Tag: California GOP

California GOP’s Official Recall Clown Car Roster Off by Nearly 100 Candidates Compared with 2003

Pensito Editors

Los Angeles Times: “State elections officials announced late Saturday that 41 candidates had filed valid paperwork and met other requisites to appear on the recall ballot to replace Newsom, kicking off the final phase of campaigning before the Sept. 14 election. Secretary of State Shirley Weber will release a certified list of names that will appear on the ballot on Wednesday.

“It’s a far cry from the 2003 recall election of then-Gov. Gray Davis, a media spectacle where 135 candidates appeared on the ballot in a campaign that drew global attention.

“The current recall has not captured the public imagination the way the prior one did. Political experts say that’s because this effort appears less likely to succeed and lacks the novelty of California’s first gubernatorial recall. While there are two reality stars running, there’s no candidate with the stature of Schwarzenegger. The most famous candidate in the race, Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, decamped to Australia to film a reality television show shortly before the filing deadline.”

As California Republicans Go, So Goes the National GOP?

Jon Ponder

To any objective observer, the national Republican Party appears to be bent on suicide — a colony of angry white male lemmings headed straight for the cliff. Every decision the party’s leadership makes, every strategy they pursue, seems to be motivated by a singular, urgent need to stoke their voters’ basest fears and inner rage.

In the minds of much of the population of this minority-majority state, the GOP is the party of white people who don’t like non-white people, a branding that — fair or not — repulses most minority voters and no small number of white voters as well.

But while the GOP base may take glee with the party’s wars on women, African-Americans, Latinos, students, the poor, immigrants, seniors and science, normal Americans, including the independent swingsters who decide elections, are increasingly unnerved by it. Driven by their base, the national GOP is ignoring the swingsters’ concerns and doubling down on efforts to appeal exclusively to teavangelical Fox watchers and Dittoheads.

As Keith Humphreys at The Reality-Based Community noted this week, this is a familiar scenario for Californian Democrats and independents, who have watched with muted astonishment over the post 20 years as the nation’s largest state Republican Party obstinately pursued a similar doubling-down on its angry white base — a strategy that has left the state party fiscally and ideologically bankrupt and shriveled to its lowest voter registration in over a century:

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