Is A Modoc County Strategy The Republican Party's Path To Winning Back California?

Republicans have been having a rough time in California ever since the party decided it would be smart policy to demonize Hispanic voters, in the same way Trump does today. 1994's explicitly anti-immigrant Proposition 187 destroyed the GOP as a viable party with Hispanics and to some extent with Asians. Almost a quarter century has passed since then and it's just gotten worse and worse for the Republicans in the most populated state in the country.

This past spring statewide registration figures horrified GOP officials. What they saw is a disintegrating party that is now in third place... and dropping rapidly:

• Democrats- 8.4 million (44.6%)
• No Party Preference- 4,844,803 (25.5%)
• Republicans- 4,771,984 (25.1%)

So how did that play out at the polls last month? Democrats won every single statewide office. Republicans in the state's congressional district dropped in half, from 14 to 7 and with the likelihood that 2020 will see the number decrease further, possibly to just 2 or 3-- out of 53! With Trump spouting his racist bullshit, it looks more than likely that Doug LaMalfa, Tom McClintock, Devin Nunes and Duncan Hunter will have very little chance to be reelected. Democrats gained 4 seats in the state Assembly which already had a Democratic supermajority and 3 in the state Senate, enough so that it too now has a Democratic supermajority. The U.S. Senate race didn't even include a Republican-- just two Democrats! And the gubernatorial race was a blowout. A profoundly flawed and mediocre Democratic candidate, Gavin Newsom, beat Republican John Cox 7,686,476 (61.9%) to 4,722,299 (38.1%).

On Friday the outgoing state Republican Party chairman, conservative former state Sen. Jim Brulte, warned national Republicans to look closely at what has happened to the California Republican Party before they continue their reflexively anti-Hispanic policies. His point was that the GOP has "not yet been able to figure out how to effectively communicate and get significant numbers of votes from non-whites," a very rapidly growing segment of the voting population.

Despite trend lines that show the “the entire country will be majority minority by 2044," he said, the GOP has failed to confront the reality of those changes-- or recognize the possibility that the recent "blue tsunami" midterm election in California was a harbinger of what lies ahead for the national party.

Brulte said he‘s repeatedly warned that the party’s overwhelmingly white and male candidates must “figure out how we get votes from people who don’t look like you."

But he said those warnings about the changing political and ethnic landscape have gone unheeded.

“And that’s why I have said that I believe California is the canary in the coal mine-- not an outlier," for the GOP in the coming cycles, he told Politico.

...Brulte, who said in 2013 it would take a minimum of six years to rebuild the dilapidated state party, has taken heat within the GOP for speaking out about the dangers it faces.

But veteran Democratic strategist Darry Sragow, who has advised the California Democratic Assembly and publishes the non-partisan California Target Book, predicts that if Brulte’s tough love advice is ignored again in 2020, “the Republican Party is destined to slide into the ocean.”

Despite Brulte's stark assessment of the GOP's future, three potential candidates are vying to replace him as chair when his term ends next February-- and all of them insist the real problems lie somewhere other than in its message to the changing ethnic electorate.

Steve Frank, a conservative Republican activist and former party official, said that the GOP has “unilaterally disarmed itself," by failing miserably in outreach to church-going conservatives and other GOP voters-- and by standing by helplessly while laws that have advantaged Democrats, including the state’s top-two primary, act as “illegal voter suppression” against Republicans in California.

Former Assemblyman Travis Allen, a favorite of the party’s far right conservative wing-- who failed to get the GOP gubernatorial nomination last year-- says he strongly rejects Brulte’s suggestion that demographics are at fault for the party’s 2018 battering.

“This is the same chatter we’ve heard form the GOP establishment for the past 20 years. The concept that Republicans need to look and sound more like Democrats to be elected in California is exactly what got us into this mess," said Allen. “It’s about time for the Republicans in California to stand up for our values, our ideals-- and yes, even support our GOP president.”

David Hadley, a former assemblyman who is viewed as the most centrist of the GOP chair candidates, told Politico said that a key problem for the Republican Party in the last election is that “the circular firing squad is out in force," and that Republicans must stop “blaming other Republicans."

“We need to start with the central matter at hand: the Democratic Party, and the special interests that control it, are the mightiest political machine in the history of American politics," he said.

In California, as in the national party, Republicans continue to dismiss the stark evidence of growing ethnic voter clout in hopes of returning to “an America that was the way it used to be," Sragow said. “They’re rubbing the rabbits’ foot and think they’re going to take back the homeland."

I spoke to a Democratic Party higher up who told me everyone she knows has their fingers crossed that Travis Allen wins since "he's in such a state of denial that there won't even be a viable Republican Party left after his first term in office... He thinks celebrating Donald Trump is going to help win back the state? The only counties with sizable populations they're still competitive in are Riverside, Fresno and Kern and his ideas will deliver all three to the Democrats." She told me it doesn't matter if Republicans continue winning massive victories in places like Modoc County since fewer people vote there than in most named L.A. or San Diego neighborhoods. [Around 3,500 people voted in Modoc County this year, 1,600 in Sierra County, 6,000 in Colusa, 5,000 in Trinity and 7,000 in Inyo, all counties where Cox posted big percentages against Newsom-- and all utterly irrelevant.]

Cox's 76.2% of the Modoc vote yielded him 2,628 votes, Newsom's 86.4% of the vote in San Francisco borough him 312,181 votes, his 71.9% in L.A. County gave him 2,114,699 votes, and his 80.6% in Alameda County brought in 462,268 votes. Travis Allen seems eager to just cede those counties to Democrats and work to move Modoc from 76.2% to 80%. Go for it!