Ringside: CA GOP Just Blew $46 Million for Nothing – Here’s How They Can Avoid Repeating That Mistake in 2026

California’s Republican Party wields virtually no power in state politics. They have super-minorities in both houses of the state legislature, they haven’t won a single statewide office in nearly two decades, and they are up against public-sector unions, leftist billionaires, monopolistic corporations and utilities, extreme environmentalists and the renewables industry, and trial lawyers. Democrats routinely outspend Republicans by 2-to-1 to 10-to-1 margins, wielding vast campaign and lobbying funds while painting the GOP a pack of racists who are puppets of corporations.

It would be hilarious if the consequences weren’t so awful. It’s the democrats who are beholden to parasites and have turned their constituents into puppets: All of the special interests who bankroll California’s Democratic party are united by the proposition that the more expensive and regulated the state becomes, the more power and profit they will reap.

Hilarious. Ironic. Sad.

To overcome these disadvantages, California Republicans must act strategically. But, they don’t. Their handling of Governor Newsom’s 2025 special election on Proposition 50, a partisan redistricting measure, exemplifies this dysfunction.

The state party spent $45 million on a doomed, vapid television and social-media campaign to defeat the proposition. With Republicans currently holding only a razor-thin majority in Congress, the size of California’s Republican congressional delegation matters. Every seat counts. Proposition 50 was designed to take away five more Republican-held congressional districts, and opponents had three options:

(1) Spend heavily on ads and lose. This is what happened. The proposition passed overwhelmingly: 7.4 million yes votes (64%) to 4.1 million no votes (36%), a 3.3 million vote margin. California only has 4.1 million registered Republicans. Independents lean roughly 2-to-1 Democratic, and GOP turnout was only slightly lower than Democratic turnout. Democrats spent $122 million and framed the election as anti-Trump. The outcome was never in doubt. The $45 million was wasted. It enriched consultants, ad agencies, and media outlets while achieving nothing.

(2) Concede early. Pre-election polls showed strong voter support for Prop. 50, framed as a way to “stick it to Trump.” By skipping the fight, the GOP could have preserved the $45 million for competitive 2026 midterm races.

(3) Fight Prop. 50, but do so by investing in long-term party-building. This was a missed opportunity. Opposition to Prop. 50 was polarized. Many voters saw through its dishonesty: it did not return redistricting to “the people” but in fact did exactly the opposite. Nor was it about “leveling the playing field” in response to GOP actions in Texas, because California’s Republicans were already as marginalized as Democrats in Texas became after their recent redistricting. Critics also recognized how Democratic policies have crushed the state’s middle class, low-income families, and small businesses.

Options 2 and 3 were the only sensible paths. The GOP could have used the “No on 50” effort to build grassroots strength. They could have mobilized door-to-door outreach to energize registered Republicans, register new voters in GOP households, and target Republican-leaning districts to expand registration. Such efforts would have laid groundwork for future elections.

The party should have learned from 2024, when California Republicans lost three more congressional seats, dropping from 12 to 9 out of 53. Twenty years ago, they held 20.

A stark example is Rep. John Duarte (CA-13), who lost reelection by just 187 votes out of 210,921 cast. One hundred and eighty seven votes. Outspent by over $2 million, Duarte’s razor-thin defeat could have been avoided with modest investment in get-out-the-vote and registration efforts instead of ad-heavy spending.

The last two decades show relentless GOP decline. Congressional representation fell from 38 percent in 2004 to 17 percent in 2024, and that will fall to 8 percent in 2026 if they don’t change their tactics. State legislative seats declined from 40 percent in the Assembly and 38 percent in the Senate in 2004 to 23 percent and 25 percent today.

Party registration tells an even worse story. Republicans had 5.7 million registrants in 2004; by 2024, that fell to 5.6 million, a net loss of over 100,000. Meanwhile, the number of registered Democrats grew from 7.1 million to 10.4 million, up by 3.3 million.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s true that Democrats have more money, control institutions, and stigmatize Republicans, but they have also governed the state into crisis, and there is no end in sight. Their brand is weaker than it should be, as shown by the near-doubling of “decline to state” and third-party voters from 3.7 million (2004) to 6.6 million (2024). Independents now represent nearly 30 percent of the electorate.

In the 2025 special election, the state GOP provided almost no grassroots support—no yard signs, door hangers, or flyers for county organizations. For half the $45 million they squandered, they could have funded statewide precinct walking, voter turnout drives, and registration efforts. Democrats saturate media and still deploy door-to-door operatives; Republicans must choose one or the other.

Reaching voters doesn’t have to involve television and streaming. California has two of the largest media markets in the nation – LA and the SF Bay Area, plus three big ones, San Diego, Sacramento, and Fresno. Buying one minute of prime time air on all five at once starts at around $300,000. For one minute. Imagine instead hiring tens of thousands of activists to put the party’s message onto door hangers and send them walking precincts. At $20 per hour, with each precinct walker expected to put 20 door hangers onto targeted addresses per hour, along with the assumption they will talk with whoever answers the door, $1 million will result in one million door hangers. The hangers themselves don’t cost much, and figure into that bargain would be 200,000 face to face conversations. Each walker would also have voter registration materials.

That’s what you get, for every three minutes of television air you forego. Which is worth more? Three minutes of statewide television that people either fast-forward through or turn off the sound and bow down to peer into their phones during the commercial interval, or 1 million hand delivered flyers, 200,000 actual face-to-face voter conversations, and voter registrations as well? And of course, with the amount of money they spent for television, the GOP could have made certain to harvest every GOP ballot in the state.

The state GOP had that option. For the money they spent, they could have gotten a unified message to tens of millions of voters, reaching millions of them face-to-face. They could have built and trained an army that would be ready to be turned loose in 2026 in any remotely competitive congressional districts, and they could have registered more voters.

As for this door hanger, it could have had a No on Prop. 50 message on one side, but it could have also had the party platform on the other side. A simple, powerful, consistent, transformative, inspiring set of solutions for California. Door hangers by the millions cost next to nothing. Where were they?

A more general Republican state party agenda could counter the Democratic “abundance” narrative and expose it for what it is, a fraud at every level, from Tom Steyer’s multi-million investment in soundbites (he can afford that; the state GOP cannot), to the in-depth exploration of the issue in the book “Abundance,” written by a pair of respected liberals, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. In both cases, whether it’s soundbites or substance, the Democrat recipe for abundance is a joke, because it equates abundant energy with renewables, abundant housing with high density subsidized urban infill, and abundant water with water rationing.

In response, Republicans have the opportunity of a generation. Their points can come down to the following:

• All energy sources are acceptable including clean natural gas and nuclear power.
• All water supply projects should be considered, and we should harvest more winter storm runoff.
• All land should be available for new homes because California is only 5 percent urbanized.

In this manner we can create abundance without subsidies by making all solutions compete with each other, creating jobs.

Let the pros play with those words, let the policy wonks flesh them out. They are the path to victory, because they represent the only realistic path to affordable abundance, and Californians are fed up trying to survive economically in the highest cost-of-living state in America.

California’s GOP can beat the odds in 2026, and defeat much if not all of the intent of Prop. 50, but only if they abandon the failed playbook of the past 20 years. Squandering $45 million on television advertising, while investing almost nothing in building a grassroots army and spreading a more general and very powerful message, was an act of negligence.

The opportunity exists; it is up to the GOP to seize it.