Ringside: Why California’s GOP Voters Must Show Up in November

The chances that a Republican could be elected governor in California have not been this good in a generation. But to do it, the winning candidate will have to attract a record turnout from registered Republicans, while also earning votes from a sizable percentage of independent voters and disaffected Democrats. If he gets every Republican vote, that will bring him to 25 percent. If he gets every non-party and minor party voter’s support, that will add another 30 percent, or to the extent he falls short he will need to peel away the votes of some Democrats.

Both of these objectives are achievable, but it won’t be easy. Let’s assume that Steve Hilton ends up as the Republican on the November ballot, since the latest primary polling has him at 20 percent vs. Chad Bianco at 12 percent. He will probably face either Tom Steyer or, because even Democrats are afraid of a Steyer governorship, Xavier Becerra.

If Steyer is elected, he will sign legislation and issue executive orders that even Gavin Newsom had enough sense to reject. These new taxes and new regulations will further weaken small and emerging businesses, multi-generational family owned businesses, while enabling large corporations and hedge funds to further consolidate every industry in the state, from nail salons and neighborhood restaurants to veterinary clinics and family farms. Is this what most Democratic voters want?

By his own example, Steyer is exposing the core masquerade of the left: socialism in America is not helping workers. It empowers centralization of power and wealth. It profits from inefficiency, fraud, waste, and corruption to destroy independent businesses, to destroy meritocracy, to mire a nation in process: litigation, regulation, and mandates, all hiding behind cynical misuse of high minded notions: compassion, environmentalism, “equity.” Tom Steyer is the oligarch he claims he will fight. Will Democrats finally recognize the deception?

And then there’s Xavier Becerra, a career politician who California’s ruling establishment is coalescing behind to stop Steyer. Among Democrats, Becerra is positioned today in a manner similar to how Joe Biden was represented versus Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential election. Good old “Uncle Joe,” the steadfast and moderate statesman. Never mind the clown show that took over the West Wing for four years and almost destroyed the country. Now we have “Tio Becerra” ready to take the helm to steer a steady course of sanity.

But it isn’t sanity, because nothing California’s state government has done for the last twenty years or more is sane. The functional, behind the scenes agenda of California’s Democrats for a generation has been centralization. That political and economic goal, profoundly advanced at this point, defies ideological stereotyping. In fact, the more ideology is overlaid on any analysis of Democratic politics in California today, the more likely the diagnosis will be flawed and misleading.

The special interests that control California through its Democratic party are not ideological. Those trappings are the moral masquerade, inducing voters to support Democrats. The motivating forces behind California’s trial lawyers, public sector unions, environmentalist NGOs, tribes, “renewables” industry, “climate” lobby, homeless industrial complex, welfare bureaucracy, and heavily subsidized “affordable” housing developers is transactional. They want to continue to collect hundreds of billions of dollars per year from state and local governments, and to extract additional hundreds of billions of dollars per year from California’s consumers who are paying artificially inflated prices for virtually everything.

Becerra is an avatar of this corrupt, regressive regime. Nothing more. If he becomes governor, California will continue its drift toward feudalism. The productive citizens will continue to flee the state. An increasing percentage of remaining Californians will depend on government handouts to survive economically, which in-turn will cement their support for the Democratic machine in perpetuity.

The question every Democrat who, for example, confront implacable, indifferent, incompetent local and state government bureaucrats who forbid them to rebuild their incinerated home in Los Angeles, should ask themselves is this: Why should I vote for candidates who are part of a political machine that uses government regulations to destroy the ability of people to make an independent living, then earns their votes by offering them government assistance?

And if the answer disaffected Democrats come up with is no, we don’t want to support this deceit and abuse any more, who are they going to vote for?

The Republican alternative, Steve Hilton, will be portrayed by his opponent as a dangerous right wing MAGA extremist beholden to President Trump. But Hilton will fight back. His political experience, his detailed policy research, and his optimistic vision for California provide ample evidence he is not an extremist. Hilton’s biggest opportunity to win over independent voters and disaffected Democrats is to highlight his solutions as well as his philosophy as most evident in his book “Positive Populism.” Hilton is articulate enough and assertive enough to overcome accusations of extremism in the upcoming gubernatorial debates between the top two candidates later this year, no matter who he faces.

Unfortunately what gives Steve Hilton a fighting chance in the November election with independent voters and disaffected Democrats is his greatest weakness with a significant percentage of California’s Republicans. These voters want a candidate who embraces conservative values and can be relied on to fight for them if elected. And for this segment of GOP voters, Hilton’s policies may be mostly good, but after enduring decades of Democrat policies, mostly good isn’t good enough. This is a strong argument but it misses the point.

The choice facing California’s Republicans isn’t between a perfect candidate and a mostly good candidate. It’s between a mostly good candidate and a candidate who will perpetuate California’s slide into feudalism. The 80/20 rule applies here. If you can get 80 percent of what you’re looking for from one candidate, and you’re not even going to get 20 percent of what you need from the other candidate, you vote for the candidate that’s going to give you that 80 percent, because you don’t want to end up with the alternative.

There is an ultra conservative Republican in California who gets this. His name is Arthur Schaper, former president of the Beach Cities Republican Club in Los Angeles. His tactics of aggressive activism led the Republican Party of Los Angeles County to unanimously revoke the club’s charter. But in a recent article for American Greatness, when writing about Trump’s attempts to keep a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, Schaper had this to say about a moderate Republican Congressman from California:

“Consider Congressman David Valadao, the Kings County dairy farmer. He has been pushing amnesty ever since he got into Congress. Valadao has weathered the most storms, having represented an interesting section of the Central Valley since 2012. It’s a two-to-one Democratic district, but he still gathers enough support from both sides of the aisle, plus his friendship with all sorts of farming interests. He’s the only Republican who can win.”

Schaper’s main point in his article is that Republicans in deep red states have no business compromising on conservative values, but Congressman Valadeo, able to win elections as a Republican in a two-to-one Democratic congressional district, does have to make compromises to get elected. Schaper recognizes something that every conservative Republican voter in California should also consider: California is a two-to-one Democratic state. It is a deep blue state. And we can vote for a mostly good candidate who will fight to fix much of what is broken, or we can stay home.

Steve Hilton faces long odds, and the legacy of failed Republican bids for governor over the last few elections might induce a GOP voter to think why bother? But there are other consequences of Republicans sitting this one out.

There is an initiative on the ballot in November, sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association, called the Local Taxpayer Protection Act to Save Proposition 13. It closes loopholes that have allowed local governments and interest groups to bypass Prop. 13’s voter protections and raise taxes, by reasserting Prop. 13’s two-thirds vote requirement for voters to approve new taxes.

In retaliation, California’s Democratic Legislature put onto the ballot ACA 13. This will require any citizen-initiated constitutional amendments that propose a higher vote threshold for state or local ballot measures to meet the same higher threshold to pass. For example, a ballot initiative proposing a 60 percent requirement for voters to approve tax increases, would itself have to be approved by 60 percent of voters.

This is an impossible standard. It virtually guarantees that tax increases in California that require voter approval will never again require more than a simple majority. Which brings us back to the core strategy of California’s Democratic Party: Make sure that 50 percent of the voters in the state collect more in benefits than they pay in taxes, and they will always vote for bigger government and higher taxes. ACA 13 must be defeated.

Also on the ballot this November is the “California Voter Identification, Citizenship Verification, and Registered Voter List Administration Initiative.” It has a chance. And if it passes, it will go a long way toward eliminating that uncanny phenomenon in California where in every race where the count is close the day after the election, somehow 40 days later after all the ballots are received, processed, and “cured,” including from voters registered on election day and given “provisional ballots,” the Democrat always wins.

Republican voters in California cannot stay home. There is too much at stake.