California GOP looking beyond Garvey to lure voters
Republican Senate candidate Steve Garvey didn’t show up this weekend to the biggest Republican gig of the year, the three-day California Republican Party convention in Burlingame that ended Sunday.
And the reaction among the 800 top grassroots activists and party leaders: Meh.
They feel they’ve got better ways to rally Republican voters to the polls than to depend on the former Los Angeles Dodger, who has never run for office before and has run a largely below-the-radar campaign.
The savvier party folks understood why he ditched. Garvey needs to win over moderates and independent voters if he has a prayer of defeating Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who currently leads him 61% to 37% in a Public Policy Institute of California survey of likely voters published in April.
Showing up at a convention where he could be lumped in with the event’s conservative marquee speakers — dog-killing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and red-meat-slinging Republican National Committee cochair Lara Trump — doesn’t exactly scream “I’m a moderate.” Nor would attending a convention that passed a resolution that expressed concern about the “targeting” of John Eastman, a former Chapman University Law School dean who has pleaded not guilty to charges in both Arizona and Georgia that he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. A State Bar Court judge has recommended that he be disbarred.
Besides, Garvey has largely been steering clear of many Republican-only events, including making the rounds of local county GOP committees, as many statewide candidates do.
Instead, Republicans are depending on other people and issues to push their voters to the
polls in a state where there are twice as many registered Democrats.
Top of the list: fears of rising crime.
On Sunday, the party backed a potential tough-on-crime ballot measure that would raise penalties for retail theft, a move far more important in juicing turnout. County election officials are reviewing the more than 900,000 signatures supporters turned in last month for a ballot initiative called the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act. It seeks to revise parts of Proposition 47, the 2014 voter-approved ballot measure that raised the felony threshold for theft to $950 from $450.
“Sometimes candidates don't set people's hair on fire, but quality-of-life issues do,” California Republican Party chair Jessica Millan Patterson said. “Crime is the No. 1 issue across the board. And when the mayor of San Francisco (London Breed) is on board with revising Prop 47, it's very clear that this was a failed experiment.”
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a frequent Fox News guest who is reportedly considering a 2026 run for governor, told conventiongoers Friday that he believes voters are moving away from criminal justice reforms found in Proposition 47.
“It is obvious to us in law enforcement that it is starting to swing the other way. Our general public is fed up with the homeless, they're fed up with the crime,” said Bianco, who was briefly a member of the extremist Oath Keepers group in 2014. Some of the group's leaders were convicted of helping to orchestrate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Bianco has said that he doesn't remember joining the group. “'The public is changing (on criminal justice reform). It's just going to take all of us to make that pendulum go a little bit faster,” he said.
Besides crime fears, California Republicans believe that the greatest driver of turnout is Donald Trump being on the ballot again. Republicans (63%) are much more enthusiastic to see a replay of the 2020 election than either Democrats (36%) or independents (27%), according to a Monmouth University poll last month.
“Trump, for whatever you want to say about him, he's got the Republican base very enthusiastic, and they're going to turn out,” said Assembly Republican leader James Gallagher of Yuba City (Sutter County). “What's going to drive voters to the polls is (the question), ‘Are you better off than four years ago?' And I think the answer is pretty clearly no. Joe Biden is not driving Democratic voters to the polls. That's a big problem for them.”
Sales were brisk at the convention for Trump-themed merchandise from outside vendors, including one called the MAGA Mall. It also featured anti-Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris merchandise, including a misogynistic T-shirt that read, “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go” and another that showed Biden sporting a Hitler-style mustache next to the phrase “Not My Dictator.”
Lara Trump, the former president's daughter-in-law, mocked Biden's ability to physically handle the rigors of debating and implied, without citing any evidence, that Biden would be “on something” to help him power through the first debate, which is scheduled for June 27 in Atlanta.
“Get your popcorn ready because I can't wait to see Joe Biden try to make it up onstage just to stand up there for like 90 minutes … and then to defend his record and put together coherent sentences without a teleprompter, without the note cards,” she said during her Saturday night onstage appearance at the convention. “I mean, we know they're gonna have him on something.”
Even part of the prayer before Saturday's programming offered by Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney, had a political bent: “Please guide the leaders of this party to make the right decisions for us to be able to reclaim this country from the malevolent forces of Marxism, nihilism and godlessness that are throughout the land.”
Republicans did take a slight turn to the center, but not without a fight. The party approved remaining neutral on ACA5, the November ballot measure that would strengthen support for same-sex marriage in the state Constitution and repeal language stating marriage is only between a man and woman. The measure is expected to pass easily in a state that overwhelmingly supports same-sex marriage. Even a majority of Republicans support gay nuptials, according to polls. Trump has said he's “fine” with gay marriage, telling “60 Minutes” in 2016 that “it's law. … It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean, it's done.”
State Republican delegates voted to be “neutral” on the measure Sunday, even though party bylaws still view marriage as only between a man and a woman. Gary Cass, a pastor from San Diego, railed against the party taking a neutral stand.
“We cannot afford to alienate the people of faith in our party, including and especially the huge Hispanic community that we have to move into the Republican Party, or we will be absolutely worthless,” Cass told delegates Sunday. “We cannot be neutral on marriage.”
Charles Moran, president of the pro-LGBTQ Log Cabin Republicans, urged the party not to oppose the ballot measure because “voters need to know that we are a big tent party. That we are a party that is inclusive of all people and that we can have divergent points of opinion within our own party — and we do.”
Those differences include accepting a Senate candidate not showing up to their state convention.