{"id":13057,"date":"2011-01-23T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-23T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-01-23T19:03:27","modified_gmt":"2011-01-23T19:03:27","slug":"its-not-the-brand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2011\/01\/23\/its-not-the-brand\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Not the Brand"},"content":{"rendered":"

To hear California Republican apologists, their party’s collapse in the 2010 elections in the Golden State are due to a bad “brand,” as Carla Marinucci and Joe Garofoli report<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Republicans, as a brand, are dead,” Duf Sundheim, the former state GOP chair, told the gathering Saturday….<\/p>\n

“There’s a brand problem,” agreed Republican Jim Brulte, former state Senate minority leader.<\/p>\n

California voters supported a number of conservative ballot measures, yet not a single conservative lawmaker for statewide office, Brulte noted. Voters made it clear they “just don’t want Republicans in office.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Heh. If only it were that simple, guys. As I explained after the election, the CA GOP has made itself unelectable by being a white man’s party<\/a>. It’s not a branding problem – it’s that Californians do not want<\/em> the Republican agenda. The party’s right-wing base hates public services, hates Latinos, hates young people, and hates 21st century California. No amount of new branding can change those underlying facts.<\/p>\n

As to Jim Brulte’s point about ballot initiatives, if he and his fellow Republicans were so confident that voters agreed with them on tax policy, why are they unwilling to let Californians vote<\/a> on taxes? The truth is that on taxes too, Californians don’t agree with Republicans. If voters are told to pick schools or low taxes, even Republicans know that voters will pick schools. This would expose as fraudulent the GOP\/Norquist claim that voters dislike taxes, and weaken the collapsing Republican political position in this state even further.<\/p>\n

There did appear to be some Republicans at the Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies conference who understood the basic problem they face:<\/p>\n

“Republicans need to learn how to talk to non-traditional Republican voters,” said Bettina Inclan, who worked on the communications team for losing California GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner. Not just Latinos, she said, but African Americans and young people, too.<\/p>\n

Republicans will remain dead in California until the party “decides it won’t be hostile to people who aren’t old and white,” said Darry Sragow, interim director of the USC\/Los Angeles Times Poll and a longtime Democratic strategist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both assessments are correct, although it’s surprising to see this coming from Inclan, whose former candidate Poizner demonstrated exactly the kind of politics that have doomed Republicans with his attacks on Latinos and immigrants in the GOP primary. While I wasn’t at the IGS conference, I certainly do hope that Inclan acknowledged that fact.<\/p>\n

While other GOP apologists like Tony Quinn think that their party’s setback is temporary, noting that California Republicans bounced back from big losses in the early 1960s with Ronald Reagan in 1966, the fact is that their party is destined for the margins, and is already becoming a small fringe group with declining influence over our state’s future.<\/p>\n

As I explained back in November, California politics are realigning<\/a> into a new system dominated by two blocs – progressives, who believe that a strong public sector and economic democracy are the way to build shared prosperity; and corporate elites, who desire an economy dominated by a few wealthy people and with little to no safety net, but who also are “socially liberal” (meaning they support Latino civil rights but don’t care if they or anyone else can actually make ends meet). San Francisco and Los Angeles already exhibit that new two-bloc system, and 2010 was the election that showed it has arrived at the state level as well.<\/p>\n

With both a top-two primary system and new districts coming into force next year, the stage is set for the permanent marginalization of the California Republican Party. With a base that hates everything about 21st century California, no candidate can make it to the second round without making that base happy – and yet any candidate that does so will therefore lose the general election because voters won’t accept a candidate who appeals to the GOP base.<\/p>\n

Until that GOP bases ages away or moves away, the party will remain unelectable, and the corporate elites will simply run their own candidates, under their own silly brands, while progressives have to fight battles within the Democratic Party and on the ballot to stop the corporate elite from taking over our state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To hear California Republican apologists, their party’s collapse in the 2010 elections in the Golden State are due to a bad “brand,” as Carla Marinucci and Joe Garofoli report<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Republicans, as a brand, are dead,” Duf Sundheim, the former state GOP chair, told the gathering Saturday….<\/p>\n

“There’s a brand problem,” agreed Republican Jim Brulte, former state Senate minority leader.<\/p>\n

California voters supported a number of conservative ballot measures, yet not a single conservative lawmaker for statewide office, Brulte noted. Voters made it clear they “just don’t want Republicans in office.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Heh. If only it were that simple, guys. As I explained after the election, the CA GOP has made itself unelectable by being a white man’s party<\/a>. It’s not a branding problem – it’s that Californians do not want<\/em> the Republican agenda. The party’s right-wing base hates public services, hates Latinos, hates young people, and hates 21st century California. No amount of new branding can change those underlying facts.<\/p>\n

As to Jim Brulte’s point about ballot initiatives, if he and his fellow Republicans were so confident that voters agreed with them on tax policy, why are they unwilling to let Californians vote<\/a> on taxes? The truth is that on taxes too, Californians don’t agree with Republicans. If voters are told to pick schools or low taxes, even Republicans know that voters will pick schools. This would expose as fraudulent the GOP\/Norquist claim that voters dislike taxes, and weaken the collapsing Republican political position in this state even further.<\/p>\n

There did appear to be some Republicans at the Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies conference who understood the basic problem they face:<\/p>\n

“Republicans need to learn how to talk to non-traditional Republican voters,” said Bettina Inclan, who worked on the communications team for losing California GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner. Not just Latinos, she said, but African Americans and young people, too.<\/p>\n

Republicans will remain dead in California until the party “decides it won’t be hostile to people who aren’t old and white,” said Darry Sragow, interim director of the USC\/Los Angeles Times Poll and a longtime Democratic strategist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both assessments are correct, although it’s surprising to see this coming from Inclan, whose former candidate Poizner demonstrated exactly the kind of politics that have doomed Republicans with his attacks on Latinos and immigrants in the GOP primary. While I wasn’t at the IGS conference, I certainly do hope that Inclan acknowledged that fact.<\/p>\n

While other GOP apologists like Tony Quinn think that their party’s setback is temporary, noting that California Republicans bounced back from big losses in the early 1960s with Ronald Reagan in 1966, the fact is that their party is destined for the margins, and is already becoming a small fringe group with declining influence over our state’s future.<\/p>\n

As I explained back in November, California politics are realigning<\/a> into a new system dominated by two blocs – progressives, who believe that a strong public sector and economic democracy are the way to build shared prosperity; and corporate elites, who desire an economy dominated by a few wealthy people and with little to no safety net, but who also are “socially liberal” (meaning they support Latino civil rights but don’t care if they or anyone else can actually make ends meet). San Francisco and Los Angeles already exhibit that new two-bloc system, and 2010 was the election that showed it has arrived at the state level as well.<\/p>\n

With both a top-two primary system and new districts coming into force next year, the stage is set for the permanent marginalization of the California Republican Party. With a base that hates everything about 21st century California, no candidate can make it to the second round without making that base happy – and yet any candidate that does so will therefore lose the general election because voters won’t accept a candidate who appeals to the GOP base.<\/p>\n

Until that GOP bases ages away or moves away, the party will remain unelectable, and the corporate elites will simply run their own candidates, under their own silly brands, while progressives have to fight battles within the Democratic Party and on the ballot to stop the corporate elite from taking over our state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-87"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-3oB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}