Calif. GOP ponders its future after losses

LOS ANGELES — In a speech to fellow Republicans in May, U.S. Rep. Mimi Walters issued an ominous warning about the coming election — California Democrats, she said, were “coming for all of us.” She was right. The congresswoman’s stunning defeat Thursday in the heart of Orange County, once a nationally known Republican stronghold, extended a Democratic rout that has seen five GOP-held House seats fall in the state, with another one threatened.

Last week’s election delivered mixed results around the U.S. — Republicans held the Senate, Democrats seized the House — but in California voters turned the state an even deeper shade of Democratic blue.

With Walters’ loss to newcomer Katie Porter, Democrats will hold a 44-9 edge in U.S. House seats, with another Orange County GOP seat in peril. The county was once home to President Richard Nixon and was considered a foundation of the modern conservative movement, gaining the moniker “Reagan country.”

Democrats are on track to hold every statewide office — again. And there wasn’t even a Republican on the ballot for U.S. Senate.

“The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time,” concluded Kristin Olsen, a former Republican leader in the state Assembly.

“The Grand Old Party is dead — partly because it has failed to separate itself from today’s toxic, national brand of Republican politics,” she wrote in a column on the website CALmatters.

Shawn Steel, one of the state’s two Republican National Committee members, said her party has “reached the point of desperation.”

“The party’s problems have been around longer and run much deeper than any one person. From money to grassroots organization, California Republicans are completely outmatched,” Steel wrote on the Washington Examiner website.

The state was once a reliable win for the GOP in presidential elections. And in Orange County, largely white, conservative homeowners delivered winning margins for Republicans.

But a surge in immigrants transformed the state and its voting patterns. The number of Hispanics, blacks and Asians has outnumbered whites since 1998. And many of those new voters lean Democratic.