On March 3, 2020, George Skelton in the L.A. Times wrote this:
“If the leader of the California Republican Party had her way, GOP candidates in this state would never mention President Trump’s name.
Not that Jessica Millan Patterson is trashing Trump — it’s hard to imagine a state Republican leader badmouthing a GOP president — but she devours the polls like every political pro. And polls consistently show that throughout most of California, Trump’s name is dirt.”
He went on to quote Assemblyman Chad Mayes==a former GOP Assembly leader who used his office to get six other Assembly members to support a massive tax increase—then left he GOP, denouncing Trump. Chair Patterson had previously taken credit for creating Mayes as a candidate via her Leftist organization, California Trailblazers. So, is there any surprise that the official Republican Party is anti-Trump? You have to get to the volunteers and grassroots, the folks that actually do the work, still support Trump.
Could this be why at the recent GOP convention there were more proxies than warm delegates at the convention
Where’s Trump? A campaign fixture in some states, his name is nearly absent in California
BY ALEXEI KOSEFF, CalMatters, 4/28/22
Delegates wear hats and pins in support of former President Donald Trump during the California Republican Party convention in Anaheim on April 23, 2022. Photo by Alisha Jucevic for CalMatters
IN SUMMARY
Republican candidates across the country are appealing to voters by claiming their allegiance to Donald Trump. But in California, many won’t even say if they voted for him.
More than a year after leaving office, former President Donald Trump still looms large over the Republican Party across the country. Seeking to maintain the fierce devotion of GOP voters as he eyes another presidential run in 2024, Trump continues to hold regular campaign rallies that draw thousands of attendees, while his endorsements are scrambling races from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Georgia as he attempts to play kingmaker in crucial primaries.
Not so much in California.
Even as Republican hopefuls in other states compete to prove which of them is most closely aligned to Trump and his agenda, his name is all but absent from campaigns for governor and other statewide offices in California, where he won less than a third of the vote in 2016 and only slightly more in 2020. False claims that he was robbed of a second term through election fraud no longer abound here.
In a handful of potentially competitive races, perhaps the GOP’s best opportunities to snap a losing streak for statewide office that stretches back to 2006, some major candidates are even distancing themselves from Trump and refusing to say whether they voted for the former president.
The strategy suggests their campaigns, before the June primary has even taken place, are already looking beyond the conservative base to appeal to a broader electorate in the November election. That might get a politician chased out of Texas for disloyalty, but it hasn’t caused much of a stir among California Republicans.
Several publicly ambivalent candidates won the state party endorsement at its convention in Anaheim last weekend, in one case over a more pointedly Trump-aligned competitor. The former president’s greatest displays of support were stray memorabilia for sale at vendor booths and a few shout-outs in candidate forums.
Jim Brulte, a former chairperson for the state party, said GOP candidates have no need to cling to Trump because they have a better message to sell to voters this year about the failures of Democratic President Joe Biden.
“If Democrats want to make this election about Donald Trump, I’m happy to have that argument,” he said. “When Donald Trump was president, we had lower oil prices, lower gas prices, we had relatively little or no inflation.”
That’s not to suggest that enthusiasm for Trump has somehow evaporated in California. Republicans, despite representing a shrinking minority of the electorate, still number more than 5 million across the state, and many of them adore the former president.
“We support President Trump, and we support everything that he stands for,” Randall Jordan, chairperson of the Tea Party California Caucus, said at the convention. “We’re hoping that either he runs again, or we have another strong candidate for 2024.”
Days after audio leaked of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield telling a group of Republican leaders that he would push Trump to resign following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, McCarthy appeared to be in minor damage control mode during his convention keynote address on Saturday evening, when he suggested that Trump should have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Republicans hoping for victory in deep blue California nonetheless must strike a careful balance. Trump remains overwhelmingly unpopular across most of the state and Democrats have been able to capitalize on that toxic brand.
Assemblymember Chad Mayes of Yucca Valley, a former leader of the Assembly Republican caucus who later left the party because of Trump, said GOP candidates who are distancing themselves from the former president without fully denouncing his attacks on the 2020 election are displaying political cowardice, not courage. Many of them reject Trumpism in private, he said, but won’t go that far in public because they fear losing conservative voters.
“It’s not enough to be quiet. Republicans have to outright reject that behavior,” Mayes said. “You’re playing politics with the fundamentals of our democracy.”
During the recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, conservative talk radio host Larry Elder galvanized Republican voters by railing against the governor’s coronavirus mandates and other liberal policies in the state. Then Newsom successfully flipped the approach on Elder, hammering him in ads and at campaign events as “the most Trump of the candidates” and “even more extreme than Trump.” Newsom ultimately defeated the recall by nearly the same massive margin as he won the governorship in 2018; Elder passed on a rematch this year.
Newsom seems eager to replicate the strategy. On a Zoom call with campaign volunteers Tuesday, he accused Brian Dahle, who received the Republican Party endorsement for governor and is his most likely challenger this fall, of supporting the Jan. 6 attack and refusing to publicly acknowledge that Biden won the presidency.
“This guy is Trump through and through,” Newsom said.
Bottom of Form
A state senator and seed farmer from rural Northern California, Dahle once spoke at a Trump rally in Redding in June 2016, declaring the region “Trump country.” This campaign, he is much more circumspect.
Dahle has politely expressed that he would support Trump if he is the Republican nominee for president again in 2024 and then quickly shifted to a critique of Newsom’s record. He has heavily touted his bipartisan credentials, telling CalMatters that he would be a better partner to Democratic lawmakers at the Capitol than Newsom has been.
Dahle shrugged off Newsom’s criticisms Tuesday, slamming the governor for trying to “distract, deflect, deny” as “every civic institution in California crumbles.” In a statement, he said there was an active investigation into Jan. 6 and “people who violated the law should be prosecuted, those who were exercising their free speech rights should be protected.”
But he notably did not affirm the 2020 election results, even after CalMatters pushed his team to clarify Dahle’s position on Trump’s conspiracy theory about widespread voting fraud. In a TV interview a day later, he said: “Joe Biden is our president, no doubt.”
Jenny Rae Le Roux, a Republican business owner who has raised more money than any candidate running against Newsom other than Dahle, does not appear to have made any public statements about Trump, though she recently announced that his former political director, Chris Carr, would serve as a senior adviser to her campaign.
Republicans in California can afford to be less deferential because the state is largely off Trump’s radar. He has endorsed in more than 140 races this year, according to the election tracking website Ballotpedia, but none in California.
So while the U.S. Senate campaign in Ohio, for example, has devolved into a slugfest over Trump’s endorsement, there is more room in California for a candidate like Shawn Collins, a Navy veteran and lawyer who finished third in the state party gubernatorial endorsement vote, ahead of Le Roux.
Collins told CalMatters that he did not vote for Trump — or Biden, whom he confirmed is the “legitimately elected president” — in 2020.
In an interview earlier this month, Collins said he “loved a lot of the things that Donald Trump was doing,” including signing a bill to reduce some federal criminal sentences that “was one of the most significant pieces of legislation for Black and brown people since the Civil Rights Act.” But he said Trump’s messaging on issues such as election fraud undermined his accomplishments and made it difficult to mark his name on the ballot.
“I left it blank,” Collins said. “I was just torn on it.”
