June 8, 2016

California’s Calamitous Republican Party, In One Chart

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


This year’s general election for the California Senate seat being vacated by Barbara Boxer will feature no Republicans: The top vote-getters in our open primary were a pair of Democrats, Attorney General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez. This is a historic result, but to get a real feel for the depth of the GOP’s debacle, take a look at this deceptively simple chart:

This tells you so much. The GOP’s only hope was to unite on a single candidate; instead they ended up with a field of 12, mostly crackpots and no-hopers. Why? Partly because it doesn’t cost much to qualify for a Senate race in California, and there were a lot of people who thought it would be amusing to be on the ballot. But it’s also because the party is such a joke that it has virtually no influence anymore, even over its own members.

What else does this chart tell us? These 12 candidates won a cumulative total of 29.4 percent of the vote. Not even a third. The top vote-getter, Duf Sundheim, was a complete unknown: a former state GOP chairman with no experience in office of any kind.

Why didn’t anyone with more name recognition run? Largely because the California GOP no longer has anyone with any name recognition. They’re completely shut out of statewide office and hold only about a third of the seats in the legislature. Only two cities of any size have Republican mayors (San Diego and Fresno), and they’re both unknown in the rest of the state.

But there are still a few GOP members of Congress who have enough stature to command an occasional TV camera (Kevin McCarthy, Darrell Issa, Duncan Hunter). Why didn’t any of them run? Because in 2010 they watched Meg Whitman flush $144 million of her personal fortune down the toilet running for governor and Carly Fiorina do the same with $7 million in the Senate race, and the results were grim: Fiorina lost by ten points and Whitman lost by 13 points. Even candidates only loosely associated with the Republican Party lost in a landslide.

So there you have it. Put all of this together and you get the chart above: a dozen nobodies with no name recognition and no chance, with the top vote-getter receiving a pathetic 8 percent of the vote. It’s the California GOP in a nutshell.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate