The real swing voters of Orange County
Republican supporters turning blue as they ponder voting Democratic in U.S. midterms
ORANGE COUNTY, CALIF.— Cindy Hopkins grimaces a little when she talks about the president she voted for.
Hopkins is a Republican-leaning fiscal conservative, a corporate vice-president of human resources in one of California’s wealthiest cities. She likes what Donald Trump has done on the economy.
But his personality pains and worries her, and she doesn’t know if she’d vote for him again. More importantly, she doesn’t know which party she’ll choose in the congressional midterms in November.
“Being a human resources person, I would just handle things really differently,” Hopkins, 51, said last week at a mall in Mission Viejo, about an hour southeast of Los Angeles. “He’s doing some good things. But personally, as a mom to a son, his knee-jerk reactions and ego scare me. From a standpoint of: I don’t want my boy in war next year. And I feel like it could go there.”
California is ignored in presidential elections, a sure Democratic win since 1992. In the 2018 election, it is a battleground that could decide who controls the House of Representatives — in part because Democrats there are exceptionally motivated, in part because Trump has caused some of the educated white women who usually vote Republican to waver.
“The Democrats are unified, a slice of Republicans are abandoning ship and crossing party lines, and independents are voting for Democrats by big margins,” said Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster in California.
Democrats need to gain 23 seats to win back control of the House. California gives them the most opportunities: there are seven seats in the state, including Hopkins’s, where Hillary Clinton beat Trump in 2016 but where the local Republican simultaneously managed to beat the local Democrat.
Four of those seven include parts of coastal Orange County, a famous bastion of conservatism. So Democrats’ road to victory runs not only through the diners of forlorn midwestern factory towns but the food court Hopkins was visiting, just down the hall from a Nordstrom and 15 minutes from Laguna Beach.
“It’s fun to have Orange County be the new Ohio, the new battleground. And we’re ready for it,” said Fred Whitaker, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party.
Even as Democrats have dominated in California at the presidential level, Orange County and other high-income suburbs around Los Angeles have reliably chosen Republicans for Congress. Whitaker conceded that “we’ve never had a challenge as tight as this before.” But he declared that Democrats are “not going to win a single one.”
“We’ve been working these seats for 35-plus years,” he said.
These, however, are no longer the suburbs of old. Orange County, known in some quarters as the home of the overwhelmingly white Real Housewives of
Orange County, is now more than 53 per cent Hispanic or Asian, up 20 percentage points from the early 1990s.
At the upscale Shops at Mission Viejo, multiple voters, women and men, ex- pressed unyielding support for Trump and for his party. But there were also signs of trouble for Republicans, particularly among women.
“I am just done with anyone that has been supportive of Trump or any of his values,” said Marsha Finnerty, a retiree of Mexican descent who said she has sometimes voted Republican but would now start to cry if she talked about Trump’s separations at the border. “We’ve had too many family members affected by a lot of the Republican values, and I’m done with it.”
Helen Musurlian, a stay-at-home mother sitting at a table a few metres away, said she was undecided. She said her vote would be about local candidates much more than the president, but that she can’t stand him.
“He’s mean, he’s a bully, he’s a narcissist. We don’t like him at all. He’s all about himself,” said Musurlian, 48.
Local voters face stark choices. In the 25th district north of Los Angeles, home of Ronald Reagan’s presidential library, the Democrat is 31-year-old Katie Hill, who ran a non-profit providing services to homeless people and who identifies as bisexual.
She is challenging incumbent Republican Steve Knight, 51, an army veteran and former LAPD cop who boasts of his time on a controversial gang unit called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.
Hill is running as an unthreatening moderate — the first issue listed on her website is “safety and security,” and it identifies her as “the daughter of a police officer” — but one who will stand up to the president. Canvassing for Hill on Saturday in a diverse subdivision of spacious cookie-cutter houses, volunteer Nicholas Kraft, 28, told homeowners over and over that Knight “votes with Trump 98 per cent of the time.”
Knight won by six percentage points in 2016. But Clinton beat Trump in the district by seven percentage points. Seeing a rare opening, Democrats have lavished Hill with a staggering $6.3 million (U.S.) in donations, triple what Knight has raised.
“I think most Democrats out here, in the last one, didn’t think there was any chance that we could ever get a Democrat in there,” Hill said in a brief encounter at a Tex-Mex restaurant beside one of her campaign offices.
“I think that also: Trump happened. And people are like, ‘We have to do something.’ And we’ve seen real threats to some of the most basic things that we took for granted, right? Health care, women’s rights, so many other things. There’s just been an awakening of people knowing that their vote matters.”
In the 45th district, where Mission Viejo is located, the divide is more about ideology than personal identity. Democratic challenger Katie Porter, a bankruptcy law professor and a Wall Street-criticizing protégé of progressive senator and former professor Elizabeth Warren, is trying to unseat Republican incumbent Mimi Walters, a former investment banker.
Republicans are trying to get voters to focus on the beliefs of local Democrats rather than the president. Their attack ads seek to paint Hill (“liberal Katie Hill”) and Porter (“extreme Katie Porter”) as too left-wing for their communities.
“They’re focusing on the seats that Hillary Clinton won in the presidential. What they forget,” Whitaker said of Democrats, “is that there’s a reason the individual members of Congress were able to retain their seats. And that is because they reflect the districts.” Tulchin, though, said, “Fundamentally, this election is about Trump.” The president dominates the news and the public mind, he said; “Katie Porter does not do that.”
The national-versus-local debate played out at one door in Hill’s district. Financial counsellor Michael Andari, 56, said he usually votes for Democrats but has become uneasy about Hill after hearing from commercials and flyers that she “wants to raise taxes.”
Kraft challenged him on that claim, then pivoted to safer ground.
“I assume if you vote Democrat, you’re not a huge Trump supporter,” Kraft said.
“Of course not,” Andari said. “He’s been a disaster.”