A plethora of conservative media outlets, social media stars, and consultants and fundraisers around the country say California is a lost cause, all while relying on donors and subscribers in the state for their businesses to operate.
Maybe I’m jaded, as I’ve sat in green rooms with some of these types as they lambasted my home state while admitting they’ve done absolutely nothing to change it. Leave if you like, but don’t pretend something is lost when you haven’t even fought for it.
NEWSOM’S BIG PROPOSITION 50 WIN TURNS HIM TO LEADING 2028 WHITE HOUSE CONTENDER
I say the same thing to my fellow registered Republicans in California after we handily lost Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pet project to stick it to President Donald Trump. Did you vote? Did you get a family member or friend to vote? Have you ever registered a Republican in the state? Have you spent any dollar amount on or time volunteering for a campaign? If you didn’t, stop complaining.
Is California hopeless? I don’t think so. Sure, we don’t have that many registered Republicans in the state (although after the wildfires in January, the GOP did see people changing their party affiliation). And we only have nine Republicans representing us in the House of Representatives. But that was nine too many for the majority Democratic state. I guess Democrats couldn’t be happy with their supermajority in Sacramento.
Propositions are confusing, expensive, and often presented in a way that suggests they will help communities in the state. And yet, a pleasant surprise occurred in 2020 when Prop 16 did not pass. It failed because average voters and immigrant communities in the state said “no” to affirmative action. The proposition wanted to change the California constitution to allow organizations, schools, and business to use race and religion for hiring decisions. Not American, and not Californian either.
Then-Vice President Kamala Harris knew she had the California delegates in the bag when she was running as President Joe Biden’s last-minute stand-in in 2024, but even the most staunch Republicans were stunned at the move to the right in the presidential election within the state. Trump won everything but the urban areas, all areas Prop 50 is now gerrymandering because Democrats claim they’re combating Texas’s redistricting. In reality, they appear to be afraid of midterm election losses, given the GOP’s statewide gains in 2024.
The president’s numbers in 2024, despite a lot of GOP voters fleeing the state after 2020, were similar to his 2020 results in the state. Democrats lost two million voters: Biden garnered over 11 million votes in 2020, and Harris was right at nine million in 2024.
Newsom knows that his policies and his party aren’t that appealing to average voters, especially after the horrific Southern California fires. Democrats losing voters is a good thing in this state; they clearly have plenty of votes to spare. But the Republicans do not, which is why we need a serious postmortem on where all the GOP voters go when we have a vital special election on the ballot.
I often have to inform people who gripe about the lack of forward momentum here in the state that if everyone who had voted for Trump in 2020 had voted in the recall of Newsom, he wouldn’t be our governor.
GOP FILES LAWSUIT CHALLENGING CALIFORNIA’S PROPOSITION 50 VICTORY
If all of the 2024 voters for Trump in California had shown up on Tuesday, Democrats would not have won their change to our state constitution to allow their gerrymandering. Our independent commission for redistricting was one of only a handful in the country and had been praised by left and right — before Newsom and the Democratic National Committee recognized they could distract from that truth by fearmongering about Trump.
California Republicans are used to losing, but we don’t have to. The GOP needs to rely not just on Democrats becoming disenchanted with the growth of antisemitism and socialism in their ranks. We need to be actively recruiting and engaging our voters.
Elisha Krauss is a conservative commentator and speaker who resides in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and their four children. She is an advocate for women’s rights, school choice, and smaller government.