Final Election Results Give Dems a Clean Sweep in California – Post-Election Polls Suggest GOP Is Walking Wounded, Maybe Walking Dead

Left: California's Democratic attorney general-elect, Kamala Harris; right: Steve Cooley had a slight lead until Karl Rove outed him as a Republican
Left: California's Democratic attorney general-elect, Kamala Harris; right: Steve Cooley had a slight lead until Karl Rove outed him as a Republican
Here’s how George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times columnist who covers Sacramento, opened his piece last Monday on the November 2 election in California:

Go ahead: Accuse me of shooting the wounded. But it may be that the body already is dead.

I’m referring to the California Republican Party.

How alive could the state GOP be after suffering the pounding it took on Nov. 2, a day of historic party triumph elsewhere across America?

“It’s not just wounded, it’s in a coma,” says Republican Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado.

Maldonado was one of several Republican victims on election day. He lost the lieutenant governor’s race to Democratic San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Later in the week, just before Thanksgiving, results from the last two close races came in. Democrats won them both. San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris is now the state’s attorney general, and Rep. Jerry McNerney in the 11th District beat a tea bagger whose single issue is abolishing public education in the United States.

Now it’s official: No California Democrat lost a race on November 2, and Democrats even picked up yet another seat in the already lopsidedly Democratic-controlled state legislature.

Considering the shellacking Democrats took in U.S. House races — dozens of GOP-tea baggers won seats, mostly from the industrial Midwest and Bible Belt — a question arises.

Why did Democrats do so well in California when the national party was on the ropes?

It’s tempting to say that the poisonous propaganda perpetrated by the GOP’s Fox channel doesn’t transmit way out west, but that is just wishful thinking.

Or maybe Californians are just too smart for Republican lies about the president, “Obamacare” and the financial crisis. There may be some truth to this. The president and his health-care reform law are both popular in the state. And Golden Staters have been living with big deficits since Enron, aided by the Bush-Cheney administration, ripped off Californians for $30 billion in the early 2000s.

What we do know is this: majorities of California voters do not like the Republican Party, and they especially do not like the California GOP.

Case in point, Attorney General-elect Kamala Harris’ opponent Steve Cooley. Writing before the final votes were counted giving Harris the win, Skelton put it this way:

Cooley was the biggest Republican vote-getter in California, which isn’t saying much…

Most surprisingly, Cooley was beaten badly — by 14 points — in his home county, where he had won three district attorney races by landslides.

Why couldn’t Cooley carry L.A.? [veteran Republican consultant Kevin] Spillane points out that local races, unlike state contests, are nonpartisan. Local candidates don’t list party affiliations.

“Cooley has been elected and reelected D.A. as an individual,” Spillane wrote. “The moment the word ‘Republican’ appeared on the ballot next to [his] name in heavily Democratic Los Angeles County, it was a huge anchor that dragged him down, exacerbated by the collapse of the GOP ticket in the final week of the campaign.”

Here’s a bit of sweet irony: Cooley had a slight lead over Harris in pre-Labor Day polling. It wasn’t until Karl Rove started pumping money in Cooley’s campaign — until the outside groups produced television ads for Cooley — that his own Democratic constituents learned that he’d hiding a dark secret. Because Los Angeles County elections are nonpartisan, Cooley had manage to keep his party status off the radar. It wasn’t until Karl Rove outed him as a Republican this year that Cooley started losing ground.

Except for the attorney general race, all statewide Dems won by double digits. Jerry Brown beat Meg Whitman by 12 points; Newsom beat Maldanado by 11 points; Debra Bowen was reelected secretary of state by 14 points. The Democratic state treasurer won by 20 points, controller by 18 points and insurance commissioner by 12 points.

Skelton again:

[Republican operative Kevin] Spillane added that the election results validated an October poll by the Public Policy Institute of California that found “Republican” to be a bad brand name in this left-leaning state.

The voters’ impressions of the Republican Party were 2 to 1 negative: 31 percent favorable, 62 percent unfavorable. Even among registered Republicans — less than a third of the electorate — only 55 percent had a favorable impression of the GOP; 39 percent looked on it unfavorably. [Emphasis added.]

Those numbers were basically reaffirmed in election day exit polling conducted for news organizations. The voters’ opinions of the Republican Party were 33 percent favorable, 61 percent unfavorable. For the Democratic Party: 50 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable.

Even a quarter of Whitman’s voters had an unfavorable view of the GOP.

Call it an anchor or an albatross, statewide candidates — in fact, most aspirants for partisan office in California — are burdened by the Republican label.

In the House races and even state legislature contests, California voters swam full force against the Republican riptide:

Nationally, Republicans picked up at least 61 seats in the U.S. House — reclaiming control — and gained six in the Senate.

Moreover, Republicans picked up nearly 700 state legislative seats across the country — the largest gain by either party since 1958 — and captured an additional 19 legislative chambers. The GOP gained a net five governorships.

Contrast that with California: Republicans lost one seat in the state Assembly, failed to gain ground in the Senate or — apparently — the congressional delegation, and lost both the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races.

Since Skelton wrote that last paragraph, it has become official. The GOP candidate lost to Rep. McNerney, making it a clean sweep for the Dems in the congressional delegation as well.

A couple of days before Skelton’s column appeared, the Times published results from a post-election poll the paper conducted with USC:

California voters surveyed in the poll repudiated the [GOP’s] stance on illegal immigration by endorsing a host of positions intended to make it easier for the undocumented to gain legal status. Their support for same-sex marriage outnumbered that opposing any legal recognition by more than 3 to 1. Californians also endorsed an assertive role for government in protecting minority citizens, regulating corporations and helping the poor and needy, and rejected arguments that an activist role for government had harmed the fiber of American society…

Strikingly, almost one in five California voters said they would never cast a ballot for a Republican. Among Latinos, that rose to almost one in three. Only 5 percent of California voters were as emphatically anti-Democrat…

The party faces a critical collision between its own voters, a minority in California, and those it needs to attract to win. The most faithful Republicans this year — those who voted for both Meg Whitman for governor and Carly Fiorina for Senate — said by a 27-point margin that to be more successful, Republicans should nominate “true conservatives.”

But among the majority of voters who spurned Whitman and Fiorina in November — and in whose good graces any future winning candidate would need to be — the results were reversed. Forty-three percent said that future Republican candidates needed to be more moderate. Only 20 percent said that Republicans should nominate “true conservatives.”

All that said, the 2010 midterms may well turn out to be the high point for Democrats in California. One thing just about every Californian can agree upon is the fact that our state government is broken.

For one thing, although it’s gotten little notice in the national press, a ballot initiative passed on Nov. 2 that will significantly, and immediately, alter the way legislative and congressional districts are designed in California. Under the new system, responsibility for reapportioning districts was removed from elected leaders and given to a panel of rank and file residents. (The panel has already been selected.)

The objective was to remove the protection of safe seats around the state, but whether it will radically change the district maps is uncertain. The reality the new district mapping panel faces is that almost all Rpublicans live in vast, mostly empty inland desert and mountain “red counties,” while nearly all the Democrats live in high-density “blue counties” along the coast. It’s hard to see how the panel can reapportion the districts without creating even more bizarrely gerrymandered boundaries than were created by the pols themselves.

The other risk for the Democrats is that at least part of what animated California voters this year was their disdain for Gov. Schwarzenegger and his inability to work well with others, meaning the Democrats who control the legislature.

That puts the onus on Gov.-elect Brown to go to Sacramento and shake things up. It’s all on the Democrats now, and if things haven’t turned around in some marked way in the next two years, voters could start sour on the Democrats, too.

But even voter disaffection for the Brown administration in 2012 can’t change the structural problems facing the California GOP, which boils down to this: The sort of extreme conservatives who win GOP primaries in California are unelectable by mainstream voters in the November elections.

Unless or until they figure out how to get out of that trap, it looks like R.I.P. for the California G.O.P.

George Skelton said it more generously: “If the California Republican Party isn’t already dead, it may need to die and be reincarnated into a more appealing body.”

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