There Are A Few Republicans Left In California

Is this why the GOP lost?

The Republicans were shocked when the final vote count in CA-21, dealt them a 7th lost seat. No one really expected TJ Cox to beat David Valadao. The final forecast from FiveThirtyEight gave Valadao a 79% chance at reelection. The last public poll showed Valadao beating Cox 50-39%. Instead, the anti-red wave did Valadao in. His massive loss in Kern county wasn’t balanced out by wins in Fresno, Kings and Tulare counties and the latest total has Cox ahead by around 600 votes-- 50.3% to 49.7%. Two years ago Valadao beat Emilio Huerta-- son of the legendary Dolores Huerta-- 75,126 (56.7%) to 57,282 (43.3%). It was a presidential election and 132,408 people showed to vote. Last month just 112,911 voters turned out. In the last midterm Valadao had beaten Amanda Renteria 45,907 (57.8%) to 33,470 (42.2%) with 79,377 people voting. Valadao had nothing to worry about, although Hillary had beaten Trump there 55.2% to 39.7%. Valadao spent $2,415,159 to Cox’s $2,245,310. The DCCC didn’t engage, although Pelosi’s SuperPAC spent $276,734 on Cox’s behalf. The NRCC spent $419,693.

Yesterday, Elena Schneider, writing for Politico, reportered that the Republicans were surprised by more than Valadao’s loss. They expected Mimi Walters, Dana Rohrabacher and Steve Knight to all hang on. Katie Porter beat Walters 51.9-48.1%; Rohrabacher lost to Harley Rounder 53.5-46.5% and Katie Hill beat Knight 54.2-45.8%. All of them did better than Hillary had in the districts.

“We never had any indication, any poll, that we’d see anything close to the margin we got,” said Matt Rexroad, a Republican consultant who worked on Steve Knight’s race.

It was one of several nasty midterm shocks for California Republicans: Internal polling described to Politico showed Knight and Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Mimi Walters-- all of whom lost-- narrowly leading their Democratic opponents at the end of the campaign. Not only did the GOP get crushed in California, the party also got taken by surprise by the intensity of the backlash in the nation’s largest state, where Republicans projected confidence nearly all year before watching Democrats flip a whopping six House districts-- and possibly a seventh.

The nightmare results were the end result of a toxic brew of overconfidence and presidential unpopularity, as some Republicans failed to recognize and reckon with the unprecedented negative reaction to President Donald Trump in districts from Orange County to California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley.

Republicans’ shock has only deepened weeks after Election Day, as absentee and provisional ballots boosted Democrat TJ Cox ahead of Rep. David Valadao, a moderate Central Valley Republican who had previously won at least 57 percent of the vote in good and bad years for the GOP, despite the fact that his party’s presidential candidates regularly lose his district by double digits… Valadao’s struggles symbolize the depth of the Democratic wave, which could balloon to as big as a 40-seat House gain behind backlash to President Donald Trump.

Republicans projected confidence in California earlier this year-- Walters told Fox News in June that Nancy Pelosi had “overplayed her hand” in the state, while National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Steve Stivers told the Los Angeles Times that Walters didn’t want or need his committee’s help.

But Democrats saw the opportunity from the beginning, even in Valadao’s district. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee persuaded Cox to run against Valadao instead of campaigning in a district seen as more competitive-- part of a broader, successful effort to back winners in the state’s all-party primaries and avoid getting “locked out” of battleground districts by the top-two primary system. The DCCC followed up in the fall by pumping TV ad money into Cox’s campaign while most outside groups left the district alone.

Now, while Republicans agree they’ve witnessed a wipeout-- Republican National Committeeman Shawn Steel called the California election results “a nuclear political holocaust for Republicans”-- they can’t agree why.

Evidence-free suggestions of fraud have multiplied, while other Republicans have focused on unprecedented Democratic campaign spending.

Rohrabacher told the San Francisco Chronicle that he “didn’t lose this vote, my district was purchased,” after Michael Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC sank $4.4 million into his district, along with a smattering of other Democratic groups. Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House GOP leadership, put in $4 million to shore up Rohrabacher, but he was already being vastly outspent.

“What we didn’t anticipate was the money tidal wave, and it’s pretty clear to me that the billionaires run the Democratic Party,” said Steel, who also wrote a Washington Examiner op-ed absolving Trump of responsibility for the losses.

But Valadao outraised and outspent his opponent. The more powerful factor was the state’s rejection of Republicans writ large, largely driven by distaste for President Donald Trump.

“If you were running for dogcatcher in Orange County-- or in a lot of places in California-- and you had an ‘R’ next to your name on the ballot, you lost,” said Andrew Acosta, a Democratic consultant in the state. “It was Trump. Trump created this. There wasn’t much Republicans could do to stop it.”

It could be decades before state Republicans’ chances recover, some in the party say.

“This is the death of the Republican Party” in California, said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant in the state. “There’s no coming back from this for at least a generation, if not more.”

Still other Republicans pointed fingers at the campaigns themselves, arguing that none of the congressional campaigns “were any different than any other generic Republican, so that was the fundamental problem,” said John Thomas, a GOP consultant based in California. “Trump was underwater in all the other seats, except in Dana’s, so that was an easy argument for Democrats to make, vote out the generic Republicans.”

Rexroad, who worked on Knight’s campaign, said he's still grappling with what happened, weighing whether the results hinged on tactics or on atmospherics.

"Honestly, I don't know what we could've done," he said. "I'm going to spend a lot of my time over the holidays thinking about it."

California offers that Democrats some great targets for 2020: Duncan Hunter, Doug LaMalfa, Tom McClintock, Devin Nunes, Paul Cook, Ken Calvert...