Chad Mayes tried to change the Republican Party. Now, he's targeting the two-party system

For Chad Mayes’ entire life, people have been telling him variations of “I vote for the candidate. I don’t vote for the party."

Now, he's putting that to the test.

The former Republican Assembly leader announced he was abandoning the GOP in December, after several years of struggling to reconcile his long-held beliefs about what the Republican Party stands for with the direction he believes President Donald Trump has taken it.

In Tuesday's primary, he's running for his fourth term in the California Assembly against two party-backed candidates he defeated in 2018: Republican Andrew Kotyuk and Democrat DeniAntionette Mazingo. But this time, the ballots list his party preference as "None."

The race will test the power of incumbency versus party affiliation in the Trump era — whether voters will choose the candidate they've elected three times by double-digit margins or vote based on the D or R next to someone's name.

“I still believe the same things I’ve always believed,” Mayes explained to The Desert Sun during an interview at a local barbecue joint. “So the question is: Will the district continue to vote for me even though I no longer have the Republican label?”

It’s a scenario he said he couldn’t have imagined himself in when he was first elected six years ago. But he's relishing it and said he understands his candidacy is a test case for independent politicians looking for a place in today's polarized political landscape.

Mostly, he's tired of the us-versus-them gamesmanship of partisan politics, he said.

Q&A: Assembly candidates on issues

Mayes joins a growing list of Republican politicians who’ve left the GOP since Trump's election in 2016. In California, that list includes San Diego Assemblyman Brian Maienschein, and Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court.

Nationwide, it includes Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, former Hawaii House of Representatives Republican Leader Beth Fukumoto, Iowa’s longest-serving Republican state lawmaker Andy McKean, and four Kansas state senators who left in 2019.

The 'No Party Preference' electorate

Mayes' decision to abandon the GOP was reported the day before the deadline to file to run for state Assembly. The California Republican Party, which had endorsed him weeks earlier, was left without a candidate in the historically conservative 42nd Assembly District, which encompasses the western Coachella Valley and parts of the high desert.

The state and local party swiftly rescinded their endorsement and scrambled to recruit Kotyuk and gather the signatures necessary to qualify him for the March ballot. (They succeeded.)

Mayes, whose district office contains a large photograph of President Ronald Reagan — the California Republican Party's one-time standard-bearer — said he still identifies as a “governing conservative." He remains dedicated to the values that first drew him to politics: a faith-inspired commitment to service and philosophical belief in limiting the size of government to let families and business make most decisions without interference.

It's the Republican Party that's changed, not him, he said.

California GOP Chair Jessica Patterson pushed back on Mayes' claims that Republicans had abandoned their values and, in a statement, said, "With regard to Assemblyman Mayes, he left the Republican Party; we didn’t leave him. I’ve known him for years, and we will agree to disagree on his actions."

“The reality is that my focus is not on the past, but on the future for our party," she wrote several weeks before the March 2020 primary. "We are working hard on the seats we can win; recruiting the best candidates and raising the dollars we need to be successful. I feel confident that we are well on our way to reinvigorating the California Republican Party.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Mayes ally and California’s most recent Republican governor, said Mayes was forging a path toward the future.

“He’s a new face of leadership because he very clearly wants to be a public servant and not a party servant," he said.

Like Mayes, an increasing number of California voters are also rejecting political parties. While Republican registration has fallen from 35% to 24% since 2000, the percentage of the California electorate registered with no party preference has almost doubled, from 14% to 26% over the same 20-year period. The increasing number of no party preference voters, however, has yet to translate into electoral success for independent candidates, who haven't won a race for state office since San Francisco's Quentin Kopp won a State Senate race in 1994.

“The goal of my campaign coming up here to March isn’t to send a message about that,” Mayes said, referring to the growing proportion of California voters who are rebuking parties and choosing instead to register as No Party Preference. “But I don’t have a problem saying that it’s an experiment.”

On paper, he doesn’t come off as the likeliest of guinea pigs.

The son of a minister from rural Ohio, Mayes said he idolized Reagan as a child in California’s high desert, where Republicans have historically dominated. He grew up attending a small Christian grade school run by his parents and, for college, studied political science at televangelist Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University in Virginia. After interning in then-U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft’s office, he moved back to Yucca Valley, married a high-school classmate and was elected to town council in 2002 when he was only 25.

'The worst thing that could happen to California Republicans'

Fast-forward to the moment polls closed on Election Night 2016.

Mayes, then Assembly Republican Leader, and Speaker Anthony Rendon, the chamber's highest ranking Democrat, were together in Sacramento, watching results come in from the East Coast states.

“We were actually drinking a beer together, which I don’t think anyone knows and certainly no one would expect,” Rendon said, specifically remembering when Florida was called for Trump. “We were heads of warring caucuses. He was leading his caucus. I was leading mine and we were competing against one another.”

Rendon remembers Mayes telling him a Trump victory would be the worst thing that could happen to California Republicans because it would cause them to lose more seats to Democrats in future elections — a fear that became reality in 2018 when Democrats flipped seven congressional districts, five state Assembly districts and three state Senate districts.

Trump's victory, Rendon said he observed, also had a deeper, more personal effect on Mayes, who he now calls a close friend.

"He felt as though a lot of the morality that he’d seen and believed about the Republican Party suddenly seemed to vanish overnight,” he said.

Rendon has endorsed Mazingo in the 42nd District Assembly race because her beliefs, he said, are more aligned with his. But he and others in the legislature are watching the race with curiosity, he said.

"All of us in the legislature see things through partisan lenses that are self-interested, but at the same time we’re also nerdy political science-types that are interested in what everything means," he said. "If you look at young folks they kind of reject party labels. If Chad is able to get elected and our (voter) demographic changes continue, it could be the start of something interesting."

'The Republican Party didn't want to be reformed'

Mayes said he's long believed that, in order to reverse their decline, California‘s Republican minority has to figure out how to translate their core ideologies to policies that widen their appeal among an ever-changing state electorate.

That belief informed his work both as Assembly Republican Leader and with New Way California, an advocacy group he co-founded with Schwarzenegger and other legislators in 2018, hoping to carve out a Republican vision that was "open, inclusive and action-packed," as Schwarzenegger said in a Facebook ad for the group.

“I set out to reform the Republican Party because, for years, California Republicans were failing to meet Californians where they were at. I wanted to go big and fast and bold towards trying to change that,” Mayes said. “Then I realized after that the Republican Party didn't want to be reformed.”

For Mayes, the journey to such a realization was often painful, but he now he feels like a weight has been lifted off him.

One low point came when his Republican caucus members, under pressure from conservative activists, ousted him as leader after he whipped the votes necessary to extend California’s carbon emissions trading policy beyond its 2020 expiration date. Branding him “Cap and Traitor," they argued carbon pricing was the kind of tax increase Republicans oppose. His most enraged enemies publicized allegations that he was having an extra-marital affair with another legislator.

The ordeal didn't surprise him, he said, because he knew what he was getting into when he ran for office and understood the dynamics behind what he saw as a politically motivated attack.

Despite his insistence that he wanted to focus on issues within the state Assembly's purview, Mayes frequently felt compelled to comment on what he perceived as Trump's wrongheaded moves. He defended the Paris Climate Accord. He criticized Trump over remarks on immigration and non-white female congresswomen. He spoke out in opposition to the California Republican Party's decision to invite Steve Bannon to their biannual convention.

But rather than alter the Republican Party, Mayes' routine admonishments of the president and willingness to stake out opposing views on issues like immigration and climate change forced him to answer a lot of allegiance questions from both Democrats and Republicans.

He insists he'd rather talk about wonky topics like the state budget, homelessness or his work establishing California's Catastrophic Wildfire Liability Fund. But before leaving the Republican Party, most of the questions constituents asked him centered on Trump, the Republican Party and issues outside state government's purview.

As an independent candidate, Mayes has pivoted his messaging to a broader critique of the two-party system.

“The parties themselves,” he said, “they're using all sorts of tools to try to get their base out and instill fear, because fear is a big motivator to get people to turn out at the polls. That kind of behavior is sickening, and it's moving us in a direction that I think is unhealthy for our country.”

Through talking to voters on both sides of the aisle, he learned that the old adage “all politics is local” popularized by former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill no longer applied in the Trump era.

“You've heard me say this: All politics is national. It's no longer local,” he told me. “We thought we could shape California Republicans as different than national Republicans. Turn out you can’t.”

He's no longer working to change the party from the inside, but is confident that the governing philosophy that led him to join in the first place remains viable in California. That made it all the more difficult, he said.

“The unfortunate thing about finding that the Republican brand in California was toxic was that it wasn't the ideas that were toxic. It wasn't a more efficient government. It wasn't trying to reduce taxes. It wasn't trying to build infrastructure with the dollars coming in,” he said. “If the brand is toxic but your ideas aren’t, and you care about the ideas more than the label, then why would you keep the label?”

Sam Metz covers politics. Reach him at samuel.metz@desertsun.com or on Twitter @metzsam.