It's a whole new ballgame for Marin GOP these days
Marin's Republican Party is involved in a civil war. The manifestation is in the March 5 primary election which sees 33 candidates running for 17 seats for the Marin County GOP Central Committee.
In California, each official political party's registered voters elect a “central committee” as its official local entity. It sounds grand. The political reality is that central committees are at the bottom of the political totem pole with little real power.
The California secretary of state's 2023 report of registration indicates that, out of 170,811 Marinites registered to vote, only 20,860 or 12.21% registered as Republicans.
The GOP was once dominant in Marin. As late as the early 1980s, it remained competitive. Today, Marin has 106,423 Democrats
and 33,907 “no party preference” independent voters.
Columbia University professor Wallace Sayre said, “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” Replace “university” with “Marin Republicans” and the truism remains.
Marin Republican Central Committee incumbents are being challenged by the aggressive MAGA (“make America great again”) wing of the GOP. Their prime target is local GOP Chair Jack Wilkinson and Vice Chair Tom Montgomery.
Among the challengers is Francis “Frank” Drouillard, coincidentally a candidate for the Marin Board of Supervisors District 4 seat against incumbent Dennis Rodoni.
Drouillard is chair of the Marin Election Integrity Committee. The group was expelled from the GOP Central Committee by Wilkinson. The now-independent committee questions the legitimacy of elections in which all voters are mailed ballots — such as those in Marin and throughout California.
I asked Drouillard if the committee accepts that President
Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election legitimately. He replied, “I know that there were serious problems with the 2020 election that have yet to be fully addressed by the courts, the state legislatures, numerous news outlets and Big Tech.
“Despite their best efforts, a growing number of Americans feel that Sasquatch is more believable than Biden getting 81 million votes.”
Note that former President Donald Trump won 74,223,975 votes with Biden securing 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232.
In the Marin GOP brouhaha, each faction is pledged to support returning Trump to the White House. The fight is about the intensity with which the two sides are committed to Trump's lies and conspiracy theories.
Passions have gone so far that the Central Committee retains a paid security guard, its “sergeant at arms,” to keep peace and eject those who their chair deems out of line.
If Marin Republicans desire to return to political relevance, they would nominate, as they successfully did in the past, moderate Republicans such as former state Sen. Peter Behr, former members of the Assembly Bill Bagley and Dr. Bill Filante.
The party can win today by fielding constitutional conservatives like former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney or center-right Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.
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Two public forums are scheduled for candidates running for Marin's Board of Supervisors in the March 5 primary election. They're hosted by COST Marin, the Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers. Both are on Zoom. I'm the moderator. To register go to costmarin.org and sign up to attend.
Registrants will receive a return email with a link to join the webinar.
COST's candidates' forum in the Second Supervisorial District is Tuesday (Jan. 16) at 7 p.m. District 2 includes San Anselmo, Fairfax, Oak Manor, Ross, Larkspur, Greenbrae, Kentfield, Kent Woodlands, Sleepy Hollow and the San Rafael neighborhoods of Gerstle Park, Bret Hart, Lomita Park and California Park.
The incumbent, Supervisor Katie Rice, is retiring. There are four candidates: Brian Colbert, San Anselmo councilmember; businessperson Heather McPhail Sridharan; Ryan O'Neil, governing board member of the Ross Valley School District; and Gabe Paulson, a tech company CEO and Larkspur City Council member.
The forum for the District 4 race is Jan. 18 at 7 p.m. Watch here next week for details.