Reposted from my Sunday feature at Daily Kos. Since it’s mainly California content, I think it deserves a place here too.
Immediately after the November election, I wrote about the overwhelming victory Democrats enjoyed in California, where Governor Brown’s tax measure was passed, the union-busting Proposition 32 was soundly defeated, and Democrats claimed a supermajority in both chambers that will allow them, if they so choose, to pass budgets and submit initiatives for voter approval without a single Republican vote.
Since the time of that writing, things have gotten even worse for Republicans in the legislature, as Democrats picked up two additional seats in vote canvassing in races which their candidates were trailing on election day: Assemblymember Cathleen Galgiani came back to beat her colleague Tom Berryhill for a hotly contested State Senate race to pad Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg’s margin. And lastly, in perhaps the shocker of elections in California, Democratic candidate Steve Fox completed a comeback on the very last day of canvassing when the Los Angeles County Registrar counted the last 1,601 votes in Assembly District 36. Fox gained 463 votes from that final update, giving him a 145-vote win in a traditionally Republican area and padding Speaker John Perez’ majority to a 55-25 count in the 80-seat chamber.
Republicans have held minority status in Sacramento ever since the turn of the millennium, but it’s only now that panic is really starting to set in. Because of Proposition 13 in 1978, which began California’s so-called “tax revolt,” it takes a two-thirds vote of the legislature to pass tax increases or put referendums on the ballot; while still a minority, Republicans had always held at least one-third of one of the two chambers, which allowed them to effectively control the terms of the debate for budgetary issues and continue to extract major cuts and concessions every single election cycle. But as the extremist Republican agenda of decimating the public sector and social services continued to cripple the state, cracks started to show. During the red wave of 2010, California Democrats not only held all their seats; they actually expanded their legislative majorities. Meanwhile, team blue also swept every single statewide office that year, despite the millions of dollars that failed CEO’s Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina spent trying to buy a governorship and Senate seat, respectively.
In 2012, the dam burst. A variety of factors combined to create a Democratic wave in California: nonpartisan redistricting created a series of competitive districts; the creation of online voter registration led to a surge of turnout by young and minority voters; and voters who had had enough of budget cuts began to believe in a different vision for the state. It all adds up to one reality: when the rounds of special elections are over and all the vacancies are filled, Democrats will be able to do what they want in Sacramento without a single Republican vote, provided that they can keep their caucus unified.
The shocking results are leading California Republicans to engage in the same refrain being used by their Washington counterparts. It’s not the policies, they claim, but rather the message:
California Republicans in the Assembly looking to revive their party have a new team on their side.
Assembly Republican leader Connie Conway on Thursday announced a new “Diversity Outreach Team” made up of government staff members. A news release says the group will focus on “helping strengthen Republican ties with women, ethnic communities and young people.”
“We know that most Californians share our common-sense ideas, but we need to do a better job communicating that message,” Conway said in a statement. “To become the majority party again, we must not only talk to diverse communities but also listen and that’s what our Diversity Outreach Team is all about.”
It takes a special brand of chutzpah to claim that most of a state’s voters agree with you when you hold no statewide offices and less than a third of the seats in both houses of that state’s legislature. But it also takes a special brand of either arrogance or blindness to believe that having your party be rendered entirely irrelevant in the most populous state in the nation is simply a messaging problem that can be fixed by token figures to head up a “diversity outreach” program aimed at all the various groups of voters who simply cannot stand what you represent.
It was the unified opposition of the Republican Party, after all, that thwarted Speaker Perez’ best efforts to eliminate a corporate tax break for multi-state businesses and use the money to cut the cost of higher education. Republican legislators and governors have consistently opposed efforts to make life easier for immigrants and their children. Republicans are the ones who have consistently worked to hold California’s budget hostage to painful budget cuts to social services and health care programs for the poor. And no amount of “outreach” to women will help undo the damage done at the national level by Rush Limbaugh and the constant efforts to strip away reproductive rights.
It’s not that California Republicans haven’t done a good enough job explaining their values. Quite the opposite: They’ve done too good a job. As a matter of fact, they even have their own equivalent of Rush Limbaugh in the form of John and Ken, archconservative radio shock jocks who enforce discipline against any Republican even contemplating lenience on tax issues or undocumented immigrants and who make a habit of crude insults against the very groups Republicans are now appointing a diversity team to reach.
If Republicans want to know what future they have to look forward to, all they have to do is see what has happened to them in California. The only thing saving Republicans nationwide is simply that the country as a whole doesn’t quite resemble the demographics of California. Yet.
