For the first time since the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, Californians will have a general election vote for the U.S. Senate without a Republican on the ballot.
Much has already been written about how the first and second place finishes in our state’s unusual “jungle primary” by two Democrats, State Attorney General Kamala Harris (D-San Francisco) and Congress Member Loretta Sanchez (D-Orange County), demonstrates the complete collapse of the Republican Party in California.
California Republicans blamed their poor showing on having too many GOP candidates in the race. But when I dove into the nitty-gritty details of the election returns, I found some really dire news for the GOP.
The State of California’s GOP Leading Up to 2016
When Senator Barbara Boxer announced her plans to retire, pretty much everyone knew that the seat would likely remain in Democratic hands. Initially, however, Republicans probably at least expected to make it to November.
Republicans haven’t been elected to statewide office since 2006 and haven’t held statewide office since 2010 when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger left due to term limits and State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner decided not to run for re-election, instead mounting an unsuccessful bid to run for Governor.
In addition, the GOP holds only 14 out of 40 seats in the State Senate (35%) and 28 out of 80 seats in the State Assembly (35%). For the U.S. House of Representatives, they hold 14 of the state’s 53 Congressional seats (26%). Don’t blame any of that on gerrymandering: Republicans managed to pass a ballot initiative in 2008 putting state legislative redistricting in the hands of an impartial citizens’ commission, and another initiative in 2010 expanding the commission’s authority to cover congressional redistricting. The impartially-drawn new boundaries resulted in the GOP losing seats after the 2010 census-mandated redistricting.
As of May 2016, Republicans represent about 27% of California’s registered voters, compared to almost 45% who are registered Democrats, 23% who are registered as No Party Preference (almost as many as Republicans), and nearly 5% for all other parties combined.
Results of the Senate Race
The “blanket primary” drew 34 declared candidates that made it onto the ballot, and while Republicans had the most candidates with 12 followed with No Party Preference candidates with 11, Democrats weren’t that far behind with 7.
Declared Senate Candidates by Party (2016)
Party |
# of Candidates |
% of All Candidates |
Republican |
12 |
35% |
No Party Preference |
11 |
32% |
Democratic |
7 |
21% |
Libertarian |
2 |
6% |
Green |
1 |
3% |
Peace & Freedom |
1 |
3% |
(Another three candidates, one No Party Preference and two Republicans, ended up also receiving write-in votes.)
Republicans claim that their voters had too many GOP candidates to choose from, but the Democratic field was also crowded. Despite their seven candidates out of 34 running, Democrats were able to coalesce around two of their candidates: State Attorney General Kamala Harris, who placed first with 39.9% of the vote, and U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, who came in second with 18.6%.
But let’s look at the first results and then I’ll explain why it’s even worse than it seems for the California GOP.
California Senate Primary Results (2016)
Candidate |
Party |
Votes |
Percent |
Kamala D. Harris |
Democratic |
3,000,689 |
39.94% |
Loretta L. Sanchez |
Democratic |
1,416,203 |
18.85% |
Duf Sundheim |
Republican |
584,251 |
7.78% |
Phil Wyman |
Republican |
352,821 |
4.70% |
Thomas G. Del Beccaro |
Republican |
323,614 |
4.31% |
Greg Conlon |
Republican |
230,944 |
3.07% |
Steve Stokes |
Democratic |
168,805 |
2.25% |
George C. Yang |
Republican |
112,055 |
1.49% |
Karen Roseberry |
Republican |
110,557 |
1.47% |
Gail K. Lightfoot |
Libertarian |
99,761 |
1.33% |
Massie Munroe |
Democratic |
98,150 |
1.31% |
Pamela Elizonda |
Green |
95,677 |
1.27% |
Tom Palzer |
Republican |
93,263 |
1.24% |
Ron Unz |
Republican |
92,325 |
1.23% |
Don Krampe |
Republican |
69,635 |
0.93% |
Eleanor García |
No Party Preference |
65,084 |
0.87% |
Jarrell Williamson |
Republican |
64,120 |
0.85% |
Von Hougo |
Republican |
63,609 |
0.85% |
Cristina Grappo |
Democratic |
63,330 |
0.84% |
Jerry J. Laws |
Republican |
53,023 |
0.71% |
Mark Matthew Herd |
Libertarian |
41,344 |
0.55% |
John Thompson Parker |
Peace & Freedom |
35,998 |
0.48% |
Ling Ling Shi |
No Party Preference |
35,196 |
0.47% |
Herbert G. Peters |
Democratic |
32,638 |
0.43% |
Emory Rodgers |
Democratic |
31,485 |
0.42% |
Mike Beitiks |
No Party Preference |
31,450 |
0.42% |
Clive Grey |
No Party Preference |
29,418 |
0.39% |
Jason Hanania |
No Party Preference |
27,715 |
0.37% |
Paul Merritt |
No Party Preference |
24,031 |
0.32% |
Jason Kraus |
No Party Preference |
19,318 |
0.26% |
Don J. Grundmann |
No Party Preference |
15,317 |
0.20% |
Scott A. Vineberg |
No Party Preference |
11,843 |
0.16% |
Tim Gildersleeve |
No Party Preference |
9,798 |
0.13% |
Gar Myers |
No Party Preference |
8,726 |
0.12% |
Billy Falling |
Republican (write-in) |
87 |
0.00% |
Ric M. Llewellyn |
No Party Preference (write-in) |
32 |
0.00% |
Alexis Stuart |
Republican (write-in) |
10 |
0.00% |
The names of the winners who advance to the general election in November are bolded. No other candidates will be on the November ballot, nor will write-in votes be considered. (Per the California Secretary of State, “Write-in candidates for voter-nominated offices can still run in the primary election. However, a write-in candidate can only move on to the general election if the candidate is one of the top two vote-getters in the primary election.”)
Examining the Results
Let’s combine the results for all candidates by party (including the write-in candidates):
California Senate Primary Results Rolled Up by Party (2016)
Party |
Sum of Votes |
Percent of Votes |
Democratic |
4,811,300 |
64% |
Republican |
2,150,314 |
29% |
No Party Preference |
277,928 |
4% |
Libertarian |
141,105 |
2% |
Green |
95,677 |
1% |
Peace & Freedom |
35,998 |
0% |
For the most part, independent voters are sort of a myth, or at least the idea of them being truly mutable is overly inflated. Nationwide, 42% of Americans tell Gallup pollsters that they identify as Independent, versus 29% who say they are Democrats and 26% who say they are Republican. People who identify as Independents (or No Party Preference voters) aren’t really that independent. More than 75% of these independents tend to lean towards one party or the other and vote almost all the time with that party.
Gallup found that a lot of this shift to people identifying as Independents has come at the expense of the Republican Party. In other words, a lot of people are embarrassed to call themselves a Republican, so they call themselves an Independent but they still vote for Republican candidates.
But that didn’t happen here and that’s why the California GOP is fucked.
- Collectively, the fourteen Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate got 28.6% of the vote. That’s only a few percent higher than the number of registered Republican voters in California.
- In other words, those Republicans did not get a lot of votes from the “No Party Preference” voters who are closeted Republicans the way you would expect based on Gallup’s poll.
- Although 45% of voters are registered as Democrats, the Democratic candidates collectively received 64% of the vote. A large percentage of the “No Party Preference” voters voted for the Democratic candidates rather than the No Party Preference candidates, who collectively only received 4% of the vote.
Unlike in other states, it appears that in California, at least with this Senate race, relatively few independent voters voted for Republican candidates.
Yes, yes, a lot of this has to do with turnout. Bernie Sanders supporters — who had to register as Democrats or No Party Preference to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary — turned out hoping that a big win for him in California would somehow turn things around. Even so, nothing required those Sanders supporters to also vote for a Democratic Senate candidate. They could just as easily have voted for one of the NPP candidates, the Green Party candidate, the Peace & Freedom candidate, or even one of the Libertarian candidates.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump had already effectively wrapped up the GOP nomination and his remaining two rivals, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, dropped out before the California primary, giving GOP voters less motivation to turn out. But Republican voters tend to be reliable voters no matter what. And if they did have Senate candidates who inspired them, how did the California GOP let that happen?
Even with their statewide disadvantages, this was the first opportunity for an open Senate seat in 24 years. How did the GOP squander that chance by not fielding a candidate without serious experience?
Of the 14 GOP candidates, including the two write-ins, Phil Wyman was the only GOP candidate to have held elected office before, having served in the State Assembly and the State Senate in addition to losing races for Congress and the GOP nomination for Attorney General. The top vote-getter, Duf Sundheim, had been Chairman of the California GOP from 2003 to 2007 but had never even been on a public ballot before. A few of the others had run for office a few times but had never been elected to anything, most not even winning their primary races.
It may have been a split field, but it was also a pretty tepid lot. The GOP in California may not have much to work with, but they could have gone back a decade or more to find a candidate who had once held statewide office, or at least found a candidate who had won a statewide primary. But even Tom Campbell, a three-time U.S. Senate candidate whom I once thought was the California GOP’s only hope of saving their soul, declined to run.
More Data Points
Digging in a little deeper, there are some more fun stats to pull out:
- Attorney General Kamala Harris (D-San Francisco), who came in first with 3,000,689 votes (39.9% of the vote), received more than a million votes than all of the Republican candidates combined, who collectively only got 28.6% of the vote – collectively more than 10% less than she did.
- In fact, Harris got more votes than all of the non-Democrats combined (who collectively only got 36.0%), and came just 1% shy of beating all other challengers combined including Democrats except for the second-place finisher. She also received more than double the votes than the second place finisher whom she’ll face in the November general election.
- Representative Loretta Sanchez (D-Anaheim) came in second with 1,416,203 votes (18.6% of the vote), more than the next three Republicans combined. Of the 14 Republican candidates, she received more votes than the bottom 12 combined.
- Although 23% of California voters are registered as “No Party Preference,” making it the third largest “party” in the state, the No Party Preference candidates only collectively received 2.8% of the vote, with most of these NPP voters apparently voting for the Democratic candidates.
- The sole Green Party candidate, Pamela Elizondo, received 95,677 votes (1.3%), which were actually nearly 18,000 more votes than the current registered number of Green Party voters (77,868) in the entire state. One possible explanation: because California’s jungle primary doesn’t apply to presidential elections, some Green Party members may have temporarily re-registered as Democrats or NPP in order to vote for Bernie Sanders in the semi-closed Democratic Presidential Primary, but continued to vote for Green Party candidates where available down-ticket.
- The two Libertarian candidates, Gail K. Lightfoot and Mark Matthew Herd, collectively received 141,105 votes, nearly 26,000 votes more than the Libertarian Party’s 115,189 registered voters in the state. Their supporters, too, may have registered as Republicans in order to vote in the state’s closed Republican Primary, which was perceived to be competitive up until a few weeks before the election, but still voted for Libertarian candidates elsewhere on the ballot.
How This Happened, and Why It Matters Nationally
How did the Republican Party get to this sorry state in California? The state has been solid blue since Bill Clinton was first elected in 1992, but it wasn’t always that way.
Of the 33 presidential elections since Lincoln’s election in 1860 (the first Republican to be elected President) until George H.W. Bush’s 1988 victory, the last Republican to win the state, Republican presidential candidates have won the state 23 times (70% of the time), and ex-Republican President Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Progressive Party won it in 1912. During that same period, Democratic presidential candidates had only won it 9 times, 27% of the time. And of those 9 victories, half were part of national landslides, including all of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Great Depression and World War II victories as well as Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 victory over Barry Goldwater.
But Bill Clinton took California by a 13 point margin in 1992 and the state hasn’t been in play since. The closest margin of a Democratic presidential victory in the state was 10% in 2004; the widest was 24% in 2008.
There may be a number of factors involved here, including a growing tech industry that seems to favor Democratic candidates and also brings in an influx of younger voters. I’d like to think (probably naively) that voters also gave Democrats a supermajority in the state legislature because they recognized GOP obstructionism was causing California’s ongoing budget crises – crises that have evaporated under a Democratic Governor with a legislature with a Democratic supermajority that can pass budgets that the GOP can no longer block.
But the biggest factor was Governor Pete Wilson and the GOP’s embrace of the anti-immigration initiative, Prop. 187, in 1994. Wilson and the party backed the initiative as part of his re-election campaign, and the ads for the initiative were as brutally immigrant-bashing as anything we’ve seen in the 2016 presidential campaign. Though Wilson won re-election and the initiative passed (only to later be struck down by the courts), the GOP lost the war by alienating Latino voters for generations. Republican registration has dropped ten percent in the state since then.
Before Prop. 187, Republican candidates for president received generally received about a third of the Latino vote in California, with Reagan getting 45% in 1984. By 2012, Mitt Romney received only 22% of California’s Latino vote. And the Latino vote is a growing part of the California electorate. In 1994, white voters made up 78 percent of the California electorate, with Latinos at 9%, blacks at 7%, and Asians and other minorities at 6%. By 2014, white voters had dropped to 59% with Latinos growing to 18%, Asians and other minorities growing to 14%, and blacks growing to 8%.
The Impact on 2016
There’s a lot of reasonable speculation that Trump may do to the nation what Pete Wilson did to California: drive Latino voters out of the Republican Party for generations. More than half of the Hispanic population in the U.S. (55%) lives in California, Texas, and Florida, with the top states as a percentage of the population being New Mexico (46.7%), Texas (38.1%), California (38.1%), Arizona (30.1%), Nevada (27.1%), Florida (22.8%), Colorado (20.9%), New Jersey (18.1%), New York (18.0%), and Illinois (16.1%).
Democratic Presidential candidates can generally rely on at least 217 electoral votes behind the “Blue Wall” – states generally not in play for Republicans. And that ignores Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that are allegedly swing states but haven’t voted for a Republican for President since the 1980s. If Latino voter participation continues to rise and their support for Democratic candidates continues to increase, it doesn’t take putting very many of these heavily Hispanic states behind the Blue Wall to suddenly create an Electoral College lock for the Democrats … especially if one of those states ends up being Texas.
In the meantime, what will California Republicans do in November? Without a Republican on the ballot for the U.S. Senate, will they vote for the candidate they consider to be the most conservative, or against the candidate they consider to be the most part of the Democratic establishment, or will they ignore the Senate race entirely? With Hillary Clinton currently polling 22 points ahead of Donald Trump, and Trump alienating many mainstream Republicans, will they even bother voting at all despite their reliable voting reputation? Depressed Republican turn-out in California is a real possibility.
And if they don’t turn out, how will that affect down-ticket candidates? Could a discouraged GOP, combined with a motivated and growing Latino electorate, be enough to tip enough close races? In particular, could the repugnant Darrell Issa, whose primary election was unexpectedly close, be at risk?
Dare I dream?