The Eyes of California Republicans Should Be on Texas

Think the midterm elections were bad for Republicans in California? Try being a Democrat in Texas. While the California GOP suffered its worst defeat in 40 years, the Texas Democratic Party was literally wiped out, losing all 14 statewide races as GOP Gov. George W. Bush attracted 69% of the vote. The different partisan outcomes run deeper than just the personalities on the ballot. California and Texas are becoming more alike in their demographics and economies and less alike 1768824832their politics. But if the California GOP is ever to recover, the model for success is the Republican Party of Texas.

Both states have diversified their economies, Texas away from dependence on oil and California away from aerospace and defense-related jobs in the post-Cold War era. Both states boast growing high-tech, information-age industries. Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex are among the nation’s top-10 metropolitan areas and epitomize the new wealth of the Sunbelt.

Thirty years ago, Texas was fundamentally Democratic: Hubert H. Humphrey beat Richard M. Nixon in the state and lost to him in California. But Texas Democrats, like today’s Republicans in California, let their ideology run amok and stopped talking about things people were interested in. The Texas Republicans, meanwhile, moved to occupy the center, with practical solutions to people’s problems. Bush’s highly popular approach to education--if it works, let’s try it-- aims to teach all children to read. Contrast this with the constant ideological battles over education in California.

Nowhere do the two state parties’ approaches differ more than in attracting voters within their own natural constituencies. The inability of California Republicans to establish a relationship with high-tech entrepreneurs and suburbanites along California’s coast has cost them dearly in wealthy communities from La Jolla to Atherton. The Republicans also have failed to hold the moderate vote in places like the Bay Area, which gave the Democrats a million-vote edge in the November elections.

The Texas GOP, by contrast, wins in virtually every suburban community. Bush received 78% of the white vote in Texas; GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Lungren and Republican senatorial aspirantMatt Fong could only manage 46% and 50%, respectively, according to exit polls. The California GOP got trounced among working women, a growing proportion of voters, while Bush did well with them in Texas.

The contrast is even more dramatic among minority voters. Texas actually has a larger percentage of black voters than California, 10% vs. 9%, but Bush received 27% of their vote. Similarly, the Latino portion of the electorate is greater in Texas, 16% vs. 13%. Yet, the common complaint heard in California’s GOP circles, that Latino empowerment dooms Republican chances at the polls, was not repeated in Texas or elsewhere in the nation. Indeed, in every state with a large Latino population, except California, a Republican governor was elected. In Florida, Gov.-elect Jeb Bush received two-thirds of the Cuban American vote on the way to his big win. GOP governors won in New York, Illinois, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, all states with large Latino populations.

The main reason is that Republicans in these other states did not engage in an orgy of immigrant bashing as they did in California. The 1998 results dramatically prove that GOP “wedge-issue” politics in California turned voters against the party, as Latinos, blacks, labor-union members, teachers and public employees contributed to large Democratic margins this fall in reaction to policies of Gov. Pete Wilson’s administration.

It would never have occurred to the Texas GOP, which has courted Latinos for 30 years, to run against immigrants, since the Latino population, especially in South Texas, forms much of the state’s business and social establishment and is growing in wealth and influence. While the California GOP received less than 20% of the Latino vote, Bush got 49% of Texas’ Latino votes, becoming the first GOP gubernatorial candidate ever to carry heavily Latino El Paso County.

If you want to see firsthand the Texas GOP’s Latino success, travel to the 23rd Congressional District along the Rio Grande River, which covers the longest portion of the U.S.-Mexican border. This district, which is 63% Latino and President Bill Clinton won twice, is represented by Rep. Henry Bonilla, a former news broadcaster and a Republican. Bonilla, an economic conservative, typifies the approach that wins votes among middle-class Latinos. He once attacked a liberal opponent as a “pseudo-intellectual who thinks all Mexican American voters want to hear about is food stamps and welfare.” Bonilla talks jobs and economic opportunity. After his landslide 1996 reelection, a local paper called him “strong as an acre of garlic.”

California Republicans could learn much from Bush and Bonilla about how to win Latino votes through inclusion, not exclusion. The California GOP’s pitiful, 32-seat showing in the state Assembly is, in large part, due to Republicans alienating a growing Latino middle class that is moving into formerly all-Anglo Republican neighborhoods. Five Assembly districts held by Republicans in Los Angeles and Orange counties earlier this decade fell to the Democrats this fall, and each shows marked growth of Latino voters.

Still, the phenomenon that destroyed the Republicans this decade could be their savior in the next. Latino and Asian small businesses have mushroomed in the past two decades in Los Angeles, and small business is the driving economic force throughout much of the Southland. Since the Civil War, the Republican Party has been the party of the small shopkeeper. These are the ethnic voters now moving into the middle class. If Gov.-elect Gray Davis’ administration loads new minimum wage, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance costs onto their backs, these shopkeepers will move right into Republican ranks.

The Bush formula in Texas is to build a governing coalition out of the middle and pursue policies that resonate with middle-class voters. He will be pushing for a major tax reduction in 1999. California Republicans, on the other hand, never were able to sell tax cuts that Californians cared about; even their much-touted car-tax cut proved a dud.

Now, the California GOP will disappear from the political scene for a while, and that might be the best thing for it, since the politics it pursued in the 1990s turned out to be such a disaster. It’s an irony that the road back might be blazed by a Texas Republican whose sandstone capital looks down on a lawn bedecked with oil wells and statues to the Confederate dead. But Bush’s success in Texas is exactly the tonic Republicans in California so badly need.*