GOP slips to 3rd in state voters’ choice
Republicans now are the third-largest “party” in California, with the fast-growing number of independent voters eclipsing the sinking GOP membership figures in a report released Friday by the secretary of state.
Democrats now make up 44.4 percent of California’s 19 million registered voters, with no-party-preference voters at 25.5 percent and Republicans at 25.1 percent. The GOP has 83,518 fewer members than the group of voters who reject party labels altogether.
“This is a real hit to the image of the California Republican Party,” said Tony Quinn, a former GOP consultant who now is senior editor of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan outfit that analyzes state political races. “This was a Republican state from the Civil War all the way to 1958,” when Democrat Pat Brown was elected governor.
The shift comes after a decades-long reg-
istration slide for Republicans. They have seen their piece of the California electorate shrink from 5.2 million registered voters and 35.8 percent of the total in 1998 to the current 4.7 million party members.
It’s not that there are fewer voters in California, either. In the past four years, total registration has risen from 17.7 million to 19 million.
Republicans tried to make the best of the new registration numbers, arguing that the change was inevitable given the surge of young voters who don’t want to join any political party.
“This isn’t surprising,” said Matt Fleming, a spokesman for the California Republican Party. “Voters have been becoming more and more independent for years. But ‘no party preference’ doesn’t mean voters are becoming Democrats, and we will continue to reach out to all voters.”
But many of the problems are unique to the state’s Republicans, Quinn said.
“A lot of Californians became Republicans during the Reagan era, but that was 50 years ago,” he said of Ronald Reagan’s two terms as governor. “Many of those Republican voters have died or moved out of the state. They retired and left.”
The loss of blue-collar jobs, including those in the defense industry of the Cold War, has had an effect on Republican registration, as has the state’s changing demography.
“There are a lot more Latino citizens in the state than there were in the past,” Quinn said. “The children who were babies when Proposition 187 passed are 24 years old now, and they’re voting.”
But they’re not voting Republican, thanks in part to how Prop. 187 was received in the Latino community. The measure, which was approved by voters but largely invalidated by the courts, would have barred undocumented immigrants from access to nonemergency health care and public schools. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, made it the centerpiece of his successful re-election campaign, but it has tarnished the GOP brand among Latinos to this day.
The overall makeup of those registering as independents doesn’t suggest they’re the Republican voters of the future. Many of them are new registrants, which means they’re young, and a large percentage of them are minorities already alienated from Republicans and President Trump.
It’s a new phenomenon that shows no indication of going away, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data, which supplies voting and registration data to political groups.
“You don’t see many 85year-old independents,” he said. For many of these young voters, “there may be something wrong with parties altogether.”
Eric Bauman, chair of the California Democratic Party, was quick to point out the Republican registration woes.
“Republicans finally succumb to independents in California. They now trail by 76,000 — Democrats hold steady, with slight increase in registration,” he wrote in a tweet that used unofficial figures.
But Democrats should ease up on the glee. While their registration numbers have risen by about 1.6 million since 1998, the party’s share of total registration has fallen from 46.8 percent to 44.4 percent.
The profile of the typical independent voter “suggests they should be walking into the arms of the Democratic Party,” Mitchell said. “We should be seeing growth of the Democratic Party; yet the Democrats are treading water in terms of registration.”
The Republican Party’s problems aren’t new. In 2007, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger warned GOP leaders that the party was “dying at the box office” because it was unable to attract more moderate voters. Little has changed in the decade since.
The gap between the Democrats and Republicans can be seen not only in the number of Republicans, but in where they are.
According to the new statistics, the places with the largest percentages of GOP voters are small, largely rural counties like Modoc, Lassen, Shasta, Amador and Mariposa. By contrast, Democrats have their strength in urban centers like San Francisco, Alameda and Los Angeles counties.
Northern California is ground zero not only for Democrats, but also for independent voters. Santa Clara County tops the state, with 31.5 percent of its voters registering with no party preference. It’s followed by San Francisco at 31.3 percent, with San Mateo and Alameda counties also making the top 10.
In the Bay Area, it isn’t news that the Republican Party ranks third. In every one of the nine Bay Area counties, there are more independent voters than Republicans. San Francisco has only 33,903 Republicans among its 481,977 registered voters, or 7 percent, by far the lowest in the state.
But the new registration numbers are hardly the end of the line for Republicans, said Mitchell of Political Data.
Falling into third “is probably a P.R. question for the party, but the realistic effect on elections is nothing,” he said. “Republicans still turn out at a high rate” and still play an important part in the state’s elections.
“The question now is whether the party will recover,” Mitchell added. “Is something going to happen that could drive the next group of new registrants back to the Republican Party?”