Going, Going ... With Midterm Wipeout, California Republican Party Drifts Closer to Irrelevance

By Mark Z. Barabak and Michael Finnegan, The Los Angeles Times

19 November 18

 

or a party in free fall the last two decades, California Republicans learned that it's possible to plunge even further.

The GOP not only lost every statewide office in the midterm election — again, in blowout fashion — but Democrats reestablished their supermajority in Sacramento, allowing them to legislate however they see fit.

After major defeats in Orange County and the Central Valley, two longtime strongholds, Republicans will have a significantly smaller footprint on Capitol Hill. (Democrats hold both Senate seats.) The GOP won’t even have enough lawmakers in California’s 53-member House delegation to field a nine-person softball team.

“It’s dead,” Mike Madrid, a former political director of the California Republican Party, said of the state GOP. “It exists in small regional pockets, where there are enough white, non-college-educated working-class communities for there to be a Republican Party. But that’s not much.”

Other states tilt lopsidedly in favor of one party or the other. But never before has a state with California’s huge populace and enormous import — socially, culturally, economically — been so dominated by a single political party. The implications will take years to fully comprehend.

Jim Brulte, chairman of the California GOP, professed not to worry. He said the party has legislative leaders “whose job it is to give voice to Republicans in the state capital.” Also, he went on, substantial numbers in the U.S. House and Senate, where the GOP holds the majority, will speak for Republicans in Washington as well.

The leader of House Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, hails from Bakersfield and enjoys a strong relationship with President Trump, which should help the state in its dealings with the administration. (If, as expected, San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi is elected speaker, she would also be well positioned to protect California’s interests.)

Still, many observers — not all of them dispirited Republicans — expressed concern about the effects of such thorough Democratic domination, both in terms of policy and, more broadly, faith in the state’s political system.

“A large part of the voting population doesn’t have a spokesman, didn’t have a candidate running for U.S. Senate, didn’t have a high-profile candidate really running for any of the constitutional offices, and now doesn’t have a strong voice in the legislative process,” said Mark Baldassare, head of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. “It’s never a good thing for people … to feel as though their voices aren’t being heard.”

Although a distinct minority of California’s registered voters — just 24% are Republican — that still amounts to more than 4.7 million residents who identify as members of the GOP. Millions more embrace the party’s values and beliefs, even if they choose not to formally join.

Al Derlighter is one of them.

An independent who lives in the Saugus area of Santa Clarita, he paused outside the Old Town Newhall public library shortly before election day to vent his frustration. A supporter of Trump and GOP Rep. Steve Knight, who ended up losing to Democrat Katie Hill, Derlighter said he used to be a Democrat but left the party when it drifted too leftward for his taste.

“I’m a prisoner in a blue state,” said the retired 57-year-old electrical mechanic supervisor. “Very underrepresented.”

But even with overwhelming control, Democratic uniformity doesn’t necessarily mean Democratic unanimity.

Conflict within the party is inevitable, pitting, for instance, coastal lawmakers against those from inland California, business-friendly Democrats against those advocating stiffer taxes and regulation, and lawmakers from affluent quarters against those representing more economically hard-pressed neighborhoods.

Political supremacy “doesn’t mean that everybody is in lockstep or singing kumbaya,” said Garry South, who spoke from firsthand experience, having been a strategist for former Gov. Gray Davis when he wrestled with fellow Democrats. “The basic nature of human beings is to compete and fight and have conflict and that doesn’t go away just because you have one-party control.”

Still, fratricidal feuding is not the same as a robust debate between parties, or the imperative to compromise with an empowered opposition.

“Degrees within a partisan tent isn’t quite like having another party with a contrasting philosophy,” said Roger Niello, a former GOP assemblyman from Sacramento who worked with Democrats to pass a 2009 budget-balancing tax hike under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “You need contrary views.”

If there is some solace for Republicans, it’s the notion that nothing lasts forever. Whether it’s overreach, complacency or internal division, single-party rule inevitably sows its own destructive seeds; eventually, the California GOP — or some entity promulgating its low-tax, limited-government philosophy — will claw its way back to power.

It can take time, as happened in Texas, where decades of Democratic hegemony gave way to decades of Republican rule, which, beginning in cities and now spreading to the suburbs, is showing signs of weakening. Or it can happen all at once, the way Schwarzenegger seized power from Davis in a lightning-strike recall catalyzed by anger over taxes and rolling electrical brownouts.

“There’s a point where there’s going to be pushback,” said Don Sipple, a media strategist who helped elect Schwarzenegger as well as his successor, Gov. Jerry Brown. “It may take the form of a center-right party, whether it’s Republican or something else. But the pendulum swings both ways.”

In the meantime, Republicans are casting about for solutions, in a familiar pattern of finger-pointing and recrimination.

San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer jokes about the party’s sorrowful state: “Folks can go to the San Diego Zoo to see the endangered pandas and then visit San Diego City Hall to see one of the last California Republicans.”

Turning serious, he suggested that the way forward for the state GOP is an utter transformation into a party focused on practicality and problem-solving, shedding its anti-immigrant rhetoric, recognizing climate change as a serious threat and defining the Republican Party as something other than a rubber stamp for Trump.

“That’s the style of leadership we’ve done here in San Diego, and it works,” Faulconer said in an interview.

But within just a few hours, Travis Allen, a Huntington Beach assemblyman, announced his candidacy for state Republican Party chairman, on a stay-the-course platform firmly rooted in the moment, saying California “deserves a strong Republican Party that supports our values, ideals and our Republican president.”

Democrats, for their part, have already begun eyeing the GOP’s few remaining California House seats, sensing opportunity for further gains in 2020.

How Voting Rights Fared in the Midterms

By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker

18 November 18

There is cause for hope, and not just in the results from Election Day.

ne of the unsung heroes of the civil-rights legislation of the nineteen-sixties is a Republican congressman from Ohio named Bill McCulloch. Representing a nearly all-white district north of Dayton, McCulloch reflected the values of what was then still justifiably called the party of Lincoln. McCulloch preferred the term “equal rights” to “civil rights” because, as he put it, “the Constitution doesn’t say that whites alone shall have our most basic rights, but that we all shall have them.” In that spirit, and in partnership with Senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, a fellow-Republican, McCulloch did as much as anyone—apart from President Lyndon Johnson and those involved in the movement itself—to create and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Todd Purdum notes in his book “An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” when McCulloch announced his retirement, in 1971, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sent him a handwritten note, saying, “I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.”

This year’s midterm campaign demonstrated just how thoroughly the Republican Party, under the leadership of President Trump, has repudiated this heritage. As usual, Trump himself set the tone, by tweeting, shortly before Election Day, “Law Enforcement has been strongly notified to watch closely for any ILLEGAL VOTING which may take place in Tuesday’s Election (or Early Voting). Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law.” It’s easy to trace the lineage of this threat to the Jim Crow era, when African-Americans were threatened with arrest and worse if they tried to register to vote. Many persisted in doing so anyway. Today, the methods employed may be less harsh, but the goal remains the same—to prevent certain Americans from exercising their rights.

The Voting Rights Act was designed to redress intimidation and discrimination, but since the Supreme Court effectively neutered the law, in the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans have embraced voter suppression with enthusiasm. In nearly every state where the G.O.P. has controlled the governorship and the legislature, it has tried to limit access to voting, most onerously by establishing such unnecessary requirements as having to produce a photo I.D. in order to register. (In a new twist this year, Native Americans in North Dakota were required to show a street address, which many people in that rural state do not have.) The stated justification for these actions has been to thwart incidents of voter fraud, such as non-citizens attempting to cast ballots, which is a nearly nonexistent problem. Trump and other Republicans turned voter fraud into a sort of all-purpose epithet, which they have also used to make spurious claims about the legitimate counting and recounting of votes in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona.

Nonetheless, there were several important victories for voting rights this year. Florida voted overwhelmingly to rid the state of a vestige of its Jim Crow days—a law that forbade former felons from voting—and thus to reënfranchise 1.4 million citizens. In Kansas, Kris Kobach, the secretary of state, who was the architect of many of the worst voter-suppression schemes in the past decade, was defeated in the governor’s race. North Carolina, which became a graveyard for voting rights after the Shelby County case, added a Democrat to the state supreme court, who will help protect the right to vote from the Republican-dominated legislature. And, in New York, Democrats won a majority in the state senate, where, together with Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic majority in the assembly, they have promised to reform the state’s appallingly restrictive rules on early and absentee voting.

Even the good news from the election comes with a caveat, however. According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, Democrats won the over-all popular vote in the four hundred and thirty-five races for the House of Representatives by about nine per cent, but they managed to capture only a relatively narrow majority of seats. This is because the district lines are so egregiously gerrymandered, especially in states fully controlled by Republicans. Victories across the country will likely give Democrats a seat at the table when the lines are redrawn after the 2020 census, but gerrymandering deserves less a level playing field than a burial. Unfortunately, the only institution that could end the partisan practice, the Supreme Court, ducked its best chance to intervene when, earlier this year, it declined to upset the Republican redistricting of Wisconsin. Now, with the replacement of Anthony Kennedy by Brett Kavanaugh, it appears virtually certain that the Justices will not take up the issue in a productive way. And since Trump has effectively outsourced his judicial appointments to the Federalist Society, the incubator of far-right thinking on the law, recourse to the federal courts on voting rights may be a fading notion.

Still, November brought some cause for optimism, and not only in the results from the first Tuesday. Just before the Federalist Society’s annual conference, a dozen prominent members, led by George T. Conway III, the husband of the White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, announced that they are forming a group called Checks and Balances, which will seek to encourage conservatives to speak out whenever the President violates constitutional principles. “We believe in the rule of law,” they wrote. “We believe in the Constitution.” Coming from conservatives in the Trump era, such modest statements sound almost revolutionary. But this flicker of conscience offers the hope that more Republicans will try to reclaim the mantle of their predecessors.

It is clear, at least, that the new crop of legislators—many of them women, many of them people of color, and all of them elected thanks to the engagement and the power of women voters—will do what they can to protect the right to vote. There’s also a lot of creative thinking going on about how to make elections fairer, with ideas like multiple-member districts and ranked-choice voting, which went into effect in Maine this year, getting serious consideration. As civil-rights heroes have known since the country’s founding, in a democracy all rights begin with the right to vote. Or, as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “The right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights.” He started out as a Republican, too.