What's next for California Republicans?

[Roll Roons]

Just as an aside, the fact that the GOP is essentially irrelevant in the country's most populous state does not reflect very well on them as a party.

[Ron DeSantis enthusiast]

They have to moderate and have a different platform away from GOP at national level, but a little difficult when you have people like McCarthy and Nunes.

[THG]

Eh, if I were them I’d focus more on the Central Valley and the Inland Parts of the state to simply make improvements in the NPV for Republicans nationwide.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

They need to get the national party not to run against California if possible. They should also back Republican-leaning independents who can escape the party brand like Poizner.

In order of priority:

1. Lots of federal House seats
2. Lots of local races, but primarily those where they can control councils/mayors
3. Defend state board of equalisation seat 1
4. Contest Insurance Commissioner post
5. Regain state board of equalisation seat 4
6. State legislature (they can’t do much but they can win enough seats to limit what an ineffectual legislature passes)
7. Everything else, where winning is either too hard or of little consequence

Where the ballot initiatives go depends on which ones are up in 2022.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

McCarthy blocked the Insurrectionists Commission that's when the polls started going down, Cox was surging until then, FF other Cox he looks too much like McCarthy and Latinos won't vote for Elder another Clarence Thomas

Latinos in Anaheim aren't gonna vote for Elder and Alex Padilla is on the ballot next yr

[Хahar 🤔]

They need to get the national party not to run against California if possible. They should also back Republican-leaning independents who can escape the party brand like Poizner.

In order of priority:

1. Lots of federal House seats
2. Lots of local races, but primarily those where they can control councils/mayors
3. Defend state board of equalisation seat 1
4. Contest Insurance Commissioner post
5. Regain state board of equalisation seat 4
6. State legislature (they can’t do much but they can win enough seats to limit what an ineffectual legislature passes)
7. Everything else, where winning is either too hard or of little consequence

Where the ballot initiatives go depends on which ones are up in 2022.

I have a couple of points here. Local elections in California are nonpartisan and voters are often unaware of candidates' partisan affiliations; while it certainly can help Republican candidates for office if they are already known to the public as local officeholders, it's not really meaningful to speak of a city council being controlled by Republicans because partisan control doesn't matter. The other point is that the Board of Equalization now has been rendered almost completely powerless; I suppose that maybe it could provide name recognition to officeholders, but for now it seems to be a place for politicians to park themselves while they wait for an office they actually want to open up.

People in this thread are suggesting that Republicans should run moderate candidates, but why would Californians vote for a moderate Republican over a moderate Democrat or an independent? I'm interested to see if anyone can articulate an answer to that question.

[H. Ross Peron]

California Republicans need to accept the fact they aren't going to win white suburbanites by Reagan-era margins anymore, so its silly to simp excessively for suburban white women wine moms, a large portion of whom have wholeheartedly bought into what Wesley Yang calls the Successor Ideology as of late with the same sense of moral panic that their Eighties predecessors fell for Satanic scares. After all, the California Democrats are very much the party of the suburban wine mom nowadays. Therefore, CA Republicans will have to make up support elsewhere, especially with working-class Asians and Latinos. This means embracing a sort of "radical centrist" ideology rather than either warmed over Reaganism (even in its faux-proletarian "Trumpist" guise) or the "fiskhully conservative, soshully librul" panacea of the pundit midwits.

Such a radical centrist platform would include:

1) Rejecting both wokeness and nativism in favour of an assimilationist civic nationalism. It's worth noting that despite California's recent leftward shift, voters strongly rejecting restoring affirmative action. The University of California system has rejected standardized testing such as SAT while the tendency of the teaching professions towards enthusiastically and uncritically adopting the latest theories has led many public school districts and teachers to embrace extreme forms of wokeness in their curriculum. Witness the infantile demands to cover over murals by a *communist* artist depicting Washington as a slaveholder by would-be neoliberal commissars like Meena Harris, the Vice President's own sister. There is an embarassment of easy targets for a culturally and historically conscious Right here, but only if it is part of a broader constructive effort to teach a positive narrative of National history and continuity and not simply fodder for talk radio or FOX News outrage.

2) Moving to the center on economics. In a state as unequal as California, the Republican Party simply has no path forward by holding onto an extreme anti-tax and anti-social welfare conservatism which has little appeal to working-class Californians of any race. Even within the Bay Area and Los Angeles megapoli, two Californias exist side by side-the metro core and elite suburban California of the professional managerial and creative class and the outer suburban/exurban California of the lower middle and working classes, who often endure hours long commutes. While overclass liberals preen about "individual autonomy" to avoid doing anything constructive about the exploding homeless population of the state, working class Californians must deal with the effects of homelessness on the quality of public facilities like parks, libraries, and mass transit which the elites can avoid by retreating to wealthy enclaves. I suspect some of the lumpenbourgeois (pseudo)intellectuals even see homelessness as part of the "charm" of life in the Big City. Of course, none of this does any favours to homeless people who are with minimal help under atrocious conditions in the Tenderloin and Skid Row. It was the California Ideology of the cultural left and economic right that combined to produce the "deinstitutionalization" approach (under President Reagan no less) that led to exploding homeless populations of the present. Instead of leading the charge to combat homelessness and rising housing costs through liberalization of zoning laws and embracing a more communitarian ethos where sometimes people should be institutionalized for their own good, Republicans only have short-term punitive solutions in mind while tying themselves to the suburban NIMBYs many of whom hate the GOP's guts now! The new legislation removing single-family zoning in California is a start but there's a lot of room where the California Republicans can still pull themselves ahead such as urging more relaxed environmental standards which can be also part of a blue collar jobs strategy in the extractive and manufacturing industries.

3) Related to both of the above, California Republicans can still run on crime issues especially on restoring penalties for certain kinds of theft but must not pretend this is the same central issue it was in the 1980s especially since Democrats are not falling for the trap of police defunding.

Of course, given the decayed state and utter intellectual bankruptcy of the California Republican Party, I suspect that none of my suggestions will be even remotely considered by any of its strategists or politicians.

[PSOL]

The only effective option is to move elsewhere. Given that the current Randian techbros and marijuana barons, the middle in California elites compared to finance and small drug lords business, are still within the Democratic Party, there’s no way for inroads anywhere.

Move and establish themselves as an elite ruling over Idaho or the sunbelt like the proven effective way to recover from failure.

[Suburbia]

They are going to focus their efforts on keep their few remaining house seats in CA.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

They need to get the national party not to run against California if possible. They should also back Republican-leaning independents who can escape the party brand like Poizner.

In order of priority:

1. Lots of federal House seats
2. Lots of local races, but primarily those where they can control councils/mayors
3. Defend state board of equalisation seat 1
4. Contest Insurance Commissioner post
5. Regain state board of equalisation seat 4
6. State legislature (they can’t do much but they can win enough seats to limit what an ineffectual legislature passes)
7. Everything else, where winning is either too hard or of little consequence

Where the ballot initiatives go depends on which ones are up in 2022.

I have a couple of points here. Local elections in California are nonpartisan and voters are often unaware of candidates' partisan affiliations; while it certainly can help Republican candidates for office if they are already known to the public as local officeholders, it's not really meaningful to speak of a city council being controlled by Republicans because partisan control doesn't matter.

/snip

Yeah, there's plenty of instances here of local officials serving in office for multiple terms and then flatlining in legislative races because they have to run with an R next to their name.

I can go on, but there's a strong part of me that wishes California can just end the charade and put party labels on local races. It kinda loses all meaning when someone like Kevin Faulconer can revolve a statewide campaign over being a "Republican" Mayor in a Democratic city.

[Suburbia]

They could have ran Wayne Gretzky, he would have done better than Elder....Canadian-American, he is conservative on issues, doesn't have the baggage that Elder has.........