California Republicans have all but laid funeral wreaths for their party in the wake of the 2018 midterm elections -- and attribute the state GOP's death to Donald Trump.
The Los Angeles Times reported that with the Democratic supermajority in the state Assembly and Senate and the state's primary election system that advances the two candidates with the highest percentage of the vote, the party's power in the state has dwindled precariously in 2016 and 2018.
Even in U.S. House of Representatives, the California's GOP is far outnumbered by Democrats, who hold 46 of the state's 53 seats.
Some longtime party loyalists, the LA Times noted, "are calling for the coroner."
“The Grand Old Party is dead,” Kristin Olsen, the former vice chair of the California GOP, wrote in a Cal Matters postmortem after the midterms.
The state party's demise, Olsen wrote, is “partly because it has failed to separate itself from today’s toxic, national brand of Republican politics.”
Mike Madrid, a California GOP consultant, agreed in a similar post-midterm eulogy in Politico quoted in the report.
“The party has to die before it can be rebuilt,” Madrid said “And by die, I mean, completely decimated."
The midterms, he noted, were a "big step" towards that necessary death.
“There is no message," Madrid added. "There is no messenger.”
John Weaver, a California Republican strategist who worked for presidential candidates John McCain and John Kasich, tweeted that demographic changes in former GOP strongholds paired with the party's increasingly anti-immigrant rhetoric were a death sentence.
"In one fell swoop, Trump and Republicans who willingly handcuffed themselves to him have turned Orange County into a GOP wasteland," Weaver said. “You want to see the future? Look no further than the demographic death spiral in the place once considered a cornerstone of the party.”
Read the entire report via the LA Times.
