Republicans find voice in resisting the resistance
While California Democrats are running against President Trump as the national keepers of the “resistance,” California Republicans are trying to find their voice in taking the opposite position: They’re running as the resistance to the resistance.
The GOP is expressing its anti-resistance by taking on California’s sanctuary state laws. The measures prohibit local law enforcement from giving immigration officials nonpublic information about inmates’ releases or keeping inmates in custody beyond the scheduled release so federal agents can pick them up.
Polls show “the intensity is off the charts” for the issue among Republican voters, said John Thomas, a strategist who is running a GOP congressional campaign in Orange County — center of a Democratic vs. Republican battle that could help determine which party controls the House next year.
Thomas said his research is showing that when opposition to sanctuary laws is cast as supporting local law enforcement, it gains support among nonpartisan voters.
And Republicans need every voter they can find. With the likelihood that no GOP candidate will be on the November ballot in the race for U.S. Senate, the party is desperate to give core supporters a reason to vote.
That’s why voters recently received an email fundraising
pitch from Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox encouraging supporters to “stand against Xavier Becerra,” the state attorney general and sanctuary state champion. Fellow GOP hopeful Travis Allen, an Orange County assemblyman, devotes much of his stump speech railing on sanctuary-city-loving “Bay Area liberal elites” like Gov. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and the poster sanctuary city of San Francisco, “whose streets glitter with smashed glass from car breakins.”
Both candidates invoke the name of Kate Steinle, who was killed on a San Francisco pier in 2015 by a man who had been deported multiple times, as the dark side of sanctuary laws. (A jury acquitted the man of murder and manslaughter after his attorneys argued that the gun had fired accidentally.)
Such a strategy ignores “all of the empirical evidence (that) shows that immigrants — unauthorized or not — commit far fewer criminal acts” than others, said Louis DeSipio, professor of political science and Chicano studies at UC Irvine. “They are just trying to use these examples to scare people.”
Nevertheless, the campaign is gaining momentum among the GOP. Last week, the all-Republican Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to join a Trump administration lawsuit seeking to overturn the state sanctuary law. Several small cities in the county and elsewhere have backed similar stances.
It’s the type of liberal-California-in-chaos story line that plays well on Fox News, Trump’s news source of choice. First question to Cox during an interview Monday on Fox: “So how do you explain this anarchy in California? It seems like things are falling apart at the seams. The government in Sacramento is being pushed back on, rightfully, by these local communities. How are you going to change this if you win the governorship?” Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel, a naturalized immigrant from South Korea, wrote in an opinion piece this week for the Wall Street Journal that “condemning the sanctuary law has nothing to do with race or politics.” Instead, she said, “it’s about protecting Americans and their constitutional rights.”
Her husband, Republican National Committee member Shawn Steel, circulated her column Wednesday in an email blast to supporters — a sign that national Republicans are embracing the issue.
Trump himself tweeted on March 28, “My Administration stands in solidarity with the brave citizens in Orange County defending their rights against California’s illegal and unconstitutional Sanctuary policies.”
Taking on sanctuary laws is a more likely road to success for California Republicans than endorsing Trump’s wall, given dismal poll numbers in the state for both it and the president.
“What they’re trying to do is embrace part of the Trump message and not embrace Trump,” DeSipio said. Casting opposition to sanctuary policies as a law-and-order issue “is a way for them to hold on to the suburban voters, who are the swing voters of 2018.”
Many of those voters — particularly in Orange County — are feeling insecure as their long white neighborhoods become more Latino and Asian, DeSipio said.
“Mentioning the name of Becerra — who has an ethnic name and is perceived to defend a Latino issue — is a way to raise this fear of the new, this fear of the change that is coming to California,” DeSipio said.
But Cox said Wednesday he’s not seeking to tap an anti-sanctuary fervor to score political points.
“I wouldn’t say something unless I believed it,” he said.
The idea of sanctuary laws “is offensive to Republicans who believe in the rule of law,” Cox said. “They want to see local law enforcement cooperating with federal law enforcement. They don’t want them working against each other.”
Over the past 10 days — thanks to his appearances on Fox and elsewhere railing against sanctuary laws — Cox said online contribution to his campaign have “doubled” to roughly $10,000 a day.
Allen, too, has seen interest in his campaign rise along with the anti-sanctuary movement. Two weeks ago, his campaign posted an online petition encouraging Californians to ask their local cities to oppose the state law. Since then, Allen said, more than 30,000 state residents from more than 300 cities have signed the petition.
But isn’t he afraid of alienating Latino and Asian voters, who may read his anti-sanctuary rhetoric as anti-immigrant or racist?
“Absolutely not,” Allen said. “Every community values a legal immigration system.”
Whatever you call it, it’s the anti-resistance message that Allen and Cox are riding into the June primary.