http://www.nationalreview.com/node/434542/print The Biggest California Primary Since Goldwater Beat Rockefeller
By Eliana Johnson — April 26, 2016
What, exactly, does a California Republican look like? The question is now a subject of heated debate, and the answer may very well determine the outcome of this historic GOP primary.
California hasn’t played a decisive role in choosing the Republican nominee since 1964, when it broke for Barry Goldwater over Nelson Rockefeller in a contest so close that Rockefeller went on to protest the results at the convention in San Francisco. This year, California’s Republican voters are set to make an equally momentous decision: The state’s 172 delegates will either put Donald Trump over the top and deliver him the nomination, or allow Ted Cruz to force a contested convention in July.
As in 1964, the race that will culminate in California is also a battle for the ideological soul of the Republican party. Goldwater’s nomination ensured the GOP would be a vessel for conservatism. On June 7, California’s 5 million registered Republicans will decide whether it remains so.
California’s primary comes at a time when the number of registered Republicans in the state has dwindled. High tax rates and a declining economy have led businessmen and entrepreneurs elsewhere. “Our base is leaving,” says Republican national committeeman Shawn Steel. “We export Republicans.”
The phenomenon has created a gulf between core party activists and the state’s rank-and-file Republicans. The former are by and large traditional conservatives who prefer Cruz to Trump, but there is considerable disagreement as to the ideological makeup of the latter, those whom Steel calls “Walmart moms.” The heated battles that have taken place in so many places across the country since 2010 have hit California so infrequently that its ideological temperature has rarely been measured, at least on the Republican side. Given its size, its varying geography, and its diverse population — coastal cities to the West, arid farmland to the East, plus large Vietnamese and Hispanic populations — it also presents political campaigns with a complex landscape, essentially several different states within a state. All of these factors have left political onlookers scratching their heads six weeks out from the crucial contest, unsure which candidate will prevail in California — and go on to take the nomination.
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Trump boasts a 17-point lead in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, and though just a handful of public polls have been conducted over the last month, there is broad agreement that he will enter California with the upper hand. The fusion of politics and entertainment that the former Apprentice host represents is a built-in advantage, particularly in a state that twice elected Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. “If Trump did nothing at all except get delegates listed with the secretary of state’s office, he would still be very competitive,” says Steel, whose wife Michelle, the Orange County supervisor, has endorsed Cruz.
But there is widespread disagreement about just how substantial Trump’s advantage will be, and how much work Cruz will have to do to counter it. There are those who insist California is natural territory for the Texas senator, while others argue the opposite. “California is not New York, and the Republican party in California is very conservative,” says Robert O’Brien, a Cruz foreign-policy adviser. “It’s a traditional conservative Republican party, and Republicans here are similar to Republicans in the West, in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, where Ted Cruz has done extraordinarily well.”
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