Hee shakes up governor’s race

Longtime Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustee and former state Sen. Clayton Hee has announced he is running for governor, a relatively late entry into the Democratic primary that could dramatically alter the dynamics of the race.

Hee served a dozen years as trustee and 14 years as a state senator representing Windward Oahu. He also served two years in the state House.

Hee’s announcement Tuesday means there now will be two well-known Democrats challenging Gov. David Ige in the primary, which could divide the opposition to the incumbent. U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa also is running for governor this year, and in political circles has generally been regarded as the front-runner.

Jerry Burris, a longtime Honolulu political columnist and author, said Hee will have to work to remind the voters of who he is and what he accomplished in his long political career. Hee, 64, last held public office as a senator in 2014, when he left the Senate to make his most recent run for lieutenant governor against Shan Tsutsui.

Hee’s previous efforts to seek higher office have been unsuccessful, including his runs for lieutenant governor in 2002 and 2014, and his unsuccessful bid for a U.S. House seat in 2006.

Burris predicted the Hee campaign “can only help” Ige. Incumbents generally have a base of people who will stick with them, Burris said, and having two opponents effectively splits Ige’s opposition.

The candidate with the most votes will win the primary. It’s not necessary to get more than 50 percent of the vote to win.

A similar divided-opposition dynamic helped former Gov. George Ariyoshi win twice with less than a majority of the vote, Burris said. “Less than half of the people were happy with Ariyoshi, but they couldn’t all coalesce around one of the two opposition candidates.”

Both Hee and Hanabusa have reputations as “disrupters,” meaning outspoken and contentious figures with “high, sharp activist profiles at the Legislature,” Burris said. That contrasts with the more mild-­mannered and likable Ige.

Hee served in the power position of Senate Judiciary chairman, and cited as one of his key accomplishments that he wrote the bill that made same-sex marriage legal in Hawaii. Hee also authored the 2014 law that increased the minimum wage to its current level of $10.10 per hour.

Hee announced his plan to run for governor Tuesday in a post and video on Facebook, and an announcement emailed to media outlets.

In a two-minute video stressing his rural roots, Hee expressed concern that working people “barely can get by to make ends meet, and that’s simply not right. Government today has misplaced its priorities, while the cost of living has exponentially increased.”

Political insiders say Hee has made a deliberate effort to reach out to the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party in recent weeks, and also appears poised to capitalize on his opposition to the Honolulu rail project.

In his video announcement Tuesday, Hee cited mismanagement of the city’s rail project that allowed the cost of rail to increase from about $5 billion to nearly $10 billion. “That’s why I decided to run for governor, to stop the madness in spending your hard-earned money for projects like the rail that are out of control,” Hee said in his video recording.

Rumors have been circulating for some time that Hee would enter the race, and one widely circulated email alleged activists in the Ige campaign encouraged Hee to run as part of an effort to peel Native Hawaiian votes away from Hanabusa.

Hee said in an interview that the email “is the kind of unfortunate nonsense that arises in political contests.”

Hee recalled he received 81,000 votes in his 2014 run for lieutenant governor, which would have been enough to win the governor’s race in 2014 if he had been in a three-way race with Ige and former Gov. Neil Abercrombie.

“I’m not doing this to be a spoiler,” Hee said. “I don’t know anybody who ever ran for office to lose. … I was convinced by people who came and showed me numbers, and the numbers are the numbers. It’s the real poll.”