How Republicans lost Orange County

But when Election Day arrived, Lopez couldn’t bring himself to vote for Donald Trump. “He just offends us too deep,” Lopez told me in January 2018, about how he and many of his fellow Latinos felt toward Trump.

Lopez, who emigrated from Mexico to the United States 30 years ago, is a builder and contractor who owns and manages several businesses in and around Orange County, Calif.

He was exasperated by Trump’s pledge to build a wall on America’s southern border. But what offended him most was Trump’s denigration of immigrants, particularly his campaign-launching claim that most Mexicans crossing illegally into America were “rapists” and drug dealers.

“I thought, ‘My son is 13 years old. I have to do a lot of explaining to him,’” Lopez said. “We are not all rapists and drug dealers. I have to explain to my young son not to be ashamed of who we are.”

Lopez and his son cried during that conversation and again on election night. “It was an emotional night,” he recalled. Still, Lopez held out hope that Trump would take a page from Reagan by enacting an immigration amnesty. “It’s too soon to hate him,” Lopez said he counseled his fellow Latinos as Trump took office.

Lopez highlights the dilemma facing Republicans in Orange County and other parts of America’s rapidly diversifying suburbs. Should the party double down on Trumpism at the risk of alienating minority voters, or should it try to distance itself from Trump while emphasizing conservative values and policies that many of those voters support?

To appreciate the political changes in Orange County over the last two election cycles, one must understand the demographic shift of the past two generations.

To do so, I drove to Little Saigon in Westminster and adjacent Garden Grove, where nearly half of residents are Asian American. Strolling through the Asian Garden Mall one weekday evening, I was the only non-Asian face I saw, aside from a black security officer.

Then I drove a few miles east to Santa Ana, the county seat, where more than 90% of residents are nonwhite and the street signs are written in both English and Spanish. To walk down Calle Cuatro, or Fourth Street, is to be transported to another part of the world. The street is lined with Latino jewelers, tax preparers, stands selling churritos, and more than a dozen bridal and quinceañera shops.

Few of the people with whom I tried to strike up conversations spoke English. A storefront display featured a box set of “Inglés sin Barreras,” or “English without Barriers,” videos to help Spanish-speakers learn English. I asked the store owner if the videos were selling well. He said they were not, which wasn’t surprising. Learning English is not necessary in a place where the law requires that city council meetings be simultaneously translated into Spanish. Even the police officer who was writing me a parking ticket as I returned to my car initially addressed me in Spanish.

Later, driving down coastal Interstate 5 from Irvine to San Clemente, I counted at least 16 AM stations on my car radio dial that featured non-English programming.

Today’s Orange County is not the Orange County of Richard Nixon, a bastion of the John Birch Society. It is not the lily-white Orange County that twice gave Reagan 70% of its votes for president. And it’s not the bleach-blond Orange County of television shows such as “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” “The O.C.,” and “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.”

Its population has more than doubled in the last 50 years, from 1.4 million people to nearly 3.2 million people, making it more populous than 21 states. In 1970, whites made up 86% of the county’s population; now they make up just 40%, meaning that over 90% of population growth in the last half-century has been nonwhite. That trend will continue. Nonwhites make up three in four Orange County public school students.

Orange County is also younger and more highly educated than it once was. Much of its middle class has been driven away by California’s high cost of living.

There are still plenty of conservative corners of this 34-city county, in moneyed places such as Newport Beach and San Clemente, or in Yorba Linda, Nixon’s birthplace, where American flags are abundant and nary a “Hate Has No Home Here” yard sign can be found.

Republicans continue to win at the local level. In March, the older, whiter voters who turn out in special elections propelled Irvine Mayor Don Wagner to victory for a seat on the Orange County Board of Supervisors. “The Orange County comeback starts now,” Fred Whitaker, the Republican Party’s county chairman, optimistically declared afterward.

But the trend is clear. As Orange County has become more diverse, Republican dominance has evaporated, and Trump has accelerated the trend.

In 2016, he became the first Republican presidential nominee in 80 years to lose Orange County. Last November, Democrats swept all seven U.S. House seats in Orange County, including four that had been held by Republicans. California Gov. Gavin Newsom became the first Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 40 years to win the county.

Orange County Democrats used to kid that they could hold local club meetings in a telephone booth. These days, new clubs are popping up everywhere. The mood was self-congratulatory one evening at an Aliso Niguel Democratic Club meeting, which was held not in a phone booth but inside something nearly as obsolete, a Presbyterian church.

After the offering plates had been deployed to collect club dues and some business conducted, I spoke with Ada Briceño, chairwoman of the Orange County Democratic Party. “I’m sitting in churches with hundreds of people in them every night,” she said, explaining that Democratic voter registration in the county grew 40% since 2016, bringing them nearly on par with Republican voter registration numbers.

In a recent op-ed for the Orange County Register, Briceño wrote the Democrats’ 2018 success was “just the beginning.” She told me she was confident Democrats could protect the party’s seven congressional seats and that their new focus was on winning down-ballot elections in 2020. “I’m in heaven to see tons of people steering together in the same direction,” she said.

Yet some Democratic voters I spoke with worry their leaders are steering the party in a direction that will cost them seats in 2020. “I’m very concerned that ill-informed people will be easily influenced by articulate people like AOC and Bernie,” said Bob Bruce, a retired engineer I met at a Laguna Beach Starbucks. “For me, there’s progressive, and there’s socialist. I’m not a socialist.”

Bruce is particularly concerned about freshman Rep. Katie Porter, an Elizabeth Warren acolyte for whom he has volunteered. He worries she may be too liberal for her district, California’s 45th, which before Porter had never been represented by a Democrat.

Orange County Republicans mostly blame their recent troubles on an unprecedented infusion of money into the 2018 races and the Democrats’ use of ballot harvesting. Ballot harvesting allows activists to collect sealed absentee or mail-in ballots on behalf of voters who failed to send them in time. Most states where ballot harvesting is legal allow only family members or caregivers to harvest ballots. But California changed its rules ahead of the 2018 election to allow anyone to collect and submit the ballots. Huge numbers of last-minute ballot submissions delayed election results in several Orange County congressional races. All of them showed the Republican candidate ahead on election night, but every Democrat went on to win once the ballots were counted.

Mission Viejo’s Republican Mayor Greg Raths doesn’t believe ballot harvesting was much of a factor. “It’s bullshit,” he told me one evening at a Young Republicans mixer at a Del Frisco’s restaurant in Irvine. “We lost. Suck it up. I don’t like harvesting, but suck it up.”

“We got a problem here in Orange County,” Raths, who has since declared his candidacy for Porter’s seat, said. “Instead of bitching and crying [about ballot harvesting], go do it yourself. It’s legal.”

Some California Republicans believe the party hasn’t done enough to reach out to immigrants and minorities. “The local party has dropped the ball with immigrant communities,” Tom Tait, a former two-term Republican mayor of Anaheim, told a reporter after the 2018 elections.

Others pin the blame on Trump specifically. Young Kim, a South Korean immigrant and the first Korean American Republican woman to become a state legislator in California, said she would have won her race for California’s 39th Congressional District if Trump had not engaged in “so much anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

The waves of Asian immigrants who settled in California in the 1970s and ’80s identified strongly with the Republican Party, in part because of the party’s firm stance against communism. George H.W. Bush won an estimated 55% of Asian American voters in the 1992 presidential election. But while some Asian Americans have been turned off by the Democratic Party’s support for socialistic policies that remind them of those of regimes they fled, for the most part they have slowly moved toward the Democratic Party. Depending on the survey, Trump won between 18% and 27% of Asian American votes in 2016.

“What we are seeing today is a generational divide,” said Linda Trinh Vo, who teaches Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine. “The younger generation is more supportive of the Democratic Party.” There are more than 200,000 Vietnamese Americans in Orange County, and many have been angered by the Trump administration’s order to deport 7,000 Vietnamese refugees who committed crimes after arriving in the U.S.

In a possible sign that some California Republicans want to chart a path away from Trump, delegates to the state convention in February elected Jessica Patterson to lead their party. The 38-year-old Latina was chosen over Travis Allen, a loud defender of Trump.

Not everyone was pleased. Raths said he received blowback when he posted a congratulatory message to Patterson on his Facebook page. “Man, I got blasted,” he said. “‘She’s part of the establishment! She’s not the right person!’ A lot of the grassroots were Travis Allen fans.”

The problem for Orange County Republicans is that Trump’s hardline immigration stance and combative rhetoric don’t just hurt him with immigrants and ethnic minorities. They also alienate white voters who care about them.

Bruce, the retired engineer, for instance, is a former Republican who voted for both Reagan and H.W. Bush for president. But he said his political views transformed after he moved to Orange County and began to appreciate the diversity he didn’t encounter growing up in segregated Chicago. “On my block, there’s an Indian family, an Asian, a guy from the South, a couple of Jewish families. If you’d said 25 years ago that I was going to live here, I’d say you were crazy. And I love it. I love it. It’s changed my own views, my politics. I’ve changed my outlook.”

I heard similar things from other Orange County residents. At a Laguna Niguel coffee shop, Lacey, a 35-year-old nurse, told me it was Orange County’s mix of cultures that brought her back after living in Colorado for several years. Lacey voted for Trump in 2016 mainly because she couldn’t stand the thought of Clinton becoming America’s first female president. But she thinks that by framing immigration as a moral issue instead of an economic one, Trump has revealed himself to be “a racist bigot.”

Lacey said she will not be supporting Trump again in 2020.

Republicans understand they must reach out to these voters. But they don’t seem to know how.

On a spring morning in Fullerton, a group of 50 or so mostly retired, white, Republican women filled the back of a buffet restaurant to listen to two millennial, Latina guest speakers point the way. “I’ve been waiting all month for this,” a woman said as she hustled past me looking for a chair in the packed room.

First up was Jazmina Saavedra. A handout with her biography touted her work history as a purveyor of anti-aging products, a solar energy entrepreneur, and a 2018 U.S. Senate candidate. “Every time I get invited to a Republican club, I just see white people,” Saavedra began. “I’m sorry.”

That comment was met with silence in the room, but Saavedra recovered with lines such as, “I never call this country my second country. This is my first country”; “Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet”; and “The wall is a message of love to the American people.”

At this last line, I turned to an 85-year-old woman sitting next to me named Claudia and asked for her thoughts on why the county had turned blue. “The Latinos,” she said.

“Can they be won over?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is it worth trying?”

“I hope it is. I guess we’ll see.”

Next up was Elsa Adeguer of Latinos 4 Trump — not to be confused with Latinos for Trump — who delivered a testimonial about fleeing violence in Latin America to come to the U.S. She explained that she was drawn to Trump because, like her, he’d once supported abortion but is now against it.

Both women elicited the most applause when they assured their audience they had done things “the right way” by entering the U.S. legally.

A few days later, I drove to the City National Grove of Anaheim, where the Orange County Republicans had set up a registration tent outside an arena hosting a series of naturalization ceremonies, trying to attract more who had done things the right way.

“Come with patriotism and enthusiasm as we welcome and register our new members at our Republican Booth,” an online invitation said.

But the welcoming was done from afar, as the half-dozen or so Republican volunteers had been penned off in a “free speech zone” on the opposite side of the arena from where the new citizens were in line. One of the activists said she’s often there all day and is lucky to register 10 people. During my hour there, just one person registered.

With the dearth of registrants, the activists were more than happy to chat with me, so long as I promised not to print their names. I asked them what Orange County Republicans need to do to win over immigrants.

“We need to convince people we don’t have horns on our head,” one woman said.

“We need to emphasize faith,” said a second. “And no open borders.”

“I would not take 2018 as gospel that everything has changed,” the first added.

I asked them whether Trump makes their job harder.

“No! In fact, he emboldens me!” the second woman said.

“We all love Trump. We’re glad he tweets. But some in the Republican Party think we should be more like Democrats,” said the first. She mentioned Patterson, the new California GOP chairwoman, whose name elicited sighs and head shakes from several of the volunteers.

“We don’t want to be politically correct,” said the second. “We have to get people to look at policy instead of personality, facts instead of feelings.”

But personality and feelings matter. It was Trump’s no-holds-barred personality that attracted many Americans who felt forgotten by politically correct, establishment politicians. But that same personality drove away the likes of Lopez, Bruce, and eventually Lacey, the types of voters Republicans will need to win consistently again in Orange County and places like it.

When I visited Lopez again in March, I asked him to assess Trump’s performance thus far. He gave Trump a 5 out of 10, mainly for presiding over a strong economy and enacting tax and healthcare reforms that have benefited Lopez’s businesses and employees.

He reiterated that he supports more of Trump’s agenda than he opposes and that he hopes Trump will set aside his obsession with building a border wall and grant illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship. “He’s the only guy who can do it at this point,” he said. “And he’s crazy enough that it just might happen.”

If it does, Lopez thinks Republicans will begin to win majorities of Latinos, whose religiosity, social conservatism, and support for free enterprise are a natural fit for the party. Short of that unlikely scenario, Lopez said he will be voting for the Democratic nominee next November.

I asked him whether he still counsels his fellow Latinos that it’s too soon to hate Trump.

“Yes, the only thing that gives us reason to hate him is what he said about my race,” he answered. Then Lopez paused and added, “To really hate him, that would make me part of the extremism that he created.”

Daniel Allott is the author of Into Trump’s America and formerly the deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner.