Recall and Midterm

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall.  Newsom won.

Nathaniel Rakich and Geoffrey Skelley at FiveThirtyEight:

But here’s the thing about the 2022 midterms: Republicans don’t need a significant shift in the electoral environment to flip the House, considering that Democrats hold only a 222-to-213 seat edge there.6 For one thing, the GOP will control the redistricting process for more districts than Democrats, so new map lines alone could provide Republicans with enough of an edge before we even consider the electoral environment. Newsom’s 26-point win also contains some potentially ominous signs for Democrats. Take Orange County, the ancestral home of the state’s GOP that is now a key swing suburban county. In 2020, Biden won Orange County by 9 points, while opposition to the recall leads by about 3 points there. And if we dig into two key, swingy House seats that Republicans flipped in 2020, we see that “yes” on recall leads relatively narrowly in the Orange County portions of California’s 39th Congressional District (by less than 1 point) and 48th Congressional District (by more than 4 points).7 By comparison, Biden performed about 5 to 6 points better in both districts in 2020, carrying the Orange County part of the 39th District by about 5 points and the 48th District (entirely in Orange) by about 1.5 points. These small shifts don’t mean Democrats can’t flip those seats back in 2022 — the lines will change to an unknown extent in redistricting, for one thing — but at the very least, it doesn’t suggest that turf is getting friendlier to them.

Nonetheless, Orange County’s result might also demonstrate Democrats can still hold onto their edge in the suburbs. Even though “yes” on recall performed better than Trump, this contest marked yet another election where the Republican candidate or the Republican-backed ballot position still lost the huge suburban county — a sign that it probably won’t return solidly to the GOP fold anytime soon. Conversely, although the recall vote failed by 26 points in heavily Hispanic Imperial County, which is located along the U.S.-Mexico border, such a result still suggests Republicans might be able to hold onto the improvements they made among Hispanic voters in 2020. That’s because that result, while positive for Newsom, is similar to Biden’s 24-point edge in 2020, which is a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s nearly 42-point lead there in 2016.

Partisan "Nonpartisan" Races in Orange County

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and local elections.

Brooke Staggs & Alicia Robinson at the OC Register

In theory, elections for dozens of city, county and regional posts are legally nonpartisan in Orange County, with ballots that don’t include party labels next to candidates’ names.

The reasoning is — or, rather, was — that local races are about local issues. Fixing potholes and keeping clean water flowing to your house are government functions that work best when they’re not subject to the kind of partisan haggling that comes with issues like gun control and abortion rights.

And voters used to go along with that. A generation ago, it would have been unheard of for a resident of, say, Irvine, to ask a council candidate knocking at the door about their party affiliation, said Randall Avila, spokesman for the Republican Party of Orange County.

No more. As Orange County’s demographics have changed, and as Democrats have grown in power in a county once dominated by Republicans, party politics and party affiliation are becoming increasingly big factors in local races.

...

Arguably, lingering “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules about party affiliation in local races might have helped Republicans in recent years. Even though registered Democrats have outnumbered registered Republicans in the county since 2019, the GOP has held its long-standing majorities in most local jurisdictions. Republicans now hold nearly 55% of county and local seats while Democrats hold just over 33%.

But with party labels increasingly attached to candidates in nonpartisan races, and with county voters leaning leftward, the GOP edge is slipping. Democrats are winning more seats on city councils, school boards, and library, sanitation and other special district boards,

“At the local level last year, we took 20 seats from Republicans,” said Ada Briceño, chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County. Those wins, she added, extended into traditionally GOP communities such as San Clemente and Fountain Valley.

Demographics of the Blue Orange

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   California is an important part of the story.

Adam Nagourney and Robert Gebeloff at NYT:

Those new swing suburban counties were one of the central factors behind the 40-seat Democratic gain in the House in November. Many of them have been changed by an increase in educated and affluent voters who have been pushed toward the Democratic column by some of Mr. Trump’s policies. That partly accounts for what is happening here in Orange County, but the political shifts can also be explained by the rapidly changing cultural, political and economic face of the region and are on display in places like Bolsa Avenue, which is known as Little Saigon.

...
In the 48th Congressional District, which voted out Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a fixture of Orange County Republican politics for nearly 30 years, the Latino population jumped to 145,585 in 2017 from 38,803 in 1980, or 8 percent, accounting for 21 percent of the district’s population.

In another corner of Orange County, where Representative Mimi Walters, a Republican, was upset by Katie Porter, her Democratic challenger, the Asian-American population jumped from 14,528 in 1980, or 4.4 percent, to 175,540 in 2017, making up just under a quarter of the total population.

...
“Everybody is surprised,” said Jim Brulte, the state Republican leader. “Like Orange County is immune to the demographic changes?”

Tom Tait, the outgoing two-term Republican mayor of Anaheim, who saw the county change before him as he grew up here, said the party had failed to keep up.

“The local party has dropped the ball with immigrant communities,” he said. “Anaheim is now one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States.”

Orange to Blue

Nate Cohn reports at The New York Times:

There is no guarantee that the Democrats can put the House in play, even if Mr. Trump’s approval ratings remain as low as they are now or slip further. The Republicans have so many safe seats that they could even survive a so-called wave election like the ones that swept Democrats to power in 2006 and out of power in 2010. The Democrats need 24 seats to retake the House.

But whether the Democrats can do it will come down to places like Orange County, which is more populous than Iowa. Four congressional districts that have at least some territory in the county still have Republican representatives, and all four were carried by Mrs. Clinton.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the road to a Democratic House begins and ends at Laguna Beach.

Darrell Issa, who represents the California coast from southern Orange County almost to La Jolla, is probably the nation’s most vulnerable incumbent. That’s based on factors that tend to predict which districts are likeliest to be competitive — like the result of his last election (he won by just 1 point) and how the district voted in recent presidential contests.

By the same measures, the 24th-most vulnerable Republican is Dana Rohrabacher, whose district is immediately north of Mr. Issa’s — stretching up the Orange County coast from Laguna Beach to Sunset Beach. In between, Ed Royce and Mimi Walters represent the 13th- and 20th-most vulnerable districts.

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But Orange County is not an outlier. Across the nation, the most vulnerable Republican incumbents among the 50 or so most competitive seats tend to be in relatively well-educated, metropolitan districts with above-average Hispanic populations. It’s the opposite of most of the 2016 presidential battleground states, which were whiter, less educated and far less Hispanic than the country as a whole.

From The Orange County Register:

 

Asians, Hispanics, and Turnout: A Case Study in Orange County

A Los Angeles Times analysis of a recent Orange County supervisorial race shows how Republicans can still win because Asian American voter turnout tops Latino turnout.

The outcome, the analysis found, turned on the high number of Santa Ana voters who failed to return the absentee ballots that had been mailed to them.

In the core of Santa Ana, where voting heavily favored [Democrat Lou] Correa, only 22% of the absentee voters got around to returning their ballots, far below the state and county's 50% return rate for absentee ballots in the 2014 general election. The unreturned ballots represented tens of thousands of votes.

[Republican] Andrew Do, by contrast, got a big boost because more than 40% of the absentee voters in Little Saigon returned their ballots.

The special election swung nearly entirely on mail-in ballots, which made up about 84% of the total vote.

Blue Orange?

Orange County, birthplace of Richard Nixon, may be on the cusp of political upheaval. In the Orange County Register, Dena Bunis reports:

Orange County Democrats have become so emboldened by how well President Barack Obama did here on election night that as far as they're concerned they can compete for any seat in this Republican rich environment.

Case in point:

Irvine Councilwoman and former Mayor Beth Krom. She made it official this week that she is going to take on Republican Rep. John Campbell.

Outside of Southern California, Orange County is synonymous with wealth, glamour (e.g., The OC) and conservative politics. The reality is more complicated. Republicans have generally won there, but in 2008, McCain took the county by a slim 50-48 percent margin. What's up?

• First, it's now a majority-minority county, about 33 percent Hispanic, 16 percent Asian, and 2 percent African American.
• Second, while coastal areas are indeed as affluent as the stereotype holds, there are gritty working-class areas farther inland. (I used to live in one of them.)
• Third, it is home to large numbers of high-income professionals, who liked Obama. Nationwide, he won narrowly among voters making more than $200k a year, and by a 58-40 percent margin among those with postgraduate study. As Michael Barone has argued convincingly, The GOP cannot take upscale voters for granted.

Orange County Republicans will have to work hard to keep their turf from turning blue.