GOP victory in California
Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2013 3:52 pm
Not holding my breath but...
According to the logic of politics, Leticia Perez should have handily won the heavily Democratic and Hispanic district in California’s central valley, and her failure to do so has Republicans eager to develop a victory template for struggling GOP candidates elsewhere in the deep-blue state and across the country.
Fresno cherry farmer and cattle rancher Andy Vidak, who is fluent in Spanish, said he captured the state Senate seat in last week’s closely watched runoff vote by connecting with Hispanic voters with a “common-sense” approach that focused on job creation, affordable energy and opposition to big government. He even cooked menudo, a cow-stomach soup and a Mexican favorite, at a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce event at the Bakersfield fairgrounds where 10,000 Hispanics turned out.
He got a big assist from other GOP officeholders and hundreds of Spanish-speaking Republican volunteers going door to door, making pitches in Spanish where necessary in the 60 percent Hispanic district. Mr. Vidak also managed to create a little political daylight from hard-liners in his party on the issue of eventually granting citizenship to illegal immigrants.
“We talked to them in their homes, where they are most comfortable on the issues that matter most to them: improving the economy, lower taxes, less government interference with small business,” Republican Assemblyman Travis Allen said.
Fresno GOP Chairman Kurtis Wiley said he had never seen a party work harder and rally its resources any better.
While Democrats are in the governor’s mansion and have legislative supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, a new kind of GOP leadership suddenly is thinking about making major inroads in California, and they are not embarrassed to say so aloud.
“California can be Republican again,” said former state Senate leader Jim Brulte, the new state GOP chairman and the first one in recent memory who has real experience in party-building, winning elections and managing fellow GOP lawmakers.
Also embedded in the story is a lesson for Democrats: They took the district for granted. Republicans working on the Vidak campaign said they were hard-pressed to find a single Democratic officeholder on the streets pitching locals on behalf of Ms. Perez, a Kern County supervisor,
Kern County Democratic Party Chairwoman Candi Easter said her party wasn’t prepared and simply got outhustled for the seat long held by successive Hispanic Democrats.
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Mr. Vidak said he got his message right and estimated that he had to win perhaps one of four Hispanic votes to carry the district. Previous GOP candidates for the seat took an estimated one of eight Hispanic votes — and routinely lost the four-county district.
“I ran on jobs, affordable energy and water, opposition to the $100 billion ‘bullet train’ federal boondoggle that Leticia supported for union jobs — and on common sense, which has no party lines,” Mr. Vidak said.
Immigration was also a big deal in my campaign,” Mr. Vidak said. “You can’t live here without knowing many people who have some sort of documentation problem that the federal government has done nothing about for 25 years.”
That is not quite the same message delivered on Mr. Vidak’s behalf by Mr. Allen, the GOP assemblyman who worked the district for Mr. Vidak for three weekends in near 100-degree temperatures, bringing “tons of volunteers” with him from all over California.
“A path to citizenship [for illegal immigrants] was not part of the message,” Mr. Allen said. “What mattered were the economic issues and that this was the first time these voters we visited talked to anyone from either party.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/29/hispanic-win-california-can-be-republican-again/