Post-Convention Wrap-Up: California GOP Said to Be on the Verge of Extinction

“Like a herd of wooly mammoths at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, the California Republican Party is on the verge of extinction,” writes CalBuzz, one of the best and most irreverent political websites in the Golden State.

That assessment came after CalBuzz spent the weekend covering the state GOP’s biannual convention.

A former Republican leader agreed. “It’s on life support,” he said.

But why is the California GOP in decline at the same time that the tea party has invigorated the the party just about everywhere else? CalBuzz suggests that the root of the party’s problem is its self-delusion — they think their candidates have not been conservative enough — as well as their dim view of, well, people:

The prevailing attitude at the convention seemed to be the Republicans lost every major statewide race and have been reduced to a strident minority because Republican candidates were too weak on conservative principles and besides, people are lazy and stupid.

The convention was notable for a couple of things that did not happen:

Convention organizers did not take up Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s offer to send his dog Sutter to debate Grover Norquist on whether Californians should be allowed to vote on extending a tax hike in order to reduce the deficit.

And right-wing extremists at the convention — CalBuzz calls them “cave dwellers” — were dissuaded from putting a resolution before the convention that would have excommunicated any GOP lawmaker who voted for the governor’s plan to put the tax issue on a statewide ballot in June.

Bob Mulholland, a former political director of the California Democratic Party, whom CalBuzz described as a “troublemaker,” helpfully provided numbers that illustrate the Republicans’ dire straits:

• There are 7,569,581 registered Democrats (44 percent) and 5,307,411 registered Republicans, (31 percent). This is the lowest GOP percentage in the history of California.
• Democrats hold 123 of the 187 partisan seats in California (66 percent).
• Democrats won all nine statewide races last November and now hold all 10 state offices (including both U.S. Senate seats). Since 1988, Democrats have won all five presidential races and all eight U.S. Senate races.
• President Obama won California by 24 points (61 percent to 37 percent) or by 3,262,692 votes.
• Democrats hold 34 of 53 House seats; 52 of 80 Assembly seats and 25 of 40 State Senate seats.

To this, we might note, there are also 3,507,119 DTS voters (Decline To State a party) (20 percent) – double the percentage from 1994. Polling and voting data find that these voters — by and large — think and act more like Democrats than Republicans on electoral issues most of the time.

And I would add that among the nine Democrats who won last November, all but one won by double digits. The one who did not, Attorney General Kamala Harris, narrowly defeated a candidate whom Karl Rove swooped in at the last minute to support.

More bad numbers: Money. The California GOP reportedly had just $250,000 in the bank before the convention.

According to CalBuzz, Republicans at the convention agreed off the record that donors “think the party is on the brink of irrelevance . . . They think the party focuses most of its time speaking to 30 percent of the state rather than the majority of the state . . . (donors are watching to see if) we’re going to continue to focus on eating our own, as opposed to focusing on electing more Republicans.”