It was predictable, inevitable even, but it doesn’t lessen the shock of what was confirmed weeks after Election Day: California’s Orange County, once a deep-red bastion of conservative Republicanism, is now on its way to being true blue. Republicans have lost at least one Orange County seat in the state assembly and likely another in the state senate. While absentee ballots are still being counted, GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox, who was blown out statewide, has a less than 1-point lead over Democrat Gavin Newsom in Orange County. The last two Republican candidates for governor, even as they lost their races, still carried Orange with a healthy majority.
The most dismaying result for the GOP in the O.C., though, is that all four of the county’s Republican-held U.S. House districts were won by Democrats. Voters in Orange County threw out crusty veteran Dana Rohrabacher and rising power player Mimi Walters. Democrats took advantage of a GOP retirement in a swing-trending south Orange district to flip that open seat. But it wasn’t until 11 days after Election Day, when Republican Young Kim conceded to Democrat Gil Cisneros, that the shutout was confirmed.
Up to the end, many plugged-in Southern California politicos were cautious about a blue wave cresting over Orange County. Local Republicans had figured they would lose at least two House seats. Rohrabacher, the 71-year-old, 15-term libertarian from Costa Mesa, was a sluggish fundraiser who showed vulnerability to a competent Democratic challenge, which he got from political newcomer Harley Rouda. And after a too-close-for-comfort reelection bid in 2016, Republican Darrell Issa declined to run again and resigned. Issa’s district, which incorporates parts of southern Orange County as well as San Diego County, went for Democrat Mike Levin over the replacement Republican, the lackluster Diane Harkey.
But there was hope in the GOP for the other two Orange seats. One of them, straddling the borders of Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, has long been held by Ed Royce, who did not seek reelection. Young Kim is a former Royce aide and state assemblywoman and also a Korean immigrant prominent in local business and politics—a good fit, Republicans thought, for a district that had become home to many Asian and Hispanic immigrants. Kim would have had the distinction of being the first Korean-American woman elected to the House and the first Asian-American woman elected as a Republican in three decades. But local Republicans feared Kim was not quite ready for prime time, and her campaign made sure she was scarce for national news reporters. In the end, Gil Cisneros, a former Republican and lottery winner, edged her out in one of the closest races of the midterms.
The heartbreaker for Orange County Republicans was Mimi Walters, a banker from Laguna Niguel who had served two terms in the House and seemed poised to rise in the Republican conference leadership. Walters was another “good fit” for her suburban district—a woman who had carved out an independent profile within Donald Trump’s Republican party. She was a good fundraiser and liked to remind people that while Hillary Clinton had won her district in 2016, Walters had won reelection that same year by 17 points. The final polls, however, showed a virtual tie between Walters and her Democratic opponent, consumer lawyer and Elizabeth Warren protégée Katie Porter. In the end, Porter won by 3 points and nearly 10,000 votes.
How could this happen in Orange County of all places? The prosperous coastal county wedged between Los Angeles and San Diego was once a byword for West Coast Republicanism. “In their grid street patterns and square moral outlooks, in their comfortable but far from showy affluence and their industriousness, in their apparent ethnic homogeneity and their adherence to traditional family patterns,” wrote Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa of the suburbs of Orange County in the 1990 edition of the Almanac of American Politics, “they resemble those midwestern towns 40 and 60 miles away from Chicago.”
Indeed, for decades many of the county’s residents were transplanted Midwesterners who “brought their attitudes with them,” as Barone and Ujifusa put it. Voters there went for the Republican candidate for president for 19 straight elections. Richard Nixon was a native, and Ronald Reagan began and ended his presidential campaigns in Orange County, which gave him his largest margins of any county in the country.
However, the vulnerability for Orange County Republicans was lurking under the surface, presaged by the 1996 defeat of bombastic conservative congressman Bob Dornan by moderate Democrat Loretta Sanchez (which Dornan attributed to voter fraud). But the turn away from the GOP became fully apparent in the last decade. John McCain barely won Orange County in 2008 at just above 50 percent, though Mitt Romney did slightly better four years later. Then, in 2016, Hillary Clinton did something no Democratic nominee had done since 1936: She won Orange by more than 8 points and more than 100,000 votes. In addition to winning the county outright, Clinton beat Trump in all four Republican-held districts. Voters there may have thought they’d be getting a GOP Congress to balance the expected Democratic president. As many suburban districts throughout the country did in 2018, voters in Orange County seem to have “corrected” to finally get the divided government they wanted.
Some Republicans are grumbling that their party was caught flat-footed by a well-funded, well-organized effort by Democrats and liberal interest groups to “harvest” absentee and same-day-registration ballots. The procedure, legal in California, allows activists to deliver sealed mail-in ballots on behalf of voters who failed to send them in time. That, says veteran Republican consultant Ken Khachigian, explains why Republican House candidates like Kim and Walters were ahead in the Election Day results only to fall behind once absentee ballots came in.
“The real problem was that the GOP leadership in California was hapless and got caught asleep at the switch—outmaneuvered by tactics marginally legal but which operated like cat’s feet in the night,” says Khachigian, who lives in San Clemente and was an aide to Presidents Nixon and Reagan.
Others in the party lay the blame at Trump’s feet. “Make no mistake about it, this was a referendum on Trump-run government, and voters in Orange County, like most of American suburbia, loudly chose divided government,” says Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based Republican who worked on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful 2003 gubernatorial campaign. “Orange County going blue has been a slow-moving lava flow that’s been visible for a couple decades. The Trump midterm accelerated its progress.”
Democrats were not blind to the opportunity. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee opened an office in Irvine, moving several senior staffers there as far back as April 2017. The party was not shy about broadcasting its goal of flipping the GOP-held Clinton seats. Even so, there was trepidation among Democrats on election night that the gambit wasn’t worth it. It was. Brian Brokaw, a Democratic consultant in Sacramento, calls it a “perfect storm” of demographic change and a toxic Republican brand.
That’s not to say Orange County voters are necessarily embracing progressivism. Stutzman says it isn’t impossible for Republicans to win back at least one of the House seats they lost—Katie Porter, he says, is “miscast” for the more conservative southeastern corner of the county. “It’s a sad day for Orange County, which, on the whole, certainly doesn’t buy into the leftist/Pelosi wing of American politics,” says Khachigian. But even this veteran of nine presidential campaigns admits that Trump is a useful tool to help Democrats turn out the vote in precincts where the current Republican president is unpopular.
The devastation may have far-reaching consequences. Along with San Diego, Orange County has long been the recruiting ground for California Republicans looking for competent and competitive statewide candidates. The 2018 wipeout is emptying a shrinking pool. Look no further than the case of Janet Nguyen, a young Republican from Garden Grove who in 2014 became the first Vietnamese-American state senator in the country. As with Young Kim, Nguyen’s likely reelection defeat (her Democratic opponent has inched ahead as we go to press) could deprive the GOP bench of yet another face that reflects the new Orange County.
John Thomas, a GOP consultant in Los Angeles who has roots in Orange County, says Republican candidates and campaigns have to realize it’s competitive turf now. “Orange County is no longer a gimme for Republicans,” says Thomas. “You have to run strong candidates with real campaigns. You can no longer dial it in.”
