In Reagan's California, Democrats overtake Republicans
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
OAKLAND — It’s official: California’s Orange County is Democratic territory.
Punctuating a political sea change, registered Democrats now outnumber card-carrying Republicans in a onetime bastion of the withering California Republican Party. The shift, decades in the making, both underscores the Republican Party’s free fall in the largest U.S. state and offers a warning to national Republicans in a time of rapid demographic change.
For years, the county has been a mainstay of Republican power in California, helping to launch the careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan while serving as an incubator for socially conservative values and economically conservative policies, a reliable source of Republican votes and a wellspring of campaign cash from a wealthy populace.
There are 179 more registered Democrats than Republicans, according to an update released by the Orange County Registrar of Voters Wednesday morning. On the eve of the 2018 election, Republicans retained a roughly 18,000-vote advantage. And now Democrats are feeling optimistic that the county could be a harbinger of similar changes in long-red states with booming populations of Latino and young voters.
That history meant that a disastrous 2018 election for California Republicans, in which Democrats flipped seven formerly GOP House seats, yielding a once-unimaginable outcome: There is not a single Republican representing Orange County, which lies between Los Angeles and San Diego, in Congress.
Those results came as a gut punch to the beleaguered state party, which has been relegated to superminority status in the Legislature and shut out of statewide office. But the transformation of Orange County has been a gradual process paralleling California as a whole shading evermore blue.
During the Orange County GOP’s heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, when Republicans were migrating there en masse from places like Los Angeles, “you couldn’t print registration forms fast enough to keep up with Republican demand,” said former Orange County Republican Party Chairman Scott Baugh. “But when the demographics started changing aggressively, there was a direct correlation with the voter registration numbers.”
“If you look at demographics going forward, the folks who are going to be registering in the next five to 10 years are not people that overwhelmingly vote Republican, so the challenge is not going to get easier,” Baugh said, though he noted a glimmer of hope in Democratic dominance given that Republicans in California rebounded from a post-Watergate nadir as they saw “liberal policies out of Sacramento switch the momentum.”
Changes in Orange County have paralleled those in the California electorate writ large, where Republican registration has shriveled as more voters shy away from parties altogether — this year, no-party-preference voters eclipsed registered Republicans to become the state’s second-largest cohort.
The electoral results have followed. In 2016, Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump in Orange County by more than 100,000 votes; in 2018, now-Gov. Gavin Newsom became the first Democratic gubernatorial candidate in decades to take the county when he edged out Republican John Cox by a few thousand votes.
Two related trends are driving the shift, said Fred Smoller, a professor of politics at Chapman University in Orange County: an increase in liberal-leaning blocs like young and Latino voters on the one hand, and the diminishment of “old white males who came here from the Midwest” who are moving elsewhere or dying.
But he argued that Trump’s ascension has exacerbated the party’s woes. And he said political trends there should offer a cautionary tale for national Republicans, as with the suburban, white Orange County women who followed counterparts in other states by electing Democrats in 2018.
“It has implications for places like Texas, with a growing Latino electorate,” he said. “Orange County is a microcosm of the United States in many ways, particularly with suburban women. It is a bellwether in this regard.”
While there’s no shortage of GOP challengers hoping to claw back Orange County congressional seats next year, the likelihood of elevated 2020 turnout — with California liberals energized by widespread animus toward Trump — means Republicans had their work cut out for them even before they were surpassed by Democrats. Some Republicans viewed as strong contenders have passed on running, including Baugh, the former county party chairman.
Republican Party of Orange County Executive Director Randall Avila told POLITICO that the registration flip was a “long time coming,” citing both changing demographics and California shifting its voting system with initiatives like automatic registration, but he said Republicans could win back a “purple county” by turning out Republicans and prying unaffiliated voters away from Democrats.
“It’s really a fight for no-party-preference voters now,” he said, and that means “we’ve got to change a few things on the way we outreach to voters,” including doing “a better job of reaching out to more folks like me,” a 29-year-old Latino.
But Republicans will be vying with energized and cash-flush Democrats who are working to expand their already-overwhelming majority in the Legislature by pushing into Republican terrain — including multiple Orange County state legislative districts. After opening an Irvine office for the 2018 midterms, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has deployed field managers to shore up the party's gains by registering voters and organizing activists.
Local Democrats aren’t just focused on protecting vulnerable first-term House members like Reps. Harley Rouda and Katie Porter , Democratic Party of Orange County Chairwoman Ada Briceño told POLITICO. She said party activists are working to make inroads on the local level, down to school boards, as part of a larger effort to sustain their 2018 gains with a bench of new leaders.
“I believe that the 2018 victory really paved the way for us to continue transforming Orange County,” Briceño said, eyeing the bigger picture.
“We need to move this momentum, as we did in Orange County,” to “places like Texas and Arizona,” she said. “We want to work in collaboration with other spaces and say this is possible, doing it one red voter at a time.”
08/07/2019 11:41 AM EDT
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“It’s really a fight for no-party-preference voters now,” he said, and that means “we’ve got to change a few things on the way we outreach to voters,” including doing “a better job of reaching out to more folks like me,” a 29-year-old Latino."
Outreach? There was only one President to grant amnesty and he was a Republican! How has that worked out for the GOP? I will give Hispanic voters credit that they are not totally locked into "Identity politics" (the death knell of democracy), but there are just enough feeble minded individuals to vote against their own interests, fists clenched, to turn a district like Orange County purple!. While these ominous outcomes will have little effect on the 2020 election, they are something the RNC has to focus on. It will be an enormous task! Identity politics is difficult to counteract, since it defies reason. It simply calls upon a voter to vote for the democratic party based upon ones race or gender or sexual preference. Thus far it has been working!
Not too surprising. Since Reagan the Republican Party has embraced the wrong policy goals. Bill Clinton going all in on the same stupid Republican ideas gave the party a reprieve but that couldn't last forever. Piracy can't sustain itself.
The Democrats may be running on fluff and empty promises but Democrats have identified the real problems in the country. Democrats may be making blue sky promises that have no chance of accomplishing anything but Democrats are speaking to real problems and concerns. Republicans adamantly refuse to accept that the problems are real and haven't been offering any alternatives. Republicans always complain that fixing real problems just ain't profitable; the pirates would lose too much money.
Republicans really have wrecked the economy, the foundations of society, and the government. Republicans plowed the field and sowed that crop. Too late to complain about the harvest. At one time Republicans could make a moral argument. But Reagan sold the Republican soul for a handful of silver.
Climate change is a perfect example. Climate change provides an opportunity to create new markets, new businesses, new jobs. Climate change could help revitalize rural America. Climate change is tailor made for capitalism. So, what have gung ho, business friendly Republican capitalists done? Republicans have done the stupidest, most idiotic, most moronic things imaginable to kill off any chance at economic opportunity.
Give us some examples.
All the Democrats do is make sure they get face time and sound bites on the media to project their fluff and blue sky promises that they can never fulfill. They desperately want to give the impression that 'they care' and want to 'do something' about the country's problems, be it anything from mass shootings to climate change. But they never come through on their compassionate promises.
California, with a large Latino population, is becoming the land of illegals at an alarming rate, and the Dems are trying to give them the power to vote there. What with left's clamor for making the popular vote the law of the land, it is imperative that the EC be protected from any change. Otherwise, the Democrats from a handful of states will control all levels of government from here to eternity.
You do understand that the reason Solyndra failed is because the Obama administration tried to set it up like Republicans would. The goal was to remove all risk for investors instead of actually producing anything. Solyndra failed because it was a financial project rather than a manufacturing project.
Coal is more than brawny men with big shovels. It's a resource that can be used for more than just burning it in 19th century boiler technology. A little investment in engineering could create new markets, new businesses, and new jobs.
The beauty of solar panels is that they do not require a grid. Solar panels provide energy at point of use without the need for infrastructure or logistics. Solar panels open up inaccessible areas for development. Solar panels can power rural America at a much lower cost than Edison era technology because they don't need a grid.
The southern border could be turned into an economic zone that creates a wall of jobs to keep illegal immigrants out of the heartland. Factories to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries could be built along the southern border so there wouldn't be a need for migrants to travel further. An economic zone along the southern border could address the huge trade deficits experienced by the US. Imported products do not contribute to economic growth; an economic zone that replaces imports would contribute to economic growth. That would be a win with no downsides.
Democrats have emphasized science. But science doesn't contribute to economic development without engineering. Republicans could have emphasized the need for engineering to spur economic development; creating new markets, creating new businesses, creating new jobs. Republicans could have argued that we need to train more engineers and blue collar workers instead of spending more on science. But that's not what Republicans have done. Republicans have emphasized finance, money, and profit; that's the stupid approach that only benefits pirates.
That's what I said. And that's all Republicans do; point out the obvious. The Republican alternative is to adamantly refuse to acknowledge there are problems that need to be addressed. Democrats offer unworkable solutions. Republicans don't offer any solutions.
Heartland America is dying. Who gives a shit about California? If there isn't economic opportunity in the heartland where are people supposed to go?
Republicans could offer capitalist economic solutions, reduce the country's dependence on imports, revitalize rural America, create new markets, and rebuild the country's industrial infrastructure. Instead Republicans butt drool down their legs about Democrats and claim that everything is just fine.