CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2021, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“CAPITOL INVASION THREATENS GOP
CALIFORNIA SEATS”
Republicans made much ado last fall
when they regained four of the seven congressional seats Democrats flipped away
from them two years earlier, in 2018.
They gloated in ways they could not over
the last 25 years, since Democrats turned this state into a sea of blue.
“We were the ones who wanted to get something
done,” crowed Hanford’s David Valadao, who took back the 21st
District seat he had lost by 900 votes to Democrat T.J. Cox two years earlier.
But are they gloating too soon?
Valadao’s margin of 1,522 votes out of about 170,000 that were cast only slightly
topped Cox’s earlier edge. Fewer than 2,000 voters switching from one candidate
to another, one party to another, made the difference.
This could portend a Democratic
comeback in the district next year – but no one can be certain, because California
is likely to lose a seat or two in the House when Census results are finalized,
assuring that district lines will change. It’s even possible Valadao could find
himself in a primary fight with neighboring GOP Rep. Devin Nunes if new
districts feature overlap between their two current ones.
Even more threatening to some
Republicans was their performance in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 mob invasion
of the U.S. Capitol, incited in part by Trump.
His purpose: To disrupt the usually
pro forma congressional certification of the Electoral College vote held on Dec.
14, which made Joe Biden president in accordance with the popular vote
nationally and in individual states. Congress voted on possibly rejecting electors
from Arizona based on unfounded fairy tales of fraud propounded by the defeated
past president. A week later, it voted to impeach Trump a second time.
Only one of the four Republicans who
recovered seats for the GOP actually voted for the objections from their party’s
senators and House members. That was Mike Garcia of Santa Clarita, a former
Navy fighter pilot who won last fall by just 333 votes out of more than 340,000
cast in the district running from Lancaster and Rosamond in the high desert of
northern Los Angeles County over to Simi Valley in Ventura County.
As with other districts, no one knows
quite what his will look like in 2022, the shape of districts to be determined
by California’s bi-partisan Citizens Redistricting Commission, whose members are
yet unnamed.
Garcia’s is the only House seat even
partly in 12-million-person Los Angeles County that’s now held by the GOP, and Garcia
won it by the barest of margins. It contains several of the few remaining
Republican-dominated enclaves in the state, but Garcia won this time because
about 800 swing voters changed their choices between 2018 and 2020.
With no evidence to back his
assertion, Garcia explained his vote to cancel Arizona’s electors by asserting without
offering any evidence that he “firmly believ(ed)” there were constitutional errors
in some states’ votes. This despite numerous court decisions finding there were
no such errors, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the incumbent’s
own appointees joined the majority ruling against him.
Immediately, there were calls in the
district for Garcia to resign and make way for a special election to replace
him, charging he gave aid and comfort to the Jan. 6 mob that invaded the
Capitol.
Meanwhile, newly elected seat flippers
Valadao, Young Kim and Michelle Steel of Orange County all found excuses not to
vote on the Arizona objection. They may have avoided calls to resign, but they
made no move to back constitutional democracy and so will be subject in 2022 to
charges they implicitly backed the mob and the former incumbent. Like Garcia, three
of them voted against impeachment. Valadao was one of just 10 Republicans to
back it.
Chances are expansion of district sizes due to loss of a seat or
two will increase the geographical reach of all their districts next year, throwing
more Democrats into their constituencies.
This leaves the California GOP in significantly
worse shape now than
before the Capitol
invasion, a boon for Democratic efforts to hold their slim House majority in an
off-year election where the incumbent president’s party usually loses some
seats.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His
book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and
the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover
fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
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