Dems trying to turn Orange County blue
Canvassers, candidates seek to flip 4 House seats
ANAHEIM — For this brief moment in the nation’s history, Orange County is the center of the political universe.
Saying that out loud draws incredulous smiles from some people and nods of agreement from others in the place where Richard Nixon was born, Ronald Reagan conservatism grew up and Democrats have long been comatose. Until lately. There’s a progressive voter revolt percolating among the 3.2 million people spread across Orange County’s 948 square miles, which stretch from the ritzy Newport Beach to the grittier side of Anaheim and the suburbia of Fullerton.
Just how that evolves remains uncertain — and turning the OC even just a little blue is going to be a heavy lift — but there’s no question the street energy is there.
“Ha, can you believe it?” said Kate Hardesty, a community college teacher involved with several progressive groups around Newport Beach. “Before, everyone was asleep — it’s Orange County. People want to have fun all the time and be happy. They’re pretty good at ignoring things, but that’s changing.”
The reason for the change? Democrats think they can flip the four U.S. House seats held by Republicans that touch Orange County and where Hillary Clinton won a majority of votes. Winning those four seats would help the Democratic Party reach its goal of flipping the 24 seats it needs to retake control of the House.
Longtime Orange County Democrats are excited about seeing strong, well-funded Democrats lining up to challenge the Republican incumbents. Several are different kinds of candidates — firsttime politicians from the biotech, medical and high-tech worlds, the kind of people who rarely run for office.
“Many of my patients are immigrants, and I’m worried that with all of this noise going on around us about health care that their voices will not be heard,” said Mai-Khanh Tran, a Vietnam War refugee, twotime breast cancer survivor and Yorba Linda pediatrician who is one of five Democrats running against Rep. Ed Royce, R-Fullerton, who has been in Congress since 1993.
Brian Forde, a Lake Forest technologist and former Republican who worked in the Obama administration, is one of six Democrats running against Rep. Mimi Walters, R-Irvine, in part because, “What I saw working in government is if you don’t have a technologist at the table, some of our most important policy challenges won’t be achieved.”
There’s action on the other side, too. Republicans believe they can end the Democrats’ choke-hold on the Legislature in Sacramento by recalling first-term Democratic state Sen. Josh Newman of Fullerton, who won a long-held GOP seat.
And there’s likely to be a statewide ballot measure next year to rescind the gasoline tax that is paying for the $50 billion in transportation improvements the Legislature passed in June. Scott Baugh, the former GOP Assembly leader from Newport Beach, predicts 30 percent of the money for an anti-gas-tax campaign would come from Orange County. GOP operatives believe an opportunity to vote down the gas tax will get their supporters to the polls.
All of this political action is being fueled by something that Bay Area residents take for granted but rarely happens in Orange County: grassroots political organizing. There is an unprecedented amount of knocking on doors, protesting outside of congressional offices, and rounding up of neighbors for political grunt work. There are regular demonstrations outside the offices of Royce and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), that draw hundreds of demonstrators.
Indivisible and other new progressive groups are not just exploding around Orange County, they’re connecting with each other and the Democratic Party.
That’s never really happened before.
“There was a lot of complacency. The (local Democratic) clubs were mainly social clubs. They were not activist clubs. They’d meet at Marie Callender’s,” said Mary Navarro, who has seen the South Orange County Democratic Club she leads grow from 30 to 300 since the election. “We were busy having our little social clubs and not paying attention — until the election. And then we woke up and realized we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
The national and state Democratic Party does, too. The Democratic Campaign Congressional Committee sent organizers to Orange County for the first time to join state party staffers in trying to connect with the new grassroots groups. On Saturday, Democratic National Committee Vice Chairman Keith Ellison will headline a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser in Costa Mesa with the theme “Orange Is the New Blue.”
Yorba Linda resident Karen Lawson is thrilled for the help, as she’s been trying to get rid of Royce since 1995. On a good day, she said, five people would show up at a weekend door-todoor Democratic Party canvass — “and the flake rate was about 40 percent,” she said.
Standing in a shady spot in Tamarack Park in Brea, Lawson looked around at the 17 people ready to canvass on a 92-degree Saturday morning recently and smiled. “I’ve never seen this before,” she said.
When the canvassers hit the road, they found people answering the doors in the predominantly Republican city had no love for President Trump. “Impeach him!” was heard more than a few times, even from Republicans.
But Brea residents were less certain about Royce, even though he’s been in Congress for two decades. Most were indifferent.
“I don’t know much about Ed Royce,” Ryan Valencia, 41, said as he polished his car in front of his home. He drives for Lyft and works at Costco. He lost his job as a loan officer because of the 2008-09 economic crash. “But I know I’m sick of hearing about Trump’s personal life. And Congress doesn’t get anything done.”
Still, Valencia isn’t racing to vote for a Democrat just yet. “There’s not really a side for people like me,” he said. He wants a candidate who would help people get affordable housing or health care.
While some Democrats are running traditional canvasses, there’s some experimental organizing going on in Issa’s district, where Terra LawsonRemer, a former Obama Treasury Department adviser and attorney, returned home two years ago because she missed West Coast life.
The 39-year-old channeled her outrage at the 2016 election results by writing a 35-page “49th Congressional District Strategy Analysis” and raising $150,000 toward creating a network of progressive neighborhood activists in a district where there were few. She is also working with Bay Area programmers on technology that could help canvassers better connect with unregistered voters.
What Lawson-Remer is doing is unusual because she isn’t focused solely on the next election. Her goal is to knit together a community of organizers — she’s recruited 180 in just the past few months — to go into blocks to talk with to their neighbors about issues.
“What I hope comes out of this is that we beat Darrell Issa,” Lawson-Remer said. “What I hope we leave behind is a progressive infrastructure that can work on other important issues.”
One of those neighborhood leaders, Amy Lindsay, a medical writer who hasn’t been politically active in the past, was going door to door in a Capistrano Beach neighborhood just to hear what was on people’s minds. Most of them didn’t want to talk about Trump or Issa, but they did want to talk about a halfway house down the street. Lindsay dutifully listened, took notes and promised to get back to them.
Playing the long game in politics is hard, Lindsay acknowledged, but “that’s how you start to build trust. When you talk about community, you find agreement, you find similar values.”
Yet all this energy, money, innovation and crop of new candidates might not be enough. Turning Orange County blue will be a lot harder than it may seem to a Washington campaign consultant.
While the county is much more racially diverse and far less Republican than it was in Reagan’s heyday, it remains more conservative than other parts of coastal California. The vast majority of local elected officials are Republican, and voters are skeptical of ideas that would seem mainstream in the Bay Area. In November, Californians approved a statewide ballot measure banning single-use plastic bags; 57 percent of Orange County voters opposed it.
No matter how unpopular Trump becomes, it will be difficult to defeat incumbent GOP members of Congress. Last year, 98 percent of House incumbents were re-elected across the country, including all four whose districts touch Orange County. Three of those — Reps. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Costa Mesa, Walters and Royce — won by more than 10 percentage points. Issa won by less than one percentage point.
Democrats believe Rohrabacher, Reagan’s 70-year-old former White House speechwriter, may be vulnerable. But he’s won 13 of his 15 races by more than 20 percentage points.
“Voters here know him, they know what he’s about. If you’re 55 and older in the district, you grew up with Ronald Reagan and Dana Rohrabacher,” said Baugh, who has raised $546,914 for this race in case Rohrabacher decides to retire. “You’re not going to easily change minds.”
Baugh conceded that “the Democrats are behaving differently for the first time in Orange County. They’re raising money, they’re canvassing, they’re organizing, they have an infrastructure. I just don’t think at the end of the day it will produce a different outcome.”