{"id":43938,"date":"2025-11-08T08:34:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T08:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/43938\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T08:34:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T08:34:24","slug":"in-prop-50-campaign-a-faltering-california-gop-was-on-display","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/43938\/","title":{"rendered":"In Prop. 50 campaign, a faltering California GOP was on display"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maya C. Miller<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\""Two\"
\n\t\t\t\tPolitical signs at the California Republican Party Fall 2025 Convention and Leadership Summit in Garden Grove, on Sept. 6, 2025. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

First, they lost their speaker. Then, they lost a key special election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, with the passage of Proposition 50, California Republicans are poised to lose five congressional seats in next year\u2019s midterms \u2014 and with them, any remaining shred of national influence they once held.<\/p>\n

The party was already floundering after the ouster and resignation of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a prolific fundraiser who could channel campaign resources to his fellow California Republicans and run interference with the Trump administration and other GOP leadership when they needed to take tough votes.<\/p>\n

Absent McCarthy\u2019s arm-twisting in D.C. and with a powerless superminority in both chambers of the state Legislature, California Republicans appear headed for an era of obsolescence, at least for the next five years.<\/p>\n

Proposition 50\u2019s landslide win<\/a> owes its success in part to the abject failure of a disarrayed No on 50 campaign low on funds and unable to keep up with the Yes side\u2019s deluge of savvy advertising.\u00a0<\/p>\n

McCarthy reportedly told his former Republican congressional colleagues that he would help raise up to $100 million to defeat the measure. But that money never materialized. Instead, his No on 50: Stop the Sacramento Power Grab committee only pulled in $11.6 million, with $1 million of that from McCarthy\u2019s defunct congressional campaign account.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While the House Republicans\u2019 super PAC pitched in $5 million to the Stop the Power Grab committee and $8 million to the state Republican Party, no financial help came from President Donald Trump or the White House donor circle, and the president only engaged at the last minute to call the election \u201crigged\u201d and discourage Republicans from trusting mail-in voting.<\/p>\n

Rob Stutzman, a California Republican political strategist, said he didn\u2019t know what happened to the promised $100 million, but his best guess is the decision came from Trump and the White House to not open the fundraising floodgates. After all, a Republican from Texas, Missouri or North Carolina is just as valuable to building a House majority as a Republican from California \u2014 and far less expensive to elect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDoug LaMalfa and Kevin Kiley and Ken Calvert go to bed at night knowing that Donald Trump just doesn\u2019t care about them and is more than happy to trade them in for a Texan,\u201d Stutzman said. \u201cI don\u2019t think that would\u2019ve happened if McCarthy was still speaker.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Kevin would\u2019ve fought for his members,\u201d Stutzman added. \u201cThey were loyal to him, he was loyal to them, and there would\u2019ve been a fully funded campaign out here.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for McCarthy declined to make him available for an interview in time for publication.<\/p>\n

New leadership at the helm of California GOP<\/p>\n

The disappointing Republican turnout against Prop. 50 and the opposition campaign\u2019s meek closing performance only displayed publicly what party insiders and operatives have been grumbling about behind the scenes for months, ever since the party gained new leadership this spring.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Corrin Rankin, a former Democrat<\/a> who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and \u201cagonized\u201d for weeks before admitting she was a Republican, ascended to chair<\/a> of the California Republican Party in March after winning a tense election against former state Sen. Mike Morrell. She previously served as vice chair under the outgoing chair, Jessica Millan Patterson<\/a>, who was widely respected as a McCarthy proteg\u00e9 and a prolific fundraiser and strategist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During a historic three-term stint as the party\u2019s first Latina chair, Millan Patterson won praise after turning the party around from its last rock-bottom moment following the 2018 midterm elections. Under her tenure, the party also flipped three legislative seats in 2024 and increased Trump\u2019s vote share in nearly every county.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But as Rankin was taking over, she reportedly declined her predecessor\u2019s offer to retain a transition team of advisers to help her new staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s taken a step backward from Jessica\u2019s leadership and how strong her leadership was because of McCarthy\u2019s perch of power,\u201d Stutzman said of the party.<\/p>\n

\""U.S.\"U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy addresses attendees during the state Republican Party convention in Sacramento on March 11, 2023. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters<\/p>\n

Rankin and her spokesperson, Matt Shupe, declined multiple interview requests. <\/p>\n

In an emailed statement in response to CalMatters’ questions, Shupe wrote: \u201cChange can be uncomfortable for some people, but we have been reimagining and rebuilding our organization to register new Republicans and win using the latest technology and tactics.”<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have initiated an after-action review to measure what worked and what we will improve to ensure our highly adaptable, innovative organization, led by Chairwoman Rankin is ready to defeat Democrats in 2026 and beyond,” he wrote. <\/p>\n

In the months since her election, multiple public rifts appear to have shown the lack of faith in Rankin\u2019s ability to successfully steer the party\u2019s fundraising and messaging efforts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In July, the Legislature\u2019s then-top Republicans, Assemblymember James Gallagher<\/a> and Sen. Brian Jones<\/a>, suddenly announced a change in the decades-old practice of splitting campaign donations between the party and legislative leadership\u2019s re-election committees, known as the \u201cone-ask\u201d policy. That gave the party great legal leeway<\/a> to distribute campaign donations where they were needed most.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy and large, no one cares about political parties. They care about elected Republican leaders,\u201d former Sen. Jim Brulte, a former party chair who oversaw the implementation of the one-ask policy in 2001. He said party leaders need to\u00a0 foster close relationships with state and congressional lawmakers and major donors. Before he sought the chairmanship, he locked up that support, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom everything I\u2019ve read, those relationships have withered a little bit,\u201d Brulte said. \u201cThey\u2019re not raising as much money as they probably need to. They probably have to repair the relationships that have not been nurtured.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some have privately suggested that the elimination of the arrangement amounted to a rebuke of Rankin\u2019s leadership and a boiling over of legislators\u2019 frustrations that the party was not funneling as much money back to statehouse races.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gallagher declined to comment through his spokesman. A spokesman for Jones said he was unavailable to answer questions in time for publication.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she\u2019s gotten some really bad advice, and we\u2019re seeing it play out in real time. And it\u2019s not been fun,\u201d Brulte said. \u201cI\u2019m disappointed to say that the party has done a good job of making itself irrelevant.\u201d<\/p>\n

A divided campaign against Prop. 50<\/p>\n

A day after Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in the Legislature engineered a statewide special election<\/a> to vote on new gerrymandered congressional districts that favor Democrats, opposition mailers started hitting voters\u2019 mailboxes. One was paid for by Republican billionaire and good governance champion Charles Munger Jr., who would go on to sink $33 million of his own money into the fight against Prop. 50.<\/p>\n

The other pamphlet, which warned recipients to \u201cstop the political power grab,\u201d was paid for by \u201cRight Path California,\u201d a new group backed by McCarthy and headed by Millan Patterson, flanked by her former leadership team from her days as party chair.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the next 10 weeks, it was Millan Patterson and Right Path California, not Rankin and the California Republican Party, that spearheaded the Republican anti-Prop. 50 messaging as Munger and his team worked to energize independents and disaffected Democrats. The party was relegated to getting out the vote, a process that critics say that it botched by wasting money on mailers sent to voters who had already turned in their ballots weeks before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI just don’t think there’s respect for the money donated to the party by the people that are spending the money,\u201d said Cathy Abernathy, a Bakersfield-based Republican strategist. She said she was disappointed that opponents of Prop. 50 didn\u2019t appeal directly to Republicans by putting Trump and other elected leaders\u2019 faces on materials, so she worked with the Kern County party to send out her own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mail I designed was Shannon Grove<\/a>, Congressman Vince Fong, Kevin McCarthy, and Donald Trump right on the cover,\u201d she said. \u201cEvery piece of mail I got paid for by some statewide group with ties to the Republican Party, or the Republican Party, the smallest word on the mailer, the smallest word was \u2018paid for the Republican Party.\u2019 There was no word \u2018Republican\u2019 other than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘We left it all on the field.’<\/p>\n

California Republican Party chair Corrin Rankin on the party’s ‘No’ campaign against Proposition 50.<\/p>\n

When asked at a press conference to respond to critics of her leadership, Rankin stood firm and said she was \u201cvery proud\u201d of the party\u2019s work opposing Prop. 50.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe left it all on the field,\u201d Rankin said. \u201cEveryone worked incredibly hard. I’m proud of our staff. I’m proud of our central committees, and I think we did an incredible job. We worked as a team, and we are 100% united.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

There\u2019s no denying that the double-whammy of losing McCarthy and now several powerful incumbent GOP seats will diminish the party\u2019s clout in Washington, putting even more pressure on the state party to fend for itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cMatt Gaetz destroyed the California Republican Party infrastructure that we had,\u201d said Stutzman, the Republican adviser, using an expletive to describe the former Florida congressman who engineered McCarthy\u2019s ouster. \u201cMcCarthy would\u2019ve made sure there was a No campaign that resonated because it would\u2019ve been funded.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Maya C. Miller, CalMatters Political signs at the California Republican Party Fall 2025 Convention and Leadership Summit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,6198,21121,1361],"class_list":{"0":"post-43938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-california-republicans","12":"tag-kevin-mccarthy","13":"tag-proposition-50"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}