SAN FRANCISCO — The outgoing chair of the California GOP — the nation’s largest state Republican Party — has issued a dire warning that his state represents “the canary in the coal mine” for the party‘s national fortunes unless it confronts demographic shifts that have already turned California into a majority-minority state.
“We have not yet been able to figure out how to effectively communicate and get significant numbers of votes from non-whites,’’ said former state Sen. Jim Brulte, who’s held the job of state GOP chair since 2013 and will retire in February.
Despite trend lines that show the “the entire country will be majority minority by 2044,’’ he said, the GOP has failed to confront the reality of those changes — or recognize the possibility that the recent "blue tsunami" midterm election in California was a harbinger of what lies ahead for the national party.
But he said those warnings about the changing political and ethnic landscape have gone unheeded.
“And that’s why I have said that I believe California is the canary in the coal mine — not an outlier,’’ for the GOP in the coming cycles, he told POLITICO.
The California chairman’s comments come days after some state party leaders — including former state party chair Shawn Steele — charged that the party’s shellacking in 2018 was less about demographics and more about Democrats’ use of new practices at the ballot box, suggesting they could have involved voter fraud.
Brulte told POLITICO he categorically rejects the notion that voting irregularities may be the source of the party’s historic beating in the 2018 midterms in California, where Democrats flipped seven House seats and left the party with just seven members in the congressional delegation, the lowest number since the 1940s. He said Republicans were repeatedly informed of ways that Democrats were marshaling new and effective ways to get out the vote — but campaigns failed to take action.
“We personally briefed the candidates, the congressional delegation, the legislators,’’ and even staff inside the White House in 2017 on the upcoming changes in California laws that might affect turnout,’ said Brulte, who lead his party for decades in the legislature.
Brulte pointed to new laws that allowed for “motor voter” registration at the Department of Motor Vehicles, same-day registration, and new efforts to register younger voters. And, he said, campaigns were specifically informed of changes which legalized “ballot harvesting” — coordinated efforts to gather and return absentee ballots with voters’ permission, a program which backers said would assist older or disabled voters.
While Democrats used ballot harvesting with great success in a collection of key races here where mail ballots made up the margin of success, “we’ve not been able to find Republicans having a lot of success anywhere related to ballot harvesting,’’ he said.
Brulte, who said in 2013 it would take a minimum of six years to rebuild the dilapidated state party, has taken heat within the GOP for speaking out about the dangers it faces.
Despite Brulte's stark assessment of the GOP's future, three potential candidates are vying to replace him as chair when his term ends next February — and all of them insist the real problems lie somewhere other than in its message to the changing ethnic electorate.
Steve Frank, a conservative Republican activist and former party official, said that the GOP has “unilaterally disarmed itself,’’ by failing miserably in outreach to church-going conservatives and other GOP voters — and by standing by helplessly while laws that have advantaged Democrats, including the state’s top-two primary, act as “illegal voter suppression” against Republicans in California.
Former Assemblyman Travis Allen, a favorite of the party’s far right conservative wing — who failed to get the GOP gubernatorial nomination last year — says he strongly rejects Brulte’s suggestion that demographics are at fault for the party’s 2018 battering.
“We need to start with the central matter at hand: the Democratic Party, and the special interests that control it, are the mightiest political machine in the history of American politics,’’ he said.
In California, as in the national party, Republicans continue to dismiss the stark evidence of growing ethnic voter clout in hopes of returning to “an America that was the way it used to be,’’ Sragow said. “They’re rubbing the rabbits’ foot and think they’re going to take back the homeland."