Trump's fault

California Republicans in trouble, but it's not all Trump's fault

By David Siders

With Donald Trump cratering in California and Republicans across the state returning mail ballots at lower rates than in 2012, former California Republican chairman Mike Schroeder winced at the numbers coming in last week.

Schroeder, political director of Ted Cruz’s primary campaign in California, was helping to scramble volunteers for down-ballot Republicans in competitive contests. Otherwise, he could only hope for a decisive — and early — victory for Hillary Clinton in the presidential race.

If Trump loses before polls close on the West Coast next week, prompting traditionally less reliable Democratic voters to stay home, Schroeder said, “That could help.”

More than 2.5 million Californians already have voted by mail, and Republican returns statewide are down about 1.4 percent from 2012, according to Political Data Inc., the voter data firm used by both Republicans and Democrats in California. Democrats, meanwhile, were exceeding their 2012 turnout at this point by two-tenths of a percent.

If that trend carries through the election, according to a district-by-district analysis compiled exclusively for POLITICO California by PDI on Sunday, Democrats will over-perform projections in every congressional and legislative district in the state.

But in no district would the Democratic turnout exceed projections by more than 1 percentage point. That lower turnout is only compounding a greater reason Republicans are vulnerable in California — the increasingly Democratic nature of their districts. According to PDI, a growing number of young voters and Latinos would have improved Democratic turnout statewide by an average of 5 percentage points over 2012 no matter who was on the ballot.

The fallout could be devastating for down-ballot Republicans. The combination of unfavorable demographic changes and Trump’s projected undertow could tilt the balance in a handful of competitive House races in California and lift Democrats’ effort to reclaim a two-thirds majority in at least one house of the state Legislature.

“If these figures hold throughout the whole period of the early vote,” said Tony Quinn, a political analyst and former Republican legislative aide, Republicans are “going to lose virtually all of these contested races.”

For a Republican Party already withering in California, he said, “It’s going to kill them … They could just sink so low that they never come back.”

While Democrats would have to run the table in several competitive districts to gain a supermajority in the state Senate, an unlikely outcome even in an advantageous election year, their prospects in the state Assembly run higher. In the lower house, Democrats need to pick up only two seats, and early turnout in targeted districts is moving in their favor.

“We’re very likely to have a supermajority in the Assembly,” said Scott Lay, a nonpartisan analyst who runs the the political “The Nooner” newsletter in Sacramento.

The California Republican Party had been in decline long before the rise of Trump, growing older and whiter as the electorate became increasingly diverse. No Republican presidential nominee has carried California since George H.W. Bush in 1988, and no Republican holds statewide office.

Yet the party had taken steps to revive itself before Trump left the GOP nationally in disarray.

It installed a highly regarded tactician, Jim Brulte, as chairman, shifting the party’s focus from ideology to fundraising and voter registration. It removed the term “illegal alien” from its platform and recruited moderate Republican candidates to run for office. In the mid-term elections in 2014, Republicans picked up seats in the state Legislature.

Two years later, once-safe Republicans are facing a barrage of Democrats attempting to yoke them to a highly unpopular nominee. Trump is running at a historically low 28 percent in California, according to the most recent Public Policy Institute of California poll. Meanwhile, Republican Party registration has fallen below 27 percent statewide, down from 30 percent in 2012.

“Right as we’re righting the ship in California, Trump comes on the scene and blows the whole thing up,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who specializes in Latino politics in California. “It gets harder and harder for Republicans to hold on to what were Republican seats.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, who beat his Democratic challenger by 16 percentage points in 2012, faced an initial turnout projection 6 percentage points better for Democrats than in the last presidential election, and he is suffering from a slight under-performance among Republican early voters, according to PDI.

In the Central Valley, Rep. Jeff Denham is also contending with marginally weak early returns, on top of turnout projections that ran 3 percentage points better for Democrats than in 2012. Democrats challenging Issa and Denham have relied heavily on advertising linking their opponents to Trump.

Early turnout projections can fail to capture swings on Election Day. In the June primary, PDI’s Paul Mitchell cautioned in Capitol Weekly on Friday, Latinos and young voters turned out in higher numbers than expected based on the early vote.

Dave Gilliard, a strategist for Issa, Denham and Scott Jones, the Republican challenging Rep. Ami Bera in a competitive Sacramento-area race, said that with a large proportion of independent voters in California, he was more closely watching the age of voters returning ballots early than their partisan breakdown. Returns as of late last week suggested older voters — those more likely to vote Republican — were returning ballots in higher proportions than at this point in the last presidential race.

Jessica Patterson, chief executive officer of the California Trailblazers program, which recruits and trains Republican legislative candidates, said efforts by Democrats to tie Republicans to Trump are demeaning to voters, who, she said, “are smarter than some of these consultants are giving them credit for.”

“These are people who have seen (Assemblyman) David Hadley on the soccer field for a decade or more. … These are people that [Assemblyman] Marc Steinorth delivered cookies to,” Patterson said. “These are people that live and breathe their community … I think what a lot of voters are doing — they see the difference between [those candidates and] the top of the ticket.”

At a campaign headquarters in the Central Valley city of Modesto, behind a banner advertising Denham as a “local farmer,” House Speaker Paul Ryan last week told supporters that Denham was integral to “fixing some of your biggest problems here.”

When Denham was asked if he would vote for Trump by Sacramento’s KCRA-TV, the candidate responded that he would focus his campaign on "the real issues that people are focused on — water, national security, the fight against ISIS.”

Still, in many congressional and legislative races, Trump is a litmus test. The Modesto Bee, which had endorsed Denham in every one of his races for state Senate and the House, changed course this year, writing, “If Jeff Denham can’t reject Trump, we must reject him.”

Denham challenger Michael Eggman, citing improving turnout projections for Democrats in the district, said that unlike in the race he lost to Denham two years ago, “it feels like I have the wind at my back.”

Even Republicans who have distanced themselves from the top of the ticket are not immune to the effect of Trump. In a wealthy suburban Assembly district east of San Francisco, Republican Assemblywoman Catharine Baker denounced Trump months ago and said she will write in Condoleezza Rice for president.

But Democrat Cheryl Cook-Kallio has continued to link Baker to her party’s nominee, dispatching a mailer stating, “On the issues that really impact us, Republican Catharine Baker’s votes look a lot like what Donald Trump says.”

Baker is defending a district where projected turnout has grown 4 percentage points for Democrats since 2012, and where lagging Republican returns are giving Democrats an additional advantage of just less than 1 percentage point more.

Following a rally at Cook-Kallio’s headquarters on Saturday, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said “it looks like a lot of Republicans are staying home.”

Baker, pausing between telephone calls over tea at her campaign office several miles away, said voters in her district ask her more about policy than Trump. But she acknowledged her race “will be dramatically tighter” next week than it was in 2014.

“There’s a lot of factors at play in a presidential year,” she said.

Looking past past the election, Baker said, “Whatever happens in November … our party needs to rebuild and grow."