Anti-Prop 50 campaign collapses

California Republicans retreat as anti-Prop 50 campaign collapses

Opponents of the Democratic-gerrymander start casting blame for defeat at the ballot.

By Will McCarthy

Republicans appear to have all but abandoned their efforts to defeat a Democratic gerrymander of California’s House districts one week before it goes before voters.

As Democrats pummel the state with Yes on 50 advertising, the Republican side of the battle has gone quiet. Major GOP donors and party leaders have effectively vanished from the front lines.

The biggest funder of the campaign to defeat Proposition 50, Charles Munger Jr., has not contributed any significant cash to the cause in weeks, and his Protect Voters First committee cut its weekly spending from more than $4 million to less than $300. The other opposition committee, Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab, spent $155,000 on advertising last week, compared to $3.8 million from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Yes on 50 campaign.

“It’s as full-throated a campaign for Democrats in California as if we were in the middle of a presidential election,” said Jon Fleischman, a former executive director of the California Republican Party. “But you can go to the house next door, occupied by Republicans, and it’s crickets — other than receiving their ballot in the mail.”

That imbalance represents a turnabout from August, when Newsom first moved his proposed map redraw towards the November ballot. At the time polls showed support for the measure, which became known as Prop 50, hovering precariously just over 50 percent. That appeared beatable by a campaign able to mobilize the Republican base while raising enough money to sway the relatively small slice of persuadable centrists. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy vowed to raise $100 million for the enterprise.

Instead Prop 50 opponents have been greatly outmatched in resources and are now bracing for an embarrassing loss. A CBS News poll released last week showed 62 percent of likely voters support the initiative.

“We still believe that there is a pathway here,” Jessica Millan Patterson, a former California Republican Party chair leading McCarthy’s committee, insisted at an American Association of Political Consultants panel in Long Beach last week. “Despite being outspent two to one.”

The Munger committee, for its part, said it would keep the flame alive, but that “Charles doesn’t discuss strategy until after the election.”

“We are continuing to communicate with voters about the value of California’s citizen-led redistricting process and will do so until the election is over,” said Protect Voters First spokesperson Amy Thoma Tan.

Munger, a multi-millionaire good-government philanthropist who backed 2008 and 2010 initiatives that established California’s independent redistricting process, has contributed $32 million this year to defend that system. His committee, Protect Voters First, was created soon after Newsom moved to put Prop 50 on the ballot.

His last major contribution to the campaign was on September 29. Some with knowledge of Munger’s spending say that he has not cut back on his contributions because of poor polling, but rather because he reached a predetermined spending limit. Others believe he would have given more had other funders had followed him. No other major donors have emerged to back Protect Voters First.

Diminishing resources have forced Munger’s campaign, which initially nearly kept pace with Newsom’s spending, to pull back significantly. They have gone from a weekly television advertising budget of between $4 million to $5 million to less than $300 the week of October 21. After inundating YouTube with No on 50 ads throughout September, Protect Voter First has not purchased a single ad on the video platform in October, according to parent company Google’s records.

The McCarthy-led Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab has raised just $11 million, primarily from national Republican Party committees and super PACs. Despite early expressions of opposition to Prop 50, President Donald Trump has not taken any significant action to aid the campaign to defeat it, although his administration is now planning to send election monitors to California in what critics have called an act of voter intimidation.

“Until polls close on November 4, we’ll use every available resource to fight back against Newsom’s partisan power grab,” Stop Sacramento Power Grab adviser Ellie Hockenbury said in a statement. With strategists on both sides treating Prop 50’s passage as a foregone conclusion, the Republican search for scapegoats appears to have begun.

Fleischman, the former party official who now works as an Orange County-based consultant, criticized Republican committees for relying on direct mail to reach voters while conceding the digital sphere to Democrats.

“I had a friend who just told me about how their 21-year-old son just got a piece of snail mail telling them why Prop 50 is bad,” Fleischman said on his podcast earlier this month. “So somebody’s wasting money on the Republican side.”

Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio said that he believed the opposition campaign “defrauded” donors with a poor campaign strategy and “inauthentic” videos.

“I knew they were going to waste money,” he told POLITICO at a No on 50 rally in the Sacramento suburb of Roseville. “The same people who gave us a superminority are the ones running these committees and profiting off the failure.”