Marin party affiliations provide food for thought
Before statewide elections, California's secretary of state issues an “88Day Report of Registration.”
The document gives a clear-eyed view of how Californians are lined up by political party. As the report provides data for all of the Golden State's 58 counties, it also presents an opportunity to learn how Marin's political orientation has shifted over the past 40 years.
The numbers tell the story.
California now has 22,038,154 total registered voters. Of those, 10,300,858 (46.74%) are Democrats, 5,271,605 (23.92%) Republicans and 5,026,623 (22.81%) registered as No Party Preference
(NPP), which is the designation for independent voters.
The GOP and NPP categories remain neck-andneck for second place in total registration, though the NNP percentage has slightly declined since 2020. That's due to the surge of partisanship overwhelming the nation that shifted a sliver of independents to affiliate with one of the two legacy parties.
A registration oddity is the American Independent Party (AIP) with 742,581 Californians, or 3.37% registrants. The party was founded in the 1960s by openly segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace. He used AIP as a vehicle to run for president until he was shot and paralyzed for life by a 21-yearold busboy looking for fame.
In 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported from 50% to 75% of AIP registrants had no idea they're associated with the racist Wallace. Most mistakenly believed they were simply registering as independents.
In Marin, this error resulted in 4,772 voters being affiliated with Wallace's legacy party.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber reports Marin has 172,014 registered voters. Of those, 106,320 (61.8%) are Democrats, 35,192 (20.46%) voters state No Party Preference and 21,480 (12.49 %) are Republicans.
When I first became involved in Marin politics in the late 1970s, the GOP was a vibrant part of the North Bay. Popular Republicans held many offices. That included Peter Behr, the North Bay's state senator and former Mill Valley mayor, who was often described as the best environmentalist in the Legislature.
San Rafael Republican and Marin-Sonoma Assemblymember Bill Bagley was a proponent of fair housing legislation and an expanded University of California system. The liberal Republican Dr. Bill Filante, previously a Marin Municipal Water District director, served in the Assembly and defeated many well-financed topnotch Democrats.
In 1980, fully 35% of Marinites were registered with the GOP, 49.3% were Democrats and only 13.4% “decline to state” independents.
Each decade thereafter, Marin Republican registration declined. By 2000, the party's registration was still a substantial 27.6%. Now it's down to 12.49%.
The party-shifting trend isn't unique to Marin. It's happened across the nation.
Middle to upper middle class suburbanites, once a bastion of moderate Republicanism, became Democrats or registered as independents as the political dividing line shifted from economics to the classbased cultural wars. Its mirror image is in California's economically struggling rural counties. There the shift was from moderate bread-and-butter Democrats to full-on Trump Republicans as the culture wars and the politics of resentment against “coastal elites” deepened.
There's a strategy to develop alternatives to the Democrats' monopoly in Marin politics. With Trump's on-going domination of the party, the GOP Republican brand is for the foreseeable future tainted in suburban America. It'll take a new centerright party or a better organized independent candidate movement to break Marin and California's one-party status quo.
A new wave of moderate candidates should dampen the culture wars whose insidious purpose is to drive wedges dividing voters into warring camps.
The task for any new political party or for organized independents is recruiting first-rate candidates with Marin appeal. That's what 1990s North Bay Republicans instinctively did. It's why Behr, Bagley, Filante, past county supervisor Gary Giacomini and former San Rafael Mayor Al Boro consistently prevailed at the ballot box.