Trump’s name nearly absent in California
More than a year after leaving office, former President Donald Trump still looms large over the Republican Party across the country. Seeking to maintain the fierce devotion of GOP voters as he eyes another presidential run in 2024, Trump continues to hold regular campaign rallies that draw thousands of attendees, while his endorsements are scrambling races from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Georgia as he attempts to play kingmaker in crucial primaries.
Not so much in California.
Even as Republican hopefuls in other states compete to prove which of them is most closely aligned to Trump and his agenda, his name is all but absent from campaigns for governor and other statewide offices in California, where he won less than a third of the vote in 2016 and only slightly more in 2020. False claims that he was robbed of a second term through election fraud no longer abound here.
In a handful of potentially competitive races, perhaps the GOP’s best opportunities to snap a losing streak for statewide office that stretches back to 2006, some major candidates are even distancing themselves from Trump and refusing to say whether they voted for the former president.
The strategy suggests their campaigns, before the June primary has even taken place, are already looking beyond the conservative base to appeal to a broader electorate in the November election. That might get a politician chased out of Texas for disloyalty, but it hasn’t caused much of a stir among California Republicans.
Several publicly ambivalent candidates won the state party endorsement at its convention in Anaheim last weekend, in one case over a more pointedly Trump-aligned competitor. The former president’s greatest displays of support were stray memorabilia for sale at vendor booths and a few shoutouts in candidate forums.
Jim Brulte, a former chairperson for the state party, said GOP candidates have no need to cling to Trump because they have a better message to sell to voters this year about the failures of Democratic President Joe Biden.