State Stands Alone Against GOP Tilt

In 1949, author Carey McWilliams published his classic work on California, calling the bumptious, booming state “The Great Exception.” On election day, California proved itself the exception once more.

While the rest of America tilted Republican, the great contrarian state emphatically backed Democrats, rewarding the party with possibly its first ticket-wide sweep in more than 100 years.

There may be consequences to this quirkiness -- and not just adding to the state’s shopworn image as the far-out land of tofu and hot tubs.

The Bush White House, which has never shown much affinity for California, has even less incentive to pay attention now as strategists begin plotting the president’s reelection plan. “The problem is the state is such a sinkhole for money,” said one White House political advisor.

California’s debilitated GOP -- its chairman openly at war with the president’s top man in the state -- has been all but disenfranchised by party leaders in Washington.

On Capitol Hill, where California has long engendered hostility, the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic congressional delegation is an even more distinct minority in the new, more Republican Congress. Instead of pushing for new environmental protections or expanded abortion rights, liberal lawmakers may end up fighting efforts to roll back current laws.

The infamous “ABC Syndrome,” as in “Anywhere But California,” may soon have added adherents. The state will find out in the next few months when it comes calling for help with Los Angeles’ health-care crisis, California’s continuing water needs, and efforts to recoup money lost in last year’s energy crunch.

And yet the saving grace -- what has long been California’s saving grace -- is its sheer size and import: physically, economically and psychologically.

“You just can’t turn your back on it,” said Republican campaign strategist Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole’s unsuccessful 1996 presidential campaign, which ended in a California drubbing. “Republicans nationally cannot afford to write off those 55 electoral votes before Labor Day. It takes too many other states to make them up.”

Democrat Barbara Boxer, the state’s junior United States senator, agreed. “They said that would happen after 2000,” when Bush lost California in a landslide. “It didn’t. It can’t.”

With Tuesday’s results, California’s leadership is now one of the most thoroughly Democratic of any state. Hawaii and Maryland, two long-standing party bastions, both elected Republican governors, as did left-leaning Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

By contrast, California not only reelected Democrat Gray Davis to a second term but also voted six of his party peers into statewide office. In one other contest, Democrat Steve Westly was leading the race for controller, but the outcome was too close to call. If Westly prevails -- and a count of absentee ballots could take some time -- it would complete the first Democratic sweep in California since 1882.

Amid the election wreckage, Republicans took solace in gaining at least two Assembly seats and possibly a third. But the party remains vastly outnumbered in the Legislature, and its spokesmen resorted Wednesday to claiming moral victories, like keeping Davis’ margin over businessman Bill Simon Jr. in single digits -- 47% to 42% -- and forcing others on the Democratic ticket to wait a few extra hours to deliver victory speeches.

“I can’t think of a state in the country where Republicans are in worse shape,” said Tony Quinn, a former GOP strategist and a leading California political demographer.

It has been a dramatic shift away from the state’s historic Republican leanings, slow-building but powerful like an avalanche.

Female voters in California -- who outnumber men -- steadily fled the GOP over the last two decades as the conservative wing of the Republican Party gained ascendancy. Latinos were antagonized by Republican anti-immigration rhetoric and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1994 support for Proposition 187, the measure that sought to deny many benefits to illegal migrants. Many grew energized and began siding overwhelmingly with Democrats.

Meantime, many of the GOP’s most loyal followers -- the ones who supported Ronald Reagan for governor and twice for president -- either died or retired to such places as Arizona, Colorado or Idaho.

The result is terrain that is politically inhospitable to even the best-intentioned Republicans. President Bush campaigned hard and spent millions in his losing effort to carry the state in 2000. Once he took office, it was months before Bush paid his first presidential visit, and he took a hands-off approach when the electricity crisis hit.

Still, he kept an active role in the state’s politics, working through his proxies to assume financial control over the California Republican Party and even helping coax Richard Riordan into the governor’s race. The former L.A. mayor, with his appeal to Latino voters and support for abortion rights and gun control, was seen as just the kind of maverick who could refashion the California GOP’s harsh image.

After Riordan imploded and Simon won the Republican primary, Bush helped raise several million dollars for the nominee. The president visited California five times on Simon’s behalf, albeit grudgingly the last time in mid-August.

Indeed, the White House barely hid its disdain for Simon and his feuding strategists; some angry party activists noted that the president never returned after Labor Day, when a visit might have helped the most.

“It’s the ultimate hypocrisy,” said K.B. Forbes, a GOP strategist with roots in the party’s conservative wing. “They keep talking about building a bigger, better Republican Party, and they’ve done nothing like that.”

Shawn Steel, the embattled chairman of the state GOP, also chimed in Wednesday.

“The same group that managed the failed Bush [California] campaign in 2000 now has control of the party, and so we’ve got the same results,” Steel said. “Had we had a more mature, sophisticated team, like the Reagan cabinet, we would be better funded and more unified and more appealing to conservatives.”

For his part, the president’s chief California emissary, Westside businessman Gerald L. Parsky, expressed pleasure with the party’s progress.

“We started coming out of a 1998 gubernatorial election we lost by 20 points. In 2000 we lost by 11 points. Here we have only lost by 5 points, and I think that’s thanks to the commitment of the president,” said Parsky, who led efforts to seize control of the state GOP from Steel and his grass-roots allies.

Privately, however, a campaign consultant close to the White House was more dubious about the president’s California prospects in 2004. His advice: “Pretend you’re running, but don’t run.”

That means that the state probably should not count on the kind of blandishments bestowed on, say, Florida, which has enjoyed the fullest panoply of administration goodies, from environmental projects to health-care benefits to repeated presidential visits.

But Bush cannot be too stinting, either. For one thing, California provides a huge chunk of the money the Republican Party collects nationally -- and neglected campaign donors are not happy, or repeat, donors.

And there are lawmakers, with California constituents, who also would not appreciate being taken for granted.

“We are both too big and too important,” said Rep. David Dreier, a San Dimas Republican close to the Bush White House. “We are the 21st century economy, we embody that, and the president understands that. And the moment he fails to, I’ll be there to remind him.”

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Times staff writers Faye Fiore and Matea Gold contributed to this report.