• CA’s primary once again irrelevant
• Unions and ride-sharing services near deal?
• Voters get to decide on legal pot
• Newsom gun initiative splits the partisan spectrum

Good morning. Happy hump day.

Business tycoon Donald Trump won the Indiana primary yesterday, forcing Texas Senator Ted Cruz, his biggest remaining rival, from the race.

Trump has all but locked up the nomination, with even Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus conceding Trump will be the nominee (Ohio Governor John Kasich is still in the race, although he’s struggled to make an impact). 

The biggest news of the race yesterday, however, is not Trump winning or Cruz dropping. Instead, it is the fact that California’s June primary has once again been relegated to irrelevant. The Sacramento Bee has more. 

In other news:

• Are unions and ride-sharing services, like Lyft and Uber, nearing a deal? CalWatchdog has more. 
• Voters will get to decide in November on whether to legalize recreational marijuana, after proponents of the measure submitted more than enough signatures on Tuesday, reports LA Weekly. 
• “Backers of a gun control initiative proposed for the November ballot argued during a legislative forum Tuesday that it is needed to make California safer, while opponents said it will unfairly harm law-abiding gun owners and is primarily aimed at getting Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom elected governor,” writes the Los Angeles Times.

Assembly:

• Full slate of hearings.

Senate:

• Governance and Finance Committee hearing. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events scheduled.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @LibertyCliff @catoletters

The Ohio governor represents an important swing state. As a member of Congress, he chaired the House Budget Committee, where he was considered the architect of the deal that balanced the federal budget. And he was instrumental in the major welfare reform legislation of the 1990s.

He shies away from talking too much about social issues, the Republicans’ Achilles Heel. He even polls well in the general — the only Republican topping Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. 

Yet, he’s struggled to matter in the race. His only primary victory so far has been his home state and he has relatively few delegates. In fact, he still hasn’t surpassed Marco Rubio’s delegate count, even though the Florida Senator has been out of the race since mid March.

However, recent polling in California, where 172 delegates are up for grabs, shows Kasich with 20 percent of support (just behind Texas Senator Ted Cruz, but way behind business tycoon Donald Trump). The overall goal, with an outright win out of reach, is to push the nomination to an open, national GOP convention this summer.

“The only adult in the room”

Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes offered the same praise that Kasich has drawn throughout the contest, that Kasich is “the only adult in the room.”

“Gov. Kasich is ready to be president on Day One,” Mayes said while introducing Kasich at the CAGOP convention Friday night. “He can unite the party and win the White House. Republicans, he is our best choice.”

Does he unite the party?

Electability matters to voters, but the supporters of every candidate believe their guy or gal is electable. 

Kasich’s biggest knock is his acceptance of the Medicaid expansion offered through Obamacare, which Republican governors refused largely rejected.

“‘Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,'” Kasich said to an Ohio legislator at the time who was making an anti-government expansion argument. “‘But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.’ ”

However, that decision has haunted him, said Republican strategist Rob Stuzman, who is part of an effort to stop Trump from winning the nomination by trying to get either Kasich or Cruz over the top.

“The knock on him throughout the race are the things he’s down in Ohio in expanding the size government that have held him back from a lot of conservative support that he probably would have had earlier in his career,” Stutzman said. 

Heidi Leupp, from Hillsborough, said she supports Kasich because of both his executive and legislative experience. She sees a winner, someone who polls well against the likely Democratic nominee, but is also popular in his own state. 

“Although he’s an outsider now, he does know how Washington works,” Leupp said. 

In a contentious primary season that’s been dominated by “mud-slinging,” Kasich has stayed above the fray, which Leupp finds attractive. But, she concedes, that both limits the amount of media attention he receives and differs from the tone of much of the electorate. 

“He doesn’t call people names, he doesn’t get into the mud, and because of that, he might not get the media exposure the mud-slingers get,” Leupp said. “But for the thoughtful voter, who looks at issues and looks at experience and looks at electability — which might be the most important thing — he is the perfect candidate.”

Kasich

To reporters on Friday, Kasich admitted that “it isn’t working out right now,” but pointed to a recent string of second-place finishes as dramatic improvement. 

“I was invisible until about eight weeks ago,” Kasich said. He added he believed people ultimately want to be positive, unified and feel good about future. “That’s why I win in the general — it’s starting to resonate.”

Even when reporters tried to trip him up with questions on abortion, Kasich defended his pro-life position and record while saying “you have to respect people who don’t agree with you on this issue.”

“I don’t intend to spend a lot of time focusing on (social issues),” Kasich said. “I intend to talk about what I think is the greatest crisis we have today, which is the lack of economic growth.”

In short order, all three remaining GOP candidates will have descended on California. Each has a speaking slot at the state party spring convention. “Trump will speak at a lunch banquet the opening day of the state convention in Burlingame, on April 29,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “Kasich will speak that evening, followed by Cruz the next day.” Expectations have already ratcheted up. In his first rally in state this month, Cruz predicted that California would “decide the Republican nomination for president.”

Clash of ideologies

But the decision may not tilt Cruz’s way. A new CBS poll, for instance, showed Trump at 49 percent among Republican primary voters in California, with Cruz at 31 and John Kasich at 16. “At the race’s current pace, Trump would need a sizable win there — as well as strong performances in between — to clinch the nomination outright,” CBS concluded. “The divergent views on the process and the division within the party are tied up with more than just strategic candidate attachments,” the network added, noting that Trump and Cruz supporters in California and New York and Pennsylvania, two other delegate-rich states around the corner, “see themselves as part of a movement, something larger than themselves and their vote.”

That ideological factor has threatened to fracture the California GOP to an even greater extent than it has already endured. Donald Trump used California’s struggles with immigration policy — and the state party’s — as fodder on the national campaign trail, depicting himself as the only Republican capable of shielding Americans from whatever security risks a relatively more generous immigration policy might pose. California Republicans have long been divided over how to approach unlawful immigration, with party leaders seeking to soften or moderate their stance amid protests from grassroots activists.

The organization race

“Cruz’s campaign has been eying California as a linchpin in its strategy to reach the 1,237 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination — or at least keep Trump from hitting the same target. Cruz’s campaign is confident it can win the state, claiming in an internal memo last month that it was on track to receive at least 55 percent of the vote,” the Texas Tribute noted. “Yet given its size and population, California could also hold promise for a candidate like Trump who tends to be more ubiquitous on the air than the ground.”

Trump’s late-in-the-game hiring of a California campaign director has fit the pattern of his slow or nonexistent response to Cruz’s diligent efforts. But the hire, Tim Clark, has raised eyebrows among longtime state observers. Clark “is a well-respected Sacramento political operative who has run statewide campaigns over the past two decades, including for Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin, a rising star in the California GOP,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “He’s thrifty and sharp, too. Last year, Clark spent only $200,000 to help John Moorlach win an Orange County state Senate seat over an opponent who spent roughly four times that much.”

Dry run

All three candidates have hoped to prepare for California by competing in New York’s approaching primary — which, like California, awards delegates proportionally, not winner-take-all. Even though Trump has sustained a daunting lead in his home state, around 50 percent, the Cruz and Kasich campaigns have recognized the value of racking up whatever delegates they can. “It is a system akin to California’s June 7 primary,” the Los Angeles Times observed, “thus offering a sort of dry run for the contest that will either settle the GOP nominating fight or provoke hand-to-hand warfare all the way to the July convention.”