In the Prop campaign. 50 a wavering California Republican Party was exposed

from Maya S. MillerCalMatters

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First, they lost their speaker. Then they lost a key special election.

Now, with the passage of Proposition 50, California Republicans stand to lose five congressional seats in next year’s midterms — and with them, every bit of national influence they once had.

The party was already reeling from the ouster and resignation of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a prolific fundraiser who could funnel campaign funds to fellow Republicans in California and intervene with the Trump administration and other GOP leadership when they needed to make tough votes.

Absent McCarthy’s arm-twisting in D.C. and with a powerless superminority in both houses of the state legislature, California Republicans appear headed for an era of relegation, at least for the next five years.

A landslide victory for the 50s proposition owes its success in part to the abject failure of a confused ‘No at 50’ campaign underfunded and unable to cope with the flood of sensible advertising on the Yes side.

McCarthy reportedly told his former Republican colleagues in Congress that he would help raise up to $100 million to repeal the measure. But that money never materialized. Instead, his No on 50: Stop the Sacramento Power Grab committee raised just $11.6 million, $1 million of which came from McCarthy’s defunct congressional account.

While the House Republican super PAC gave $5 million to the Stop the Power Grab committee and $8 million to the state GOP, no financial help came from President Donald Trump or the White House donor circle, and the president only committed at the last minute to calling the election “rigged” and discouraging Republicans from trusting mail-in voting.

Rob Stutzman, a California Republican political strategist, said he didn’t know what happened to the promised $100 million, but his best guess was that the decision came from Trump and the White House not to open the floodgates for fundraising. After all, a Republican from Texas, Missouri or North Carolina is just as valuable to building a majority in the House of Representatives as a Republican from California — and much cheaper to elect.

“Doug LaMalfa, Kevin Kiley and Ken Calvert go to bed at night knowing that Donald Trump just doesn’t care about them and is more than happy to trade them for a Texan,” Stutzman said. “I don’t think that would have happened if McCarthy was still speaker.”

“I think Kevin would fight for his members,” Stutzman added. “They were loyal to him, he was loyal to them, and he was going to have a fully funded campaign here.”

A spokesman for McCarthy declined to make him available for an interview in time for publication.

New leadership at the helm of the California Republican Party

Disappointing Republican turnout against Prop. 50 and the opposition’s tame closing campaign performance only showed publicly what party insiders and operatives have been muttering about behind the scenes for months since the party received new leadership this spring.

Corinne Rankin, a former Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and “agonized” for weeks before admitting she was a Republican, got on the chair of the California Republican Party in March after winning a tight election against former state Sen. Mike Morrell. She previously served as Deputy Chair under the outgoing Chair, Jessica Milan Pattersonwho was widely respected as a McCarthy protégé and a prolific fundraiser and strategist.

During her historic three-term tenure as the party’s first Latino chairman, Milan Patterson earned praise for turning the party around from its last-minute bottoming in the 2018 midterm elections. During her tenure, the party also flipped three 2024 legislative seats and increased Trump’s vote share in nearly every district.

But as Rankin took over, she rejected her predecessor’s offer to retain a transition team of advisers to help her new staff.

“There’s been a step back from Jessica’s leadership and how strong her leadership was because of McCarthy’s power,” Stutzman said of the party.

Rankin and her spokesman, Matt Shupe, declined multiple interview requests.

In an emailed statement in response to questions from CalMatters, Shupe wrote: “The change may be uncomfortable for some people, but we are rethinking and rebuilding our organization to register new Republicans and win using the latest technology and tactics.”

“We have initiated an after-action review to measure what is working and what we will improve to ensure that our highly adaptable, innovative organization, led by Chairman Rankin, is ready to defeat Democrats in 2026 and beyond,” he wrote.

In the months since her election, numerous public disagreements seemed to show a lack of faith in Rankin’s ability to successfully lead the party’s fundraising and messaging efforts.

In July, then-top Republicans in the Legislature, Rep James Gallagher and Sen. Brian Jonessuddenly announced a change to the decades-old practice of splitting campaign donations between the party’s re-election committees and the legislative leadership, known as the “one-ask” policy. This gave the party great legal leeway to distribute campaign donations where they are most needed.

“Generally speaking, nobody cares about the political parties. They care about the elected Republican leaders,” said former Sen. Jim Brulte, a former party chairman who oversaw the implementation of the one-question policy in 2001. He said party leaders should foster close relationships with state and congressional lawmakers and major donors. Before seeking the chairmanship, he locked in that support, he said.

“From everything I’ve read, that relationship is a little withered,” Brulte said. “They’re not raising as much money as they probably should. They probably need to repair the relationships that weren’t sustained.”

Some privately suggested that scrapping the agreement amounted to a rebuke to Rankin’s leadership and seething lawmakers’ frustration that the party isn’t funneling as much money back into statewide races.

Gallagher declined to comment through his spokesman. A spokesman for Jones said he was not available to answer questions in time for publication.

“I think she got some really bad advice and we’re seeing it play out in real time. And it wasn’t fun,” Brulte said. “I’m disappointed to say that the party has done a good job of making itself irrelevant.”

Divided campaign against Prop. 50

A day after Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in the Legislature organizes special elections throughout the country to vote in new rigged congressional districts that favor Democrats, opposition mailers began hitting voters’ mailboxes. One was paid for by Republican billionaire and good government champion Charles Munger Jr., who would pour $33 million of his own money into the fight against Prop. 50.

The other pamphlet, which warned recipients to “stop the political power grab,” was paid for by California Straight, a new group backed by McCarthy and headed by Milne Patterson, flanked by her former leadership team from her days as party chairman.

For the next 10 weeks, Milne Patterson and California Straight, not Rankin and the California Republican Party, led the Republican anti-prop movement. 50 messages as Munger and his team worked to energize independents and disaffected Democrats. The party was forced to withdraw from the vote, a process critics say it botched by wasting money on letters sent to voters who had already cast their ballots weeks before.

“I just don’t think there’s any respect for the money donated to the party by the people who spend the money,” said Kathy Abernathy, a Bakersfield-based Republican strategist. She said she was disappointed that opponents of Prop. 50 didn’t directly address Republicans by putting the faces of Trump and other elected leaders on materials, so she worked with the Kern County party to send her own.

“The mail I designed was Shannon GroveCongressman Vince Fong, Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump right on the cover,” she said. “Every letter that I was paid for by some state group with ties to the Republican Party or the Republican Party, the smallest word in the letter, the smallest word was ‘paid for the Republican Party.’ There was no other word “Republican” than that.

“We left everything on the field.”

California Republican Party Chair Corinne Rankin on the party’s No campaign against Proposition 50.

When asked at a press conference to respond to critics of her leadership, Rankin remained firm, saying she was “very proud” of the party’s work opposing Prop. 50.

“We left it all on the field,” Rankin said. “Everyone worked incredibly hard. I’m proud of our staff. I’m proud of our central committees and I think we did an amazing job. We worked as a team and we’re 100 percent united.”

As of Oct. 31, the party still had $2.85 million in its state and federal accounts, according to an internal presentation given to the board of directors and obtained by CalMatters.

There’s no denying that the double whammy of losing McCarthy and now several powerful GOP incumbents will reduce the party’s influence in Washington, putting even more pressure on the state party to fend for itself.

“Matt Goetz destroyed the GOP infrastructure in California that we had,” said Stutzman, the Republican adviser, using an expletive to describe the former Florida congressman who orchestrated McCarthy’s ouster. “McCarthy would have made sure there was a No campaign that resonated because it would have been funded.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.