At Daily Kos, James Lambert has some good news for Democrats:
It’s very probable that registered Republicans [in California] will fall behind both Democrats and “no party preference” voters at some point by Election Day this fall, essentially relegating the California GOP to third-party status. This, in the state that sent both Nixon and Reagan to the White House.
What stuck for me most in the statistics, which were provided by California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, is that California has added seven million residents in the last twenty years, which has resulted in 1.7 million more registered Democrats and about a half a million fewer registered Republicans. In truth, both numbers are astonishingly low. By comparison, there are three million more people who are registered to vote but don’t express a party preference. This latter group now represents one in four registered Californians, which is the same rough percentage that are registered as Republicans.
The overall point of Lambert’s piece is that the “no party preference” group will surpass the Republican group in size any day now. And, because the ‘no party’ group leans to the left, the Republicans are even worse shape than registration numbers might suggest. Thus, they can be characterized as almost a third party.
They say that California often leads the way for the rest of the nation, but it will be a long time before the rest of the country has the same demographics as the Golden State. What I am more interested in seeing is if some right-leaning people on the left coast can come up with some alternative to the Republican Party. It’s probably easier to do this in California than anywhere else because of their unique election laws. Candidates don’t have to identify with a party and all candidates are lumped together in one giant jungle primary, with only the top two vote-getters advancing to the general election.
I’ve long toyed with the idea of progressives running candidates for the U.S. House who will pledge to vote only for a Speaker of the House that is collectively acceptable to them. California always struck me as the best place to start some a movement. But it could be that some right-wing Silicon Valley billionaire pursues the idea first. If they can get enough candidates elected who will reject a Paul Ryan in favor of someone who has a much different and more California-friendly ideology, they can become king-makers. Either they get their Speaker, of the Democrats get to choose.
All I know is that if you’re not a Democrat or on the left, and you live in California, the GOP isn’t a brand you want to be saddled with. You can already see this with how many Republican congressmen are not seeking reelection this year. Maybe someone can prove again that California leads the nation by getting started on a new center-right party. I’m sure New England would follow, and then perhaps the Mid-Atlantic.
Oooh, what with a similar group on the right (the Freedumb Caucus) we might be able to go almost 2 years without a functional government, like Belgium did! Exciting!
More seriously, California is likely to become a one-party state, but with jungle primaries, minus the machine aspect. Because of the jungle primaries, we get a much wider range of policies in general election Democrats and it’s not clear we need two parties.
>>Because of the jungle primaries, we get a much wider range of policies in general election Democrats and it’s not clear we need two parties.
do you think that’s a good thing? I don’t. What I see is, the Republican brand is toxic, so the center-right are relabeling themselves “business Democrats” instead of turning into a new party. Fuck the jungle primary.
Politics should allow as broad a range of groups as possible to hav a say. With a traditional single-party area there’s typically just one. With the current two-party system there are two. With the current jungle primary system, we’re seeing something like 5 (left, left-center, and centrist Dem plus crazy and non-crazy Republican) and I’d call that a huge improvement.
You prefer a system in which we can’t effectively challenge Dianne Feinstein?
Actually, Washington State (where I live) has a Top Two primary system similar to California’s, and it’s been terrible for third parties, regardless of ideology, trying to get a foothold with the electorate. Here’s why: under our old system (similar to what most states still use), third party candidates appeared on the November ballot simply by winning their party’s nomination. Now, such candidates must win in direct competition with at least one (usually more) mainstream party in a summer primary, where fundraising, media attention, and voter turnout are all much lower and name ID means more.
If, say, Bill Gates ran for Congress here – with unlimited money and existing name ID – he could make it work. He’d get plenty of free media, and he could simply buy the campaign and party infrastructure he’d need. But aside from California and New York there’s at most only a handful of people in any state with the wealth and celebrity to pull that off, and is that who we want representing us anyway?
Then there’s this: the celebrity-turned-politician model used in California by Schwarzenegger (and nationally by Trump) went through a mainstream party, even though neither was a great ideological fit, precisely because it gave their campaigns more legitimacy – and because both Ahhnold and The Donald were so successful in their previous careers that they simply assumed they could beat anyone in any field, including politics. Would someone with that kind of life experience and personality intentionally launch a campaign away from the limelight of one of the two major parties?
To me, the numbers in California instead suggest that its state GOP is uniquely ripe for an outsider to take it over and win – which, at this point, is most likely to mean an establishment R type (a current-day equivalent of Pete Wilson) who’s bad enough, but explicitly disavows the current generation of nut jobs running the party. This is something like what Mitt Romney is trying to do in Utah, with a unique additional asset in the state’s political dominance by the LDS. But as Booman himself pointed out, Romney is no panacea, esoecially given the baggage stemming from his previous intraparty attempts to placate and win over the nut job faction. Anyone from the Republican old guard in California, or anywhere else, likely has similar baggage.
That leaves the celebrity mavericks as the only ones who could actually use a Top Two primary system to shake things up – and on top of everything else, their very celebrity means they’re likely not very good at building or promoting a party that can thrive without them running. On the left, ask Ralph Nader fans what that looks like. Or, going farther back, Jesse Jackson, who really did try to build a movement that would outlive him. He inspired a generation of activism, to be sure, but in the end, when he stopped running, so, too, did the Rainbow Party – almost immediately in most places.
I do think California is ripe for self-funded independent candidates. But a new party, right left or center, that can supplant the GOP as competition to the Democrats? That will take a lot longer IMHO, and even then, would be most likely to happen when the D’s crash and burn their one-party rule and people (especially people with a lot of money) demand a more viable alternative than the current GOP. We might not like what that looks like.
It would be more likely (and it remains my fondest hope) that somehow the Right splinters between the Wall Street wing (the Republican Party) and Bannon’s ethnonationalist party (the Murican Party). It would only last an election or two, but it would flip a LOT of seats. The Bannon/Moore/Miller wing is both ideologically and racially strident and tactically stupid.
Schism/Chaos 2020!
In California, the Democratic party has all but split in two — with one group that’s moderate and another that’s radical. In a way not unlike before our politics became so riven with extremism except without the strong party control and without the appeals to racism.
I hope the rest of the nation follows California in this regard. It may be long time before the country matches California demographically but it’s heartening to witness young folks getting truly fed up with politics as usual. The kids in Florida who are leading a movement for gun control are rightly holding it as something separate from party politics. But the result is essentially the same in that the ones lining up most heavily at the NRA pig troths are in one particularly odious party.
Just to clarify, I’m not hoping for a Democratic split absent a shrinking of the GOP into much-deserved irrelevance.
Can you give us a better idea of what you mean by radical? Yes, there can be wildly radical splinter groups (Ebonics supporters in Berkley, for example) but there are plenty of true liberals in California as opposed to the corporatist/centrists that in most states have a grip on the Democratic Party. I support the liberals.
Here in Colorado the more liberal, but hardly radical, wing of the Democratic Party has taken charge. I was so disgusted with the “leadership” of the state party in 2016 I re-registered unaffiliated but I’ve come back to the fold with new, real leadership. Liberal leadership.
It’s not quite a movement yet, and not quite the beginning of a movement, but something has shifted, and if you squint you can see that beginning, and what could become a successful movement.
That’s why it’s going to become very important to the NRA to quash this if it goes on very long.
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What’s so unique about California? Party Affiliation – Gallup
November 2016:
Republican – 27%
Independent – 36%
Democrat – 31%
January 2018
Republican – 22%
Independent – 44%
Democrat – 32%
. . . here?
Wow, the Republicans down by 5% since Trump was elected? There’s probably some noise there but even so those numbers could be catastrophic – they’ve fallen below the canonical 27%.
It’s not just demographics… Like so many other places, the Republican party in California went off the rails. Arnold was their last gasp at an electable state wide candidate, and he got in only because he got to bypass the primary process.
Of course, it’s not all paradise in California- the money party still prevails by and large (see: California single payer) And you can argue that the top two finisher primary system actually promotes the “I’m not really a Democrat, I just play one on T.V.” candidates with statewide name recognition like Dianne Feinstein. Still, I’m hopeful that good things are going to happen this election cycle.
Single payer didn’t fail in CA because of “the money party”. It failed because the plan was a fraud. It had no funding mechanism. It was not a serious plan, it was a publicity stunt.
Without a funding mechanism, single payer would have been doomed to failure, and would have been a huge budget headache for the state. I do still have family out that way, and I think all of us were in agreement that the bill needed to be taken behind the barn and put out of its misery. If the Assembly wishes to offer up a bill that will actually fund single payer, I’m all for it.
Well, isn’t that the point? I’m sorry, but they do have the power to craft legislation. It’s not a take it or leave it deal. At least they should take a stab at a realistic proposal. Maybe it can’t be done with out the support of the federal government, but what’s the harm in trying?
Maybe it’s just me, but I think killing a bill in the dead of the night that you said you supported when they ran for election doesn’t inspire loads of confidence about their goals.
Do we want single payer or not?
I’m not opposed to empty bills that are intended to signal support but at some point you need a real bill. Where is the real bill?
Because without something serious people can support you’re just doing purity signalling bullshit.
Here‘s an example of a real bill that answers all the questions and puts us on the path to single payer.
Is that the best way or the only way? No it sure is not.
But when some reporter asks the most basic, obvious question “how do you pay for this?” you’re not standing there dick in hand saying “don’t worry about it”. You have an answer. A defensible answer.
Another substantial problem with the single payer campaign in California is that the most strident campaign supporters want to fudge the facts on the polling, which burns their credibility.
The poll they tend to flog shows that over 60% of Californians support universal health insurance, but when those same voters were asked if they would be willing to pay more taxes to fund the program, support went down to 44%.
If the California Legislature passed single payer in 2018, Governor Brown would veto it.
If the California Legislature passed single payer in 2019 and the next Governor signed it into law, signature gatherers would qualify a ballot measure to repeal the Law. That State Proposition would win in 2020, and there would be a wipeout of Democratic Party incumbents and open seat candidates, particularly for Legislative seats. I don’t like that conclusion, but I’m confident that would be the outcome.
The voters aren’t with us on this issue yet. We have more work to do. California voters got there on the Statewide $15 minimum wage with a COLA and paid sick time, a few years after the national campaign began, so we can get them there on this as well. We have more work to do with the voters to accomplish this.
I don’t think a majority of California State Legislators campaigned on a pledge to pass single payer. Feel free to correct me, but I don’t think 41 Senators and 21 Senators have made that pledge. And Governor Brown certainly didn’t, so the case is moot for now.
I make the case below that if the Legislature passed single payer or another form of universal health insurance before the 2020 election, the Law would be repealed by the voters and many of the Legislators who voted for the taxes necessary to fund the Law would uselessly and counterproductively sign their political death warrants by doing so.
California voters have swallowed a number of tax increases in recent years, two by initiative (progressive, solid support) and one passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor this year, a gas tax which is likely to face a repeal challenge at the ballot box in 2020.
We have to finish baking the cake here. It’s baking, but it’s not ready yet. As someone who knows we’re wasting oodles of money from all the massive profit-taking interests in the current system, the fact that it’s not ready grieves me. But that’s the state of affairs before us for at least a bit longer.
Correction: the California gas tax was made Law in 2017, and the repeal is likely to be considered by the voters in November 2018.
As a Californian who remember the appalling Reagan years, my sense now is that the no-party people are primarily to the LEFT of the dems not to the center. The test will be whether we can get rid of Feinstein, who is much much worse that you non-CA folks probably think she is. Even Boxer was horrible. Those two had a lot to do with helping Lieberman survive long enough to kill medicare for all, which gave us the Obamacare backlash and … connect the dots.
If Feinstein is reelected I’ll go along with your assessment – otherwise, I think we need a new party to the left of the national dem party.
I just checked the Colorado SoS website. Registered voters by party as of January 2018:
Democratic Pary 1,003424
Republican Party 995,090
Unaffiliated 1,163,751.
I am fairly confident that unaffiliated has swelled since I last looked, which was after the 2016 election. If I have time I’ll check other years.
Total registration in 2018 is down from November 2016, which surprised me given the strong in-migration the state is experiencing. Both the Democratic and Republican registration is down as well, but unaffiliated is up.
Total registration 2016 3,292,062 and 2018 3,219,953
2016 registration by party
Democratic 1,050,396
Republican 1,043,361
Unaffiliated 1,137,648
. . . GOP down.
Good!
Democratic registration is down 46,972. Perhaps confusing because I failed to put in a comma in the 2018 number.
I just got the years reversed in my head.
I had to double check myself because my first reaction was that was what I had done.