It was inevitable. There was no way to stop it. Or was there?
For months now, we have heard at length about the “blue wave” waiting to crash on Republican hopes to hold on to the House this year. The Democrats were more motivated than Republicans, they said, and the road to taking back the House would run through California.
Well, the big California primary is now in the books. Contrary to their expectations, however, honest Democrats know that California didn’t deliver the boost they expected. Here is why.
First, we note that Hillary Clinton, in her presidential bid, won seven California congressional districts that Democrats thought could help them in their effort to take back the House from Republicans this year. Second, at the beginning of the year, the generic congressional poll was so lopsided in the Democrats’ favor that two longtime Republican congressmen decided to retire rather than run for re-election: Ed Royce of Orange County and Daryl Issa of San Diego.
Further, California was the center of the Trump resistance. Latino voters were said to be angry and Democrat leaders, up and down the state, rode the resistance to grab headlines.
So loud was the political clamor, the thought was that if the wave was going to wash away Republicans, certainly that would occur in California. So excited were the Democrats, they fielded a huge number of opportunistic candidates for several of the congressional seats — and that meant candidates who had every reason, and millions of dollars, to push out the Democrat vote.
But something happened on the way to the beach.
The economy improved, the generic congressional polling was tied, a gas tax recall took shape in California, an anti-resistance, anti-sanctuary state effort took shape, and then inevitability worked against the Democrats.
It turns out that the Republicans, and independents and crossover voters, were motivated enough to recall a Democrat state Senator who voted for the gas tax. That Democrat was replaced by a Republican. At the Assembly level, Republicans fared better than expected in Riverside and even in a Bay Area contest. All combined, in six of the seven of those Clinton districts, votes for the Republican candidates exceeded the votes for the Democrats. Hardly a wave. More like an anti-wave.
The anti-wave was broader than some would like to admit. The Democrats had two statewide Latino candidates on the ballot in the California primary: the former State Senate leader, Kevin de Leon, who is from Los Angeles, and the former Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa.
The Latino vote for de Leon and Villaraigosa, however, was flat. They finished off in the distance, although at least de Leon will be on the fall ballot, only to be badly beaten, however, in November by incumbent Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate race.
And that is the fine point of the matter.
It is inevitable in California that Feinstein is going to win re-election, and has been all along. It also is inevitable, in the eyes of many Democrats, that Gavin Newsom is going to be the next governor.
So why vote? That is what many Democrats likely think in a state where voter registration breaks down like this: 19 million registered voters, with Democrats at 44.4 percent, no-party-preference voters at 25.5 percent, and Republicans third at 25.1 percent.
While the Democrats could pick up a seat this fall, California Democrat voters are not that motivated statewide. Moreover, a full repeal of the gas tax is on the ballot this fall.
While that won’t guarantee Republicans a statewide victory, it likely will provide enough motivation for them to protect those contested congressional seats along with an ever-improving economy.
In other words, the “flip the House” inevitability factor isn’t colored blue — not nationally and not even in California.
Thomas Del Beccaro (@tomdelbeccaro) is former chairman of the California Republican Party and author of That Divided Era: How We Got Here and the Keys to America’s Reconciliation.
