Ringside: What is the Future of California’s Republican Party?

In 2012 I was involved with a ballot initiative that qualified for the state ballot. Generally referred to as a “paycheck protection” measure, it was the third time that conservative activists in the state had put onto the state ballot an initiative which, if approved by voters, would have required public sector unions to ask their members for affirmative consent before they could spend any portion of their dues on politics or lobbying.

It was quite a fight. According to Open Secrets, proponents ultimately spent nearly $60 million to convince voters to support Prop. 32, but this is misleading. The biggest committee formed is support of Prop. 32 was also spending money to defeat Prop. 30 which proposed to increase the state sales tax rate from 7.25 to 7.50 percent. Taking this into account, Prop. 32 was outspent by its foes $73 million to $35 million. Even this understates our funding disadvantage, since the priority of the PAC focused on both initiatives was to prioritize stopping Prop. 30 where they felt there were better odds.

In the end, both went wrong. Voters approved Prop. 30 by a 55.5 percent to 44.6 percent margin and sales taxes went up. At the same time, voters rejected Prop. 32 by a even more decisive 56.6 percent to 43.4 percent margin, and the so-called “paycheck protection” initiative went down in defeat.

This campaign marked my first insider experience in politics. And contrary to what I’d always been told, I learned that Democrats in California have far more money than Republicans. I learned this is largely thanks to the power of California’s public sector unions which are overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats, and which altogether spend hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle. That fact has been confirmed repeatedly over the years since 2012, most recently in the overwhelming spending advantage Democrats recently wielded in their successful campaign to restore partisan gerrymandering in California through the passage of Prop. 50.

There were other observations I first made back in 2012 that have stood the test of time. They should have come as no surprise but at least for me, until I saw them first hand it wasn’t obvious. The first is that donors control campaign strategy. I was part of a grassroots team that managed to qualify Prop. 32 for the ballot – something that is virtually impossible today – but as soon we got it qualified and the big money arrived, the whole campaign message was altered. The second thing I learned was that the donors dictate who the consultants will be, and here again, as soon as there was a pile of new money, in rode a new team of consultants. And third, I realized with considerable shock that most consultants at best hold a bemused indifference to campaign volunteers and unpaid party activists. More common is almost open contempt.

In retrospect, I was naive to not realize that the biggest donors pick the strategy and pick who they’re going to pay. The attitude of consultants toward volunteers, however, was something I didn’t expect.

At first glance it would seem this is a horrific wasted opportunity. But for Republicans, seizing this opportunity isn’t as easy as it might seem. When it comes to the Democrats, they have two advantages.

First, they have a cadre of leftist, union indoctrinated public sector workers who get a lot of time off work, and are united by a handful of simple but powerful mantras: corporations are bad, racism and sexism is bad, excessive private wealth is exploitative, fossil fuel is poisoning the planet and may kill us all, if government programs and benefits are cut we cannot survive, and Republicans epitomize all of these bad things and they must be stopped.

Second, the Democrats pay their “volunteers,” which means they are better trained and more disciplined.

What do Republicans have to counter this? When you aren’t paying people to volunteer, and when you don’t have a set of unifying mantras that hijack the amygdala, what’s left that will enable you to mobilize the armies that Democrats routinely muster to register voters, walk precincts, and harvest ballots?

As it turns out, not much. Republican voters who are animated by the economic oppression levied on small businesses are also too busy working to walk precincts. Other Republican activists tend to be focused on social issues where while they’re usually right, often extremely right, they are issues that are easily caricatured by the Left. For example, Democrats have managed to make preserving the right to choose an abortion an almost sacred single issue that has become the only thing that matters to millions of liberal voters. And yet that is the issue that also would turn out the largest contingents of Republican volunteers.

In general, social conservatives have a hard time winning in California, even though their moral arguments are sound. Maybe the sentiments of the electorate can eventually be realigned to embrace conservative positions on social issues, but it’s a long and uphill battle that is best fought for now in the culture. But political professionals, facing county parties where social conservatives make those issues their priority and dominate the central committees, have a tough choice. They can do what the most powerful faction in their activist base wants, and invest campaigns with social conservative messaging, and lose, or they can keep the grassroots at arms length.

To stop here, however, is only half the story. There are plenty of grassroots activists in California who are practical and realize there are issues where the Democrats have failed and are clearly accountable since they’ve been running the state virtually unopposed for over a generation. Economic issues, ridiculous over-regulation, the cost of living, failing education, persistent and rampant homelessness and ongoing unacceptable rates of crime are all issues where the Democrats have made a mess.

And here is where Republican donors and their professional consultants have to be held accountable. They have failed to come up with a message of hope and a unified set of policy proposals that will solve the issues where Democrats have no answer and keep on just making everything worse. With such glaring deficiencies in Democrat policies, Republicans must come up with a message and platform that presents a clear and attractive alternative. But they haven’t even come up with a message powerful enough to attract their own grassroots base. That is inexcusable. Republicans can disagree internally over how much priority to assign social issues, or how these issues should be addressed, but meanwhile there is an entire preexisting world of agreement among Republicans on issues of compelling relevance and enormous scope.

For example:

• All it would take to have cheap electricity again would be to stop shutting down a natural gas power plant every time another 100 megawatt solar-plus-storage farm is commissioned.
• All it would take to have abundant water again would be to relax restrictions on delta pumping during the massive storms that sweep through California every winter, and permit farmers to recharge aquifers during winter surpluses without that costing them part of their summer allocations.
• We could stop most major wildfires simply by restoring the ability of logging companies to harvest and mill timber in the state.
• We could end most homelessness by building cost-effective congregate shelters and compelling homeless people to use them, and enforcing sobriety.
• Rates of crime would fall precipitously if we simply were allowed to enforce Prop. 36.
• We could lower the cost of housing by ending the regulatory war on single family homes on open land.
• We could go a long way towards rescuing K-12 public education by making it easier to open charter schools and by enacting the Vergara reforms – longer probationary periods before granting teacher tenure, prioritizing merit over seniority in layoffs, and making it easier for principals to fire bad teachers.

While every one of these proposals will drive a hard left activist apoplectic, they’re actually quite reasonable. And most of them would either generate tax revenue or reduce government spending.

There’s much more, of course. The California Business Roundtable, or the California Chapter of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, or scores of other business groups are ready to propose countless reforms that might finally stop California from being recognized as the worst state in America to do business, year after year, or having nearly the worst tax climate in the U.S., also year after year.

Another thing I learned however back in 2012 which is undoubtedly still true regards the ecosystem of political consulting professionals. Unlike in the private sector, where markets are perpetual and anyone with good skills can search at anytime for a new job, in the political sector jobs arrive with the campaign season and end after every election. A political professional must engage in a perpetual scramble for work and in this environment, contacts and loyalty are more likely to predominate over competence. The friend you get onto a campaign this cycle is the friend who will get you hired somewhere else on the next cycle.

How decisive this difference between job market in the private sector versus the political sector is hard to judge, but it is another way in which Democrats wield an advantage over Republicans. Only Democrats have full time armies of public sector union political professionals and a perennial flow of money to fund full time lobbyists and consultants.

Which brings us to the recent debacle called Republican opposition to Prop. 50. The major donors who spent millions in a futile attempt to head off passage must know the model is broken. So why did they spend all that money? And the political professionals who took that money and used it to buy television ads must also have known it was going to be a colossal waste of money. Is that the best our political professionals can do? Accept the ecosystem as it is, knowing that using the same tactics will fail, but pretend they won’t fail so donors don’t balk, then count on friends to get another next job on the next cycle? Is that what happened?

What needs to happen is a reconciliation. California’s grassroots and the donor/consultant class need to identify common ground, and the motivation and means to do this is best coming from donors who are tired of squandering their money. Donors and grassroots need to unite on a platform that will attract a majority of voters in the state, and there is plenty of material to work with. For those grassroots activists for whom good enough is the enemy of perfect, and for whom social issues are the only thing that matters, for now they can redirect their energy to changing the culture.

For the rest of California’s Republican grassroots activists who want to win, they can get training and they can get paid, and they can take those millions that went into the pockets of ad agencies, television networks, and consultants, and use it instead to spread – door to door – a practical message that voters are ready to hear. A message and a platform that will unify and restore California.