California: GOP brand dead?

24 January 2011 |permalink | email article

Barring an unlikely turnaround the Republican Party appears dead on arrival in the deep-blue state. That was the consensus of a couple of hundred strategists, lawmakers – Democrats and Republicans – at a UC Berkeley symposium over the weekend.

While it’s true that state voters supported a number of conservative ballot measures in November not a single conservative candidate for statewide office was elected. Republican Jim Brulte, former state Senate minority leader, put it succinctly – “there’s a brand problem.”

The sharpest debate at the two-day Institute of Governmental Studies was about Meg Whitman, the 2010 billionaire Republican candidate who lost to Gov. Jerry Brown by 13-points, despite spending more than $140 million of her own money. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted neither she, nor her team of multi-millionaire consultants had enough courtesy to appear and defend themselves.

Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist, opined that Republicans will remain dead in California until the party “decides it won’t be hostile to people who aren’t old and white.”

The fundamental problem facing Republicans is the party is losing ground to decline-to-state- voters, who now compose 1 in 5 registered voters. The most staggering problem confronting the minority party is vote trends among women, who now are 16 percent more likely to register as Democrats than as Republicans.

More to the point, as national Republicans beginning to turn their attention to picking a nominee for the 2012 president contest, is that California is home to 1 in 8 American voters. Unless the Republicans can discover another Ronald Reagan - not to be confused with Arnold Schwarzenegger - the party’s statewide prospects seem bleak for the next decade.

Quotable

“Right now I do not see on the Republican side any one individual that will emerge at the top of the pile.” – Colin Powell, while not yet committed to Obama as he was in 2008, praised the president for taking on health care. “We didn’t elect Superman, we elected a human being.”

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