The Party Came to a Fork in the Road --and Didn’t Take It

Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame catcher and dugout philosopher, is alleged to have said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The California Republican Party just came to a fork in the road at its party convention in Sacramento and didn’t take it.

California Republicans suffered their worst defeat in 40 years in November. We lost the governor’s seat, all but two statewide offices and the U.S. Senate seat to the Democrats’ most vulnerable senator, Barbara Boxer. That would be bad enough, but we also lost five seats in the state Assembly and one in the California Senate.

And that’s not the really bad news. A party can recover from a poor candidate or a poor campaign. The really bad news is that we’ve lost more than 600,000 registered Republicans in California since 1990 and may lose as many as a million, total, in this decade. For the past two years, we have averaged losing about 12,500 a month, or about 415 every day.

More bad news is that the trend is not reversing, and in fact, may be accelerating. According to one of the Republican leaders in the Assembly, new registrations are running about 11% Republican, 26% Democrat and more than 50% “decline to state.” Are Republicans going down to the registrar’s office and re-registering as Democrats? Not many. The big losses are the Republicans who move or have a name change and don’t re-register Republican.

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Why this dramatic drop in registration? It might best have been summed up by the most popular sticker at the recent party convention: “It’s the Women, Stupid.” The women’s vote defeated Republicans and elected Democrats in November.

Republican women have long been the workers and the voters of the party. Some 25,000 members strong, the California Federated Republican Women have run the registration drives, manned the phones and worked the polls on election day to get out the vote. In 1998, men voted relatively equally for Republicans and Democrats. Women voted almost two-to-one for Democrats.

According to The Times’ exit poll, about 23% of the voters in November were Democrat men and 23%, Republican men. About 28% were Democrat women and 18% were Republican women. And of the Republican women voters, about 20% to 25% voted for Democrats. In total, Republican women who voted for Republican candidates made up about 14% of the electorate.

Can Republican candidates win without the women’s vote? No. Can Republican candidates win the women’s vote with their current platform? No. In the November election, Republican women were forced to hold their nose and vote Republican, hold their nose and vote Democrat or stay home. They did all three about equally.

Republicans have given women dozens of reasons to stay home or vote Democrat, but the No. 1 reason by far is the anti-choice plank in the Republican platform. It took women 150 years to get to vote in America, longer than that to have a last name, or own property in their name, and just short of 200 years to get the government out of their doctors’ offices. They aren’t about to go back. As one said recently, “Republican women are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.”

Women also don’t like guns and are concerned about education, tobacco, the environment, health care, child care, flex work and equal pay. Candidates who spoke to those issues in November won the women’s vote.

Where was the “fork in the road”? At the California Republican Party convention. For the first time in eight years, the election of officers did not resemble an election in Cuba. There were two candidates for every office.

One slate was composed of the incumbent officers, who have led the party during the loss of more than a million registered Republicans and to the worst defeat in 40 years. The other slate, led by Nick Bavaro and Brooks Firestone, offered a much more mainstream, inclusive platform and might have been able to recapture some of the fallen-away Republicans.

The Republican leaders serving in the Assembly, state Senate and Congress appoint almost half the delegates to the convention. They could have appointed members who wanted to change the direction of the party and instructed them to vote for the mainstream slate. They didn’t. They appointed more of the same type of delegates who have controlled the party and instructed them to vote for the incumbents. They elected the party they want.

The party did not take Yogi’s “fork in the road,” but rather, did his “deja vu all over again.”

We will see how that plays out in 2000.