election on November 3. Democratic Lt. Governor John Garamendi and Republican attorney David Harmer are battling for the Bay Area congressional seat vacated by Democrat Ellen Tauscher, who left to join the Obama state department. Normally a staunch Democratic seat, there is a growing chance it could swing to the GOP given the state’s latest budget collapse and the 13% approval rating of the state legislature.

Mr. Harmer has had no trouble portraying Mr. Garamendi as a big part of the state’s fiscal mess. Mr. Garamendi, a true-blue liberal who has held various offices for 30 years, clearly relishes the old tax-and-spend formula that got California into its current fiscal hole. “It’s not true that raising taxes harms the economy,” he declared at a recent economic forum, where he called for revisions to Proposition 13, the popular limit on local property taxes. He insisted that California’s woes “are a revenue problem, not a spending problem.”

Mr. Garamendi also appears to have a careless attitude about facts. His new campaign mailing attacks Mr. Harmer for telling a Utah newspaper that he supports moving American jobs to other countries. There’s one problem: The person quoted in the article is an entirely different David Harmer, a former official at the Utah State Department of Community and Economic Development.

Mr. Harmer, a former Congressional aide and the son of Ronald Reagan’s last lieutenant governor in California, has demanded an apology but the Sacramento Bee reports that Mr. Garamendi’s handlers have “stuck with the smear and said the bottom line is still that Harmer doesn’t support President Obama’s efforts to create jobs.”

A recent poll using conventional turnout models by Wilson Research Strategies shows Mr. Garamendi with a 41% to 34% lead in the district, a less than stellar performance. In a low-turnout race, in which Democrats stay home out of a lack of enthusiasm for the candidate and for the party’s policies in Washington, an upset is definitely possible.

Read article at WSJ.com here.