George Skelton has a piece in the Los Angeles Times on the collapse of the Republican Party in California. The numbers are pretty startling. Just 22% of voters under thirty, and 18% of Latinos are registered as Republicans. The Democrats control all the statewide offices and they achieved supermajority status in the legislature after the November elections (although vacancies have since brought them temporarily below a supermajority in the Senate). The California Business Roundtable has done some extensive polling of the state electorate, and they’ve come to the conclusion that there is no longer any benefit to be gained by giving money to the Republicans.
The white GOP core is aging, [Paul] Mitchell [vice president of Political Data] notes, significantly reducing the party’s share of the California electorate. “Republican voters are going out the back door,” he says. “And coming in the front door are Latinos and youth — voters who are much more Democrat.”
The business community, always focused on the bottom line, increasingly sees moderate Democrats as the best investment for campaign dollars. The GOP just hasn’t been producing.
“We’re going to be redoubling our effort to help elect Democrats who understand business,” says Rob Lapsley, president of the Business Roundtable.
It’s nice that the business community has concluded that the California GOP is as useless as tits on a bull, but the power of money never really goes away. It just finds new partners.
This worries me considerably. I’ve felt one of four things can happen to the Republican Party. The Tea Party breaks of to a third party, the establishment forms a third party, the establishment regains control, or the establishment shifts to the Dems. The last scares me as their money will allow them to dominate the Dem Party, leaving us with a lunatic right Tea Party Republican Party and a center right Democratic Party with no party of the left. CA may be a bellweather for my feared outcome.
If say by initiative, you could make the laws more friendly to 3rd parties, if the GOP becomes a useless rump could a more leftist third party emerge?
leaving us with a lunatic right Tea Party Republican Party and a center right Democratic Party with no party of the left.
Sorry but I don’t think that’s a future possibility – I think that describes the situation today, nationally.
But I agree that this probably is a bellwether for the future. A lot of people won’t get this because they think of CA as a liberal state, so they think “OF COURSE the GOP is out of power. But the CA-as-liberal-state meme is a very recent change, politically-speaking. In the 28 years from 1982 to 2010 the GOP held the governorship for 23 years – which by the way explains a lot of the resulting economic problems. CA voters consistently preferred GOP governors, and the one Democrat who did win was recalled. In addition, CA was not long ago a reliable GOP state – they voted for the GOP presidential candidate in 9 of 10 elections through 1988 (the lone exception was Goldwater) and has a long history of prominent GOP politicians, including Nixon and Reagan.
The collapse of the GOP in CA is thus a relatively recent trend, and if you look back on the causes you see a lot of foreshadowing of what has happened nationally. Yes, you can link the trend in part to immigration and the fact that whites are now a plurality, not a majority, in the state. But that’s not the whole story. CA began to turn away from GOP nationally in the early 1990s – simultaneous with the rise of hate radio and the Gingrich movement. CA continued to elect GOP politicians locally for a while, but by the latter 1990s it was apparent that the GOP primary voters were foreshadowing the tea party trend and selecting the more extreme candidates and thus making it hard to win state-wide races. One exception – the nomination of moderate GOP rep Tom Campbell to go against Feinstein in 2000 – essentially proved the rule. Once Campbell won (IIRC it was because the extreme candidates split the vote) the GOP essentially refused to promote or fund his candidacy and he got creamed in the general.
By 2003 the only way the GOP could win a statewide race was the weird recall election with celebrity Schwartzengroper – who had no track record of political statements. With that special election they were able to avoid the problems with most-extreme-person-wins primary.
The GOP tried to solve this by creating the strange no-party primary where the top two candidates are selected, which they got passed through a referendum (I know it wasn’t officially a GOP referendum, but that was the motivation). But ironically that strategy failed – in theory they hoped to run one establishment-selected GOP candidate against a split field – in practice this has given more seats to Democrats.
The problem, of course, is that the resulting CA democratic party is, as noted above, center-right, because that’s where the money goes. I supposed that’s not horrible – after the last few decades we could probably be happy with government by Eisenhower Republicans.
but the system does invite third parties to the table in primaries.
Shouldn’t that be teats on a bull?
those, too.
So now they will suborn only Democrats?
“We’re going to be redoubling our effort to help elect Democrats who understand business,” says Rob Lapsley, president of the Business Roundtable.
I don’t think he means DFH’s. And we understand business very damn well. I wonder if Mr. Lapsley does.
yeah, we’ve had all we can take of “Democrats who understand business”.
Boo mentioned the CA legislature: the reason we don’t have a Dem supermajority in the the CA Senate any more is that a “business Democrat” is leaving to take a job as an oil company lobbyist.
There’s no need to speculate. We’re basically talking about Gavin Newsom here. He’s just biding his time until Jerry Brown is finished being governor.