Garcia triumph gives GOP momentum
GOP businessman Mike Garcia’s surprisingly easy win in a California congressional runoff election provided a welcome spark of life for Republicans across the country and a warning light for Democrats anxious to keep control of the House.
Garcia led Assemblywoman Christy Smith, DSanta Clarita (Los Angeles County), 56% to 44% on Wednesday in the contest to serve the remaining months of the term of Democrat Katie Hill, who resigned late last year.
Although that margin probably will tighten as thousands of latearriving mail ballots are counted, it’s clear there are not enough outstanding votes to change the outcome of Tuesday’s election. Smith conceded the race Wednesday, vowing to take back the seat when she and Garcia meet in a November rematch for the full, twoyear term.
“While it’s critical that we ensure every vote is counted and recorded, we believe that the current tally shows Mike Garcia is
the likely victor in the May 12 special election,” Smith said in a statement. “As such, I’d like to congratulate him. That said, this is only one step in this process.”
Garcia and his GOP allies were gleeful over the win.
“After seeing more results last night, it is clear that our message of lower taxes and ensuring we don’t take liberal Sacramento dysfunction to Washington prevailed,” Garcia said in a statement. “I’m ready to go to work right away.”
In a tweet Wednesday, President Trump called it “a big Congressional win in California,” and a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee’s “Trump Victory Committee” said voters had rejected the Democrats’ “tired socialist policies” and that the “Republicans’ path to winning back the House runs through California thanks to the enthusiasm for President Trump.”
There’s not much evidence that deepblue California has suddenly become Trump country, however. An Emerson College poll of registered voters in the state, released Monday, found that 59% of those surveyed disapprove of the job Trump has done as president, and they favor Democrat Joe Biden in the November race by 30 points.
But Democrats have to worry that Smith’s campaign cratered even though she and the party spent heavily on ads trying to link Garcia to the president and his policies. Trump’s highprofile endorsement and Garcia’s enthusiastic embrace of the president didn’t seem to hurt him with the voters of the district, which extends across northern Los Angeles County and west into Ventura County.
For Democrats, “there’s an overreliance on Trump and trying to tie him to Republican candidates,” said Mike Madrid, a GOP consultant who is nevertheless working to defeat the president in November. “You still need a candidate that voters can get behind.”
Garcia, a former Navy fighter pilot and the son of immigrants from Mexico, struck a chord in the district, Madrid added.
Because there’s no sign of a Trump resurgence in California, the election came down to a contrast between Garcia and Smith, a former school board member who was elected to the Assembly in 2018.
Tuesday’s election was also the first held in the heart of the coronavirus pandemic, which may have affected the results in ways that can’t yet be judged, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., which analyzes voting behavior for political groups and campaigns.
By the time all the votes are counted, Garcia’s congressional race will have the secondhighest turnout of any California special election since 2015 — behind only Tuesday’s runoff election for the 28th State Senate District in Riverside County.
“If you’re stuck in the house with a ballot for a month, you’re likely to send it in,” Mitchell said.
Republican complaints that Democrats were trying to rig the election by opening more inperson voting centers came to nothing, Mitchell added. Those votes broke better than 21 for Garcia, the Republican.
Inperson votes accounted for only a relative handful of the ballot cast, with better than 95% of the votes arriving by mail.
Garcia will face a very different group of voters in November, an electorate that won’t be nearly as old, white and Republican as the group that cast ballots Tuesday.
“The number of voters will basically double” in the general election, Mitchell said. In Tuesday’s election, he said, “there was a dramatic underperformance of younger, minority and independent voters.”
All those groups of voters are much more likely to turn out for a presidential election, he added, “which changes the face of the race.”
Garcia’s victory breaks a long GOP losing streak in California and gives Republicans hope, not only for grabbing back some of the six other congressional seats that Democrats flipped in California in 2018 — Hill knocked off a GOP incumbent — but also taking control of the House.
“This is the most important election,” said former GOP Rep. Elton Gallegly, who joined Garcia on a halfhour conference call with supporters Tuesday night. “This is the first domino, and we’re going to see others fall.”