California Dream?

This dramatic electoral advantage at the national level parallels statewide trends. The last Republican candidate to win California statewide was Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. The State Legislature, meanwhile, contains insurmountable Democratic majorities in both chambers. The San Andreas Fault may divide California’s plates, but it also symbolically marks the boundaries between the conservative-leaning rural east and the liberal-leaning coastal west. The boundaries are sliding at a faster pace, restricting Republicans’ political territory. The party is in a position where California’s 33rd Governor, Ronald Reagan, has become a historical relic to the state’s younger and ethnically diverse electorate.

The Republican party’s decline in California could imperil its grip on the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. Democrats require at least 24 seats to regain the majority that they lost in 2010. California could offer the winning formula for that difficult pursuit. Out of the state’s 53 Congressional districts, Republicans currently hold 14 seats. Compare this to 1996, when Republicans were just two districts shy of holding the majority in California. The bulk of today’s districts are geographically bound in the state’s eastern half. Clinton carried 50 percent of the Republican-held districts in 2016.

Democrats hope to unseat Republicans like Darrell Issa, the former House Oversight Committee chair who advocated various investigations into the Obama administration. In 2016, Issa retained his seat by just over 1,600 votes, portending future challenges in a district stretching from southern Orange County to northern San Diego. Issa’s Southern Californian colleagues, from Mimi Walters and Ed Royce to Dana Rohrabacher, are also confronting precarious electoral situations. Trump performed miserably in their districts, which have experienced ongoing demographic change and increasing levels of affluence. The party’s performance in these districts reflects decades of transitioning political preferences.

Ethan Rarick, Director of the Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service at UC-Berkeley, attributes Republicans’ problems to two factors. “It’s the national Republican brand that is unpopular in California,” said Rarick, who noted that the party no longer possesses the ideological diversity that existed fifty years before. In addition to California voters’ rejection of Republican positions, Rarick believes that the state’s changing demographics is difficult for the party to overcome. “Over the past 20 to 25 years, California has become more ethnically diverse,” he noted. This diversity has proven advantageous for Democrats, and Rarick observed that many affluent white voters are also finding refuge in the party.

The Proposition 187 Saga

The Republican party’s diminishing power in California is all the more striking when considering its past position of strength. After all, the state produced Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, two of the 20^th century’s most consequential Republican presidents. Conventional wisdom holds that the party’s demise began in 1994 with Proposition 187, a crackdown on illegal immigration that California’s voters supported by a substantial majority.

Known as the “Save Our State” initiative, Proposition 187 is considered the cataclysmic ballot maneuver that permanently alienated California’s growing Latino voting base. The initiative, championed by Republican governor Pete Wilson, would have denied non-emergency public services to illegal immigrants in California. Proposition 187 would have also required state employees to report illegal immigrants to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to expedite deportation.

Wilson, who faced re-election in 1994, enthusiastically supported the initiative. He presented himself as tough on borders, criticized the federal government’s failure to address the issue, and argued that California’s fiscal future depended on an immigration crackdown. Wilson’s immigration stance injected adrenaline into his campaign, reversing his underdog standing in the polls into a resounding victory. Wilson’s campaign aired a television ad—infamously known as the “They Keep Coming” commercial—that showed grainy footage purporting to show illegal immigrants running across highway traffic. The commercial worked. Wilson ended up winning every region except the Bay Area.

At the time, William F. Buckley wrote a column warning Republicans that their support of Proposition 187 could manifest into long-term disaster. “To pass such a measure as 187 situates the GOP with a strain of xenophobia which will very quickly (California will be more than 50 percent Asian/Hispanic at the turn of the century whatever happens to illegals) evolve into anti-GOP resentments by the majority of Californians,” wrote Buckley. “That could lead to such electoral catastrophes as pursued many GOP candidates who were slow in boarding the civil-rights crusade.”

Buckley correctly predicted that Proposition 187 would not withstand the court system. His warning, however, proved fruitless in 1994, when Wilson simply needed to win re-election. California’s many regions, including the Central Valley, still had the right political and cultural makeup to deliver that victory. The former governor remains content with his decision. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times earlier this year, Wilson defended his position on Proposition 187. “It wasn’t scapegoating,” he said. “What it was doing was laying out the facts of what it was costing state taxpayers for federal failure.”

Historical Context

Wilson, now 84, politically matured during the twilight of the Republican party’s golden age in California. Republicans remained powerful when Wilson entered state politics, but the party had once enjoyed total dominance in Sacramento. As Rarick notes in his biography of former Governor Pat Brown, California Rising, the 1920s alone encapsulated these halcyon days. “In the six decades since the Civil War,” Rarick wrote, “only two Democrats had been elected president. Through the 1920s only a handful of Democrats were elected to the California legislature.” He noted that in one legislative session, the 80-member state assembly was comprised of 78 Republicans and only 2 Democrats.

This political ecosystem required Democrat Pat Brown to begin his political career as a Republican in San Francisco, then a reliably Republican city. Democratic registration surged during the New Deal era, but Republicans remained in power partially because of a controversial cross-file system that favored Republican candidates. The major newspapers leaned Republican and right-wing groups like the John Birch Society thrived. Democrats slowly clinched major statewide offices, but the state still produced Republican governors like Earl Warren, and Reagan, who stopped Brown’s attempt at a third term. Between 1952 and 1992, only one Democratic presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson, won California. Republicans also enjoyed a significant state-level resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s.

Wilson himself embodied the 20^th century experience in California politics. He grew up in the Midwest but migrated to California for law school. He became an advance man for Nixon in the 1962 gubernatorial campaign. After the former vice president’s loss, Wilson moved to San Diego to practice law and ascended the electoral hierarchy. He was elected to the Assembly in the 1960s, served as San Diego’s mayor in the 1970s, went to Washington as senator in the 1980s, and presided as governor in the 1990s.

Wilson’s gubernatorial victory in 1990 included the support of 46 percent of Latino voters. Throughout the 1980s, Republicans courted healthy levels of Latino support. In 1986, approximately 45 percent of Latino voters cast ballots for GOP governor George Deukmijean. Reagan also won strong Latino support in his presidential victories in California.

The story holds that this favorable voting trend for Republicans significantly changed after the Proposition 187 episode. But attributing the Republicans’ decline to a single event discounts decades of gaining Democratic strength in the state legislature, row offices, and local government. This theory also rejects the rapid growth of the Latino population. In 1980, the U.S. Census showed that approximately 4.5 million Latinos lived in California. This number ballooned to 7.7 million in 1990 and 10.9 million by 2000. These numbers also failed to account for the illegal immigrant population. Now that California is a majority-minority state, it’s easy to understand why the Democrats inevitably prevailed, considering that minority groups historically gravitate toward the party.

California Dreaming

Paradoxically, while California’s Republican party may face extirpation, but the state’s conservatives are experiencing a renaissance. Policy ideas that have thrived in the Trump administration, especially immigration restriction, germinated in California’s liberal coastal cities over the past twenty years. For instance, San Bernardino’s consideration to crackdown on immigration at the municipal level inspired Pennsylvania and New York communities to carry out such ordinances in the mid-2000s.

A decade later, the state produced leading figures in the right-leaning populist movement. Santa Monica native Stephen Miller devised Trump’s immigration platform. Michael Anton, a senior Trump administration official, wrote the “The Flight 93 Election,” a famous Claremont Review of Books essay that served as the intellectual Trump supporter’s 95 Theses to vote against Clinton. The late Andrew Breitbart developed Breitbart.com in Los Angeles, and the website in turn produced Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Steve Bannon, now Breitbart’s executive chairman, worked in Hollywood before his ascendance as leader of the populist movement. Bannon addressed the California Republican party’s convention in October. In his speech, Bannon told the crowd that “California is to Donald Trump as South Carolina was to Andrew Jackson.” He referred to Jackson’s Nullification Crisis with South Carolina in 1830s, when the state declared federal tariffs null and void. The incident factored into the South’s eventual succession from the Union. Bannon compared this historical event to California’s sanctuary cities. He called California a “sanctuary state,” warning that “if you do not roll this back—and I’m talking about people in this room—10 or 15 years from now the folks in Silicon Valley and the progressive left in this state are going to try to secede from the union.”

Convention attendees raucously received Bannon’s remarks. But the convention dispersed without any real future strategy. The problem for state Republicans rests at the national level. What resonates for Republicans in the Rust Belt or Deep South fails miserably in California. Compounding this crisis is that voters who flocked to Trump in 2016 are not necessarily loyal to the party or conservative cause. They turned instead to the president and an ideologically complex populist movement.

For the moment, Republicans arguably have the upper hand on the immigration issue. A half-century of stagnant, open-ended, and family-based immigration policies left a detrimental economic impact on many declining post-industrial regions. Voters responded accordingly in 2016. These regions cannot comprehend California’s support for open borders and zealous aversion to any form of immigration restriction. Their voters would balk at the absurdity of the University of California’s decision to list melting pot as a “microaggression.” But what works for Republicans in Rust Belt states risks political suicide in California. The state’s demographics are simply too dramatic and large for Republicans to overcome. Liberal positions prevail as the composition of California’s counties, and Congressional districts, continue to change.

For now, Republicans must hope that they retain or pick up enough House seats in regions that once trended Democratic. This could offset whatever Republican-held districts are lost in California. The House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, represents a district based in Bakersfield. But McCarthy could lose his post if Republicans cannot cauterize the party’s electoral disadvantage. Republican David Valadao’s Central Valley district alone is more than 75 percent Latino. Too many California voters are at odds with Republicans on tax reform, immigration, DACA, and the environment.

Democrats presently look to U.S. Senator Kamala Harris and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti the way Republicans once turned to Nixon and Reagan. The perpetual Governor Jerry Brown, meanwhile, casts himself as a leading moral opponent of Trump. The state’s Republicans, in turn, seek inspiration in San Diego’s Kevin Faulconer, the nation’s only big-city GOP mayor. Faulconer spoke of “New California Republicans” this year, but he dismissed interest in running for governor in 2018.

It appears that California’s Republican golden age is now a reference in history books unlikely to be revisited. What this means for the party, and conservatism itself, remains an unanswered question as the nation’s political realignment continues. In a cruel twist of irony, what has vanquished Republicans in California also reinvigorated the party in other parts of the country. In next year’s mid-term elections, the Republicans’ accumulating years of accepting their decline in California, and relinquishing the state’s control to Democrats, could very well be the reason they lose the U.S. House of Representatives.

Charles F. McElwee III, a writer based in northeastern Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government.