California screaming
California Republicans have sounded a blaring alarm about the GOP’s wayward course. The question is whether the rest of the party is listening.
The latest cri de coeur comes from five former political directors of the state party that produced Ronald Reagan. They argue in a letter to the California GOP’s board of directors that the party must distance itself from President Trump and the politics of division, the Los Angeles Times reported last week. The former officials, whose tenures date from the 1990s through 2010, write that last month’s election “proved that choosing nationalism over conservatism is a losing proposition.”
They have a point. Bakersfield’s own Kevin McCarthy, the incoming House minority leader, will lead just half a dozen fellow Republicans from California after the party lost every seriously contested congressional seat in the state. Even Steve Poizner, who dropped his Republican affiliation in an effort to return to the insurance commissioner post, couldn’t prevent a Democratic sweep of statewide offices. Meanwhile, a new Assembly that is three-quarters Democratic sent observers searching for prefixes to denote something greater than a two-thirds supermajority.
Other onetime stalwarts have noticed. Kristin Olsen, a former leader of the Assembly’s diminished Republican caucus, judged in the aftermath of the election that because of a failure to “adapt to changing demographics” and separate itself from a national party co-opted by Trump, the California GOP “isn’t salvageable.” The state party’s outgoing chairman, Jim Brulte, also cited “changing demographics and our inability to connect with nonwhite voters.”
California is no outlier here; it’s a harbinger. White residents ceased to represent a majority of the state’s population in 2000, and the country is expected to reach that milestone around 2045.
The practical limits of base appeals to nationalism are becoming evident on many fronts, from the Trump administration’s steady accumulation of failures and scandal to British Prime Minister Theresa May’s inability to fashion a workable exit from the European Union.
Senate Republicans have begun to show signs of disaffection, especially with Trump’s refusal to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a decision the president cloaked in an “America first” claim of narrow national interest above all else. But outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan’s unfounded insinuation of election irregularities to explain the California collapse remains too typical of Republicans’ determination to follow Trump into the abyss.