Before a single general election ballot is cast in November, President Barack Obama begins his bid for a second term with 55 electoral votes, more than a fifth needed for re-election.
Those belong to California, a state that until 1992 had been a virtual Republican lock-in in presidential elections. From 1952 through 1988, Republicans won every presidential election except the landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
All that changed in 1994 when, although Gov. Pete Wilson won re-election and led a slate of four major statewide winners, the GOP fortunes took an overnight reversal from which Republican candidates have never recovered — movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial election notwithstanding.
How did the Republicans manage to lose California, a state whose voters repudiated Jerry Brown’s U.S. Senate seat after his first two terms in office? And does anything in last week’s primary results suggest any glimmer of hope that the GOP can reverse what appears to be the likelihood of another defeat come November in the Golden State.
“Immigration and anti-immigrant Republican politics were the colliding forces that forever swept away this old world of California politics,” says Ron Unz,the conservative who led the successful 1998 campaign for Proposition 227, which dismantled California’s bilingual-education system.
The Achilles heel for Republicans turned out to be the 1994 anti-immigrant ballot initiative Proposition 187, championed by Wilson and other Republicans and passed into law by voters that November.
Proposition 187 established a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibited illegal aliens from using health care, public education and other social services in California. That law, however, was soon determined to be unconstitutional by a federal court, and in 1999, Gov. Gray Davis stopped state appeals against the ruling.
So short-lived but so far-reaching. Proposition 187 became the ruination of the Republican Party, beyond GOP bluster. It continues to this day. In 2010, a year when Republicans picked up 63 House seats nationally, they failed to capture a single Democratic seat in the Golden State. All indications from Tuesday’s primary are that the GOP will not take away any Democratic seats in California this November either.
Too often the news media and Republicans themselves blame California’s electorate, who say it is far too liberal on the social issues — abortion, gay rights and gun control — for today’s conservative GOP positions to be viable.
But in the last two generations, California’s social liberalism hasn’t changed significantly. In the 1960s, the state enacted one of America’s most liberal abortion laws, and the national gay rights movement began in San Francisco. Yet during all these years, Californians elected Ronald Reagan as governor, and never went Democratic in a presidential campaign until Bill Clinton ran in 1992.
“The fault lay with those political morons who had been running the California Republican Party after the halcyon days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan,” says commentator Raoul Lowery Contreras.
Analysts believe the GOP immigrant bashing drove away hundreds of thousands of Mexican-American voters, including many who had moved into the state’s middle-class. Bruce Cain, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley maintains that Mexican-American men were reregistering Republican at a 50 percent rate before Proposition 187, but that quickly ended.
Except for Schwarzenegger, who rode to office on his celebrity and the tide of voter discontent with Gov. Davis, no other Republican has been elected governor or U.S. Senator in California nor carried the state in a presidential election since 1994.
Moreover, the California Republican Party has no more celebrities to put on the ballot, and Schwarzenegger’s spotty legacy not to mention his love child scandal have ruined any realistic possibility of him helping likely nominee Mitt Romney capture this fall, much less a comeback of his own in a U.S. Senate seat likely to open up in the near future.
Republicans in California, it would appear, are saddled with a legacy of their own making.
“A sort of reverse tsunami took effect,” says Republican consultant Ken Khachigian of the negative political impact of Proposition 187. California voters “know who we are, and they don’t like us.”