Source: Politics<\/p>\n
SAN DIEGO \u2014 It took a decade of electoral defeats and the humiliation of this month\u2019s failed gubernatorial recall. But as the California Republican Party gathered over the weekend for its biannual convention, the bleak reality sunk in.<\/p>\n
For the foreseeable future, Republicans likely won\u2019t be winning top-of-the-ticket statewide races in California \u2014 or even seriously competing in them. Even party stalwarts here acknowledged it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a predictable evolution for a moribund party, but one loaded with identity-altering implications for the GOP in the nation\u2019s most populous state. For years, Republicans in California ran candidates for marquee statewide races, lost and regrouped, certain that the next time might be different. That thinking has changed following their drubbing in the recall<\/a>.<\/p>\n As the convention unfolded in half-empty meeting rooms at a waterfront hotel, there was no feting of Larry Elder, the conservative radio show host who excited the party\u2019s rank-and-file in the recall \u2014 and who discovered that was nowhere near enough to unseat an incumbent Democratic governor. Elder himself was on the opposite coast, tweeting<\/a> that he was \u201crecovering from the campaign in Key West, Florida.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor was Kevin Faulconer, once widely considered the future of the state party, on the convention program. The former San Diego mayor, who did even worse than Elder in the recall election, took private meetings on the patio of a restaurant several blocks from the convention hotel, avoiding any confrontation with party activists who disdain his moderate politics.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re down to what, 23 or 24 percent [voter registration]?\u201d said Randall Jordan, chair of the Tea Party California Caucus. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a lot of influence in the state of California.\u201d<\/p>\n Resigned to the math in a state where Democrats now outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one, hardly anyone envisions a Republican winning top-tier races statewide anymore. Instead, the state party will compete in local races in parts of the state where the GOP remains competitive, including in congressional districts in Orange County and suburban Los Angeles \u2014 where the outcome of several House races could determine the balance of power in Washington next year.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not insignificant. But it\u2019s a far cry from the party of Ronald Reagan. Reduced to picking narrower targets in red and purple pockets of the state, the California Republican Party today is the portrait of a shrunken party \u2014 less a statewide operation than one that competes in discrete pockets across the state.<\/p>\n \u201cListen, we play in the fights that we can win,\u201d said Jessica Millan Patterson, the chair of the state party.<\/p>\n On Sunday, she told delegates that in 2022, the focus of the state party will be on helping Republicans retake the U.S. House \u2014 \u201con retiring Nancy Pelosi and replacing her as speaker of the House with a Republican from California, Kevin McCarthy.\u201d<\/p>\n For mainstream Republicans who were involved in California politics when the last Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was first elected in 2003, the answer to the party\u2019s foundering has long been to get behind a centrist \u2014 a candidate who could appeal to the independents and Democrats necessary to win in California. That\u2019s worked for Republicans in past election cycles in Democratic-leaning states like Massachusetts and Maryland.<\/p>\n But that didn\u2019t work for Republicans in California in 2010, when Meg Whitman ran unsuccessfully for governor. And if anything, the recall laid bare how much more difficult that pick-a-centrist calculation may be in the post-Donald Trump era, in which more moderate, Trump-skeptical Republicans have been all but exiled from the party. In the recall, the party\u2019s activist base would not tolerate Faulconer, a centrist, depriving him of GOP support. Meanwhile, the base\u2019s preferred, more Trump-like candidate, Elder, won over Republicans but couldn\u2019t compete for the Democratic and independent votes necessary to win.<\/p>\n