George Skelton has a piece in the Los Angeles Times on the collapse of the Republican Party in California. The numbers are pretty startling. Just 22% of voters under thirty, and 18% of Latinos are registered as Republicans. The Democrats control all the statewide offices and they achieved supermajority status in the legislature after the November elections (although vacancies have since brought them temporarily below a supermajority in the Senate). The California Business Roundtable has done some extensive polling of the state electorate, and they’ve come to the conclusion that there is no longer any benefit to be gained by giving money to the Republicans.
The white GOP core is aging, [Paul] Mitchell [vice president of Political Data] notes, significantly reducing the party’s share of the California electorate. “Republican voters are going out the back door,” he says. “And coming in the front door are Latinos and youth — voters who are much more Democrat.”
The business community, always focused on the bottom line, increasingly sees moderate Democrats as the best investment for campaign dollars. The GOP just hasn’t been producing.
“We’re going to be redoubling our effort to help elect Democrats who understand business,” says Rob Lapsley, president of the Business Roundtable.
It’s nice that the business community has concluded that the California GOP is as useless as tits on a bull, but the power of money never really goes away. It just finds new partners.
