Bye Bye California Republican Party

A crowd gathers to view the corpse of the rare and
nearly extinct California Republican elephant.

The Incredible Vanishing GOP

• While the column below is from a Leftist point of view the voter registration numbers do not lie. The GOP is slipping into 3rd place behind independent voters.
• The collapse of the California GOP is partly due to the fact that the party does not stand for anything. 
• For example, in the last election the GOP refused to put a proposition on the ballot defunding the insane, unpopular and corrupt high speed rail system. (GOP donors are also feeding at the high speed rail trough.) With no major issue to rally the public the GOP collapsed giving Democrats super-majorities in the legislature.
• Call me a "crazy" Blogger but if you do not stand for anything why should people vote for you?

(Orange County Register)  -  The election results were in more than month ago. Except in California and a couple of other states, Republican Donald Trump drew a robust number of presidential votes, enough to put him in the White House even if it fell well short of a plurality.

But there was nothing robust about the performance of his party mates here in America’s largest state.

They lost seats in the state Legislature and barely held onto a piddling 14 out of 53 seats in California’s congressional delegation. Unless things change soon, they only promise to get worse and worse over the next few years for the state GOP.

If past is prologue, the state’s Republican Party will soon become the third choice of Californians registered to vote — and 78 percent of those eligible to register are in fact registered — fully 19.4 million of us, according to the count delivered by Secretary of State Alex Padilla four days before November’s Election Day.

California Secretary of State

That overall number is up about 1.2 million over the last four years, despite forecasts that far fewer people would sign up to vote this time because outgoing President Obama was not on the fall ballot.

And yet the Republican number is way down. Over those same four years, the state’s GOP lost 312,000 voters even as population climbed and Trump spent much of May campaigning here, at many stops encouraging his supporters to register Republican.

This was obviously not enough. For as Republican registration nosedived to just 26 percent of registered voters, Democratic registration was up about 775,000, for a net gain of more than 1.1 million voters over their Republican rivals in just four years.

In registration numbers, that created a huge shift into the “no party preference” (NPP) category, now the No. 3 choice for registered voters at 24.2 percent of registrants, barely 300,000 voters behind the Republican tally.

Over four years, the NPP total is now about 25 percent above its level of four years ago, gaining more than 900,000 voters, the largest increase of any political group, or in this case, a non-group.

There’s some comfort here for Democrats, who have seen many thousands of Republican voters convert to their column or drift into NPP-land.

But more of them are choosing to switch to the NPP column than into the Democratic fold, which translates as a warning to the Dems: Don’t get smug.

For the GOP isn’t losing voters just because of its brand. It’s hurting because it’s out of step with the majority of Californians, whose fall votes favored gun controls, legalized marijuana and higher tobacco taxes, just a few causes Republican Party officials refused to back.

If a party gets too out of step with the voters its candidates seek to represent, it is doomed.

But many Republicans, voters and officials alike, prefer to stick to their very conservative guns, refusing to bend even a little on hard-line stances they’ve long held. “We wouldn’t be offering a choice if we changed,” said one party official.

In effect, they’re borrowing a line from the 19th Century Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay, who said “I’d rather be right than president” — and never became president despite three national runs.

Like Clay, the GOP will keep losing elections unless and until it bends at least a little. And if it won’t bend to fit the preferences of the clear majority of California voters, it soon may have runoff spots in even fewer races than it did this fall.

That’s the real meaning of all those complicated voter registration numbers.

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