California Democrats have centered around a handful of Republican challengers they hope to tar with Donald Trump’s brush. 

Assemblymen Dante Acosta, R-San Bernardino, David Hadley, R-Torrance and Marc Steinorth, R-Redlands, Assemblywoman Young Kim, R-Fullerton, and state Senate candidate Mike Antonovich have all been hit with the attack, which aims to send them packing by exploiting Trump’s historic unpopularity in-state. “Trump is extraordinarily unpopular in California, even for a Republican in the famously liberal state. Nearly seven in 10 California voters view Trump unfavorably, according to a Field Poll conducted last month. More than half said they hold a ‘very unfavorable’ view of him,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. 

“California Democrats in those races are using a strategy their party has employed in congressional and other contests across the country — spending millions of dollars to link Republican candidates to their party’s nominee for president, even in races where GOP lawmakers have refused to back Trump.”

The Republican nominee has still managed to maintain a hard core of support. But it has been increasingly likely to draw headlines that do little to flatter the candidate. “Supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump staged a protest Tuesday outside the Los Angeles office of attorney Gloria Allred, who represents Summer Zervos — the Huntington Beach woman who claims she was a victim of unwanted sexual advances by Trump,” as the Mercury News noted separately. “Allred and Zervos made headlines Friday when the contestant on Season 5 of ‘The Apprentice’ said during a news conference that Trump kissed and groped her after she approached him about a position in his business empire.”

A state lost

Although the Trump campaign made hay early in the election season by playing up California’s struggles with unlawful immigration, and both the candidate and his team often intimated that they could put the deep-blue state in play with their unconventional approach and populist message, Trump’s stumbles approaching the electoral finish line have put West Coast voters far out of reach. “The controversial GOP candidate’s support has fallen to 30 percent, below the current low-water mark held by George H.W. Bush, who got 33 percent of the popular vote in California in a three-way contest in 1992,” according to ABC 10 News.

“While both presidential front-runners have lost support in the past 17 days, according to a SurveyUSA pre-election tracking poll conducted for KABC-TV in Los Angeles, KPIX-TV San Francisco, KGTV-TV San Diego, and KFSN-TV Fresno, Hillary Clinton’s lead over Trump remains steady at 26 percentage points.” 

But in a reminder that Democrats have not fully addressed voters’ frustrations, Clinton and Trump both dropped three points, while the undecided vote doubled, the station reported.

Team of rivals

Meanwhile, the main target of Trump’s intraparty battles, House Speaker Paul Ryan, has not given up on the Golden State as a critical place to seek and show support. “The Wisconsin representative arrives in California next Thursday and will hold 12 events in seven cities over two days,” the Los Angeles Times noted. “Ryan is expected to campaign with Reps. Jeff Denham, David Valadao and Steve Knight, as well as Scott Jones, who is challenging Rep. Ami Bera. He will also hold events benefiting Team Ryan, a joint fundraising committee.”

“Ryan was already a prodigious fundraiser, raising nearly $50 million this year and transferring more than half to help congressional candidates. But he is barnstorming the nation in the lead-up to the November election. This month alone, Ryan has held more than 65 events in 17 states.”

Despite Ryan’s appeal to sitting Republican representatives in California, the national mood among the GOP has appeared to turn against him amid Trump’s attacks. In a recent Bloomberg poll, for instance, “46 percent of all voters have a negative view of Ryan, and only 37 percent favorable, a drop from earlier surveys this year. More striking, when asked who represents their view of the party, Republicans by 51 percent to 33 percent prefer Trump over Ryan.”

As early ballots arrive in mailboxes this week, Golden State voters will arrive at a symbolic and substantial demographic landmark: a so-called majority-minority electorate. 

“For the first time, non-Latino whites will fall below 50 percent of the state’s eligible voters,” as the California Civic Engagement Project predicted in 2014. “From 1980 to 2014, the state’s Latino and Asian American populations grew by 230 percent and 331 percent, respectively, while the white population fell about 6 percent,” the Orange County Register noted, citing a January report from the Civic Engagement Project. 

Despite a clear trend since the 1990s toward political dominance by Democrats, the longer term implications of the demographic shift have remained shrouded in mystery. On the one hand, in-state Republicans have weathered a period of fracture likely to end eventually in a new but familiar rough equilibrium between the two major parties. On the other hand, nonwhite voting patterns, especially in recent immigrant families, have in some respects had a limited impact on California politics. Many nonwhite residents, according to the Register, “are too young to vote or otherwise not registered. So far, the voter rolls haven’t made the minority-majority jump. A Field Poll found that 59 percent of California’s registered voters are white, down from 83 percent in 1978.” 

Low enthusiasm

Another complicating factor involves voter enthusiasm and turnout. Voter rolls have swelled tremendously, with a surge of new registrations pushing the current total to over 18 million. “The new data show California now has more registered voters than the population of 46 states,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Yet registered voters have not coalesced around a consensus political agenda. “Republicans trailed Democrats in registration by more than 18 percentage points,” the Times continued, but decline-to-state voters, “known in California as those who have ‘no party preference,’ were a close third and made up more than 23 percent of the statewide registration.” 

For Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters alike, showing up at the polls has not always been an easy sell — despite consistent measures from Sacramento designed to make voting as easy and popular as possible. (“In California, no law requires voters to show ID. They soon will be registered to vote automatically. Their vote will be counted even if it shows up three days after the election,” as the Sacramento Bee noted.) Many Democrats have rested easy in the knowledge that their party will prevail even with low turnout. Although Loretta Sanchez would be the first Latina U.S. Senator if elected to replace Barbara Boxer, for instance, her candidacy has not ratcheted up projected turnout in November. Republicans, traditionally more likely to vote, have faced sharp intraparty conflicts in recent years, sometimes leaving state and local elections effectively uncontested. Voters who have soured on both parties, meanwhile, have not always had an opportunity to make a decisive difference in election day outcomes. 

Wedge issues

Nevertheless, the determined push by California officials for de facto amnesty for unlawful and undocumented immigrants has only sharpened as an electoral wedge issue. In Santa Ana, as the New York Times recently observed, transformative changes around immigration have raised political questions even as Latino political power has increased only modestly. “Immigrants living illegally in California are entitled to driver’s licenses. Their children can receive state-funded health insurance. Local law enforcement officials generally do not provide information to federal immigration authorities, as they do in many other parts of the country. On a smaller, if no less symbolic, level, the first thing the Santa Ana City Council did when it went all-Latino in 2006 was pass a law requiring simultaneous translation of all of its meetings to Spanish,” the Times reported. 

“The power and presence of Latinos in this community in Orange County — itself once a bastion of Republicanism — is echoed up and down the California coast. Latinos now make up just under 40 percent of the state’s population, projected to increase to 47 percent by 2050. The leaders of both houses of the Legislature are Latino, as is the secretary of state, the current mayor of Los Angeles and the previous mayor.”

With just a few months remaining in the race to replace outgoing Sen. Barbara Boxer, the struggle has sharpened between leading Northern Californian candidate Kamala Harris and the Southland’s Loretta Sanchez. Seeking an edge against her opponent, who’s leading, Sanchez has gone on the attack, drawing Harris into controversies around everything from Donald Trump to their debate schedule. But questions remained as to whether Sanchez would be able to close the gap, at a time when California voters have not been captivated by the race or, according to polls, the candidates. 

The Trump card

When it comes to Trump, a figure immensely unpopular with many California Democrats, it transpired that Harris once received $6,000 in donations from the mogul, but did not follow the lead of other attorneys general in bringing suit against him around allegedly fraudulent practices at Trump University. 

“Trump donated to several state attorneys general in recent years, including New York’s Eric Schneiderman, who filed a lawsuit against the school for ripping off students,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “Harris’ office has also investigated the school, but so far has not filed charges. Several Trump University students filed a still-pending civil suit six years ago, which Sanchez insisted should have been enough for Harris to have immediately rejected Trump’s donations in 2011 and 2013.”

Debating the debates

Meanwhile, as befits a underdog, Sanchez has zeroed in on the prospect of a robust debate schedule as a way to boost name recognition on the cheap and land some high-profile blows against Harris. As the Los Angeles Times noted, Sanchez “wants to have four debates — seeking to double the two proposed by her rival in the November election, Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris. The two campaigns traded barbs in early August after the Harris campaign announced she would participate in two forums, including one in Sacramento that Sanchez later rejected. At the time, Sanchez political consultant Bill Carrick criticized the Harris campaign in early August for ‘arrogantly announcing’ her terms.”

With Sanchez looking to Republicans to put her over the top, her need to make a positive impact among a broad and disillusioned audience in a short amount of time has grown acute. Although Sanchez “regularly receives 100 percent ratings from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, and has a lifetime 95 percent rating from the AFC-CIO,” New York Magazine observed, “she doesn’t have much choice” in courting whatever slice of the Golden State GOP electorate she can get. “A recent USC/L.A. Times poll showed Sanchez trailing Harris 30 percent to 16 percent,” the magazine added, “with three-fourths of self-identified Republicans declaring themselves either undecided or unwilling to vote for either of the surviving Democrats.”

Wavering voters

Driven by Republican discontent, California voters as a whole have again shown little enthusiasm for turnout on election day. The USC poll indicated that “16 percent of registered voters, mostly self-described Republicans and independents, have decided to skip the first open U.S. Senate race that California has seen in 24 years — the same percentage of voters who favor Sanchez,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

In today’s volatile campaign climate, however, analysts have cautioned against writing off Sanchez: “More than a third of California voters indicated they still ‘don’t know’ which Senate candidate they’ll pick on Nov. 8, according to the poll,” the Times concluded — a figure that, if it breaks Sanchez’s way in the home stretch, could help produce another upset victory in an election year defined by them. As Thomas Elias recalled at the Los Angeles Daily News, about 40 percent of the electorate was undecided until the final days before the primary” election that landed Sanchez a second-place finish, “just as about 35 percent are similarly perplexed, undecided, uninterested or turned off today. One poll showed 28 percent of voters don’t plan to cast any ballot in this race.” The key difference between the primary and the general election? Unlike this time around, Republicans were able to cast votes for Republicans. 

Donald Trump’s primary victory in California came along with a big cost to his campaign, as the presumptive Republican nominee’s sustained attacks and insinuations against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans roiled the Golden State and slowed the party’s move to consolidate around him.

Although Trump has long put his plans for a border wall at the center of his campaign, he recently drew a fresh chorus of criticism for his invective against the judge involved in the highest-profile lawsuit against him. “Trump implied in interviews last week that U.S. district judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrant parents, is unfit to hear a case involving the candidate’s disgraced Trump University because ‘he’s Mexican’ and thus has a conflict of interest due to Trump’s comments about Mexicans during the presidential campaign,” as Vice News recalled.

Drawing fire

In a shift that had even some Trump supporters concerned, the national news media pounced on the Curiel story, aggressively fact-checking Trump’s vague but pointed charges. “Trump said Curiel belonged to a group that is very strongly pro-Mexican. The California La Raza Lawyers Association does advance the interests of the Latino legal community and works on issues that matter in Latino communities more broadly. However, it has stayed on the sidelines in the immigration debate,” PolitiFact noted. “Trump’s statement is accurate only in the sense that the association’s mission aims to support Latinos, but even that is flawed because he said the group was pro-Mexican and the Latino designation reaches a wider set of people. The claim ignores critical facts that would give a very different impression.”

Trump’s charges, which many leading Republicans have decried as race-baiting or worse, also offered California Democrats a cudgel with which to beat their in-state opponents. “Democrats seeking to unseat several Republican members of Congress from California linked the incumbents to Donald Trump,” the Associated Press observed, “hoping to tap discontent with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in districts with large numbers of Democrats and Latinos.” Although several GOP incumbents survived handily, the state GOP’s nerves frayed further over fears that massive anti-Trump turnout will sink their failing fortunes come November.

Violence from the left

But Trump’s adversaries confronted a public relations mess of their own in his wake, as protests that spiraled into violence fed perceptions among pro-Trump voters that even peaceful rallies will meet with intimidation and physical retaliation. “Donald Trump supporters leaving the presumptive GOP nominee’s rally in San Jose […] were pounced by protesters, some of whom threw punches and eggs,” according to NBC Los Angeles. “The protesters chased and taunted Trump’s supporters outside the San Jose Convention Center. They surrounded one woman and threw eggs and bottles at her.”

Those attacks have now resulted in arrests. Three juvenile males “were accused of taking part in a number of skirmishes between Trump supporters and anti-Trump demonstrators […] outside the San Jose Convention Center,” where Trump was holding one of his trademark rallies, Reuters reported. “Two of the teenagers, aged 16 and 17, face charges of felony assault with a deadly weapon. The third, also 16, faces a misdemeanor battery charge, the San Jose Police Department said in a statement.”

“Four others were arrested during the protests last week. Two 19-year-olds and an 18-year-old face charges of felony assault with a deadly weapon, while another 19-year-old faces a misdemeanor charge of refusal to disperse. It is unclear whether the seven charged were Trump supporters or among the hundreds of protesters who were seen on news clips waving Mexican flags, chanting anti-Trump slogans, and burning Trump hats and at least one U.S. flag.”

Costly California

Nevertheless, with Hillary Clinton opening a bigger lead over Trump in the polls now that she has all but dispatched Bernie Sanders, analysts doubt that Trump can put California electorally in play. Despite his apparent claim to the contrary, as Slate observed, California’s high campaign cost seems prohibitive barring a dramatic change in his fortunes.

With Donald Trump riding high in statewide polls and Bernie Sanders committed to seeing through his youth-fueled campaign all the way to the convention, California has become a large and unlikely test case for how millennials might vote in the general election — both in terms of ideology and simple turnout.

Although anecdotal evidence has shaped a popular view of millennials as a dejected and politically disconnected generation, some data analysis has complicated that picture. 

“Millennials in 2016 are significantly less likely to vote or try to influence others vote than were the ’80s generation in the 1987 survey, or the first wave of postwar baby boomers in 1967,” according to the Washington Post. “But millennials display about the same level of political interest as the youngest generation did in 1987, and millennials contact local government and work with others in the community at essentially the same rates as did youth in the earlier surveys. And today’s youth are likely to get involved in protests or other political confrontations.”

The data and the anecdotes have been in closer accord when it comes to Trump. As the San Francisco Chronicle surmised, “having Trump at the top of the GOP ticket is political uranium, poisoning any hope that California Republicans had of seeming more palatable to women, millennials and Latinos[.]”

Interpreting Trump

But in the Golden State, where the state GOP has steadily lost registered party members to decline-to-state voters, some millennials appeared to be surprisingly willing to consider Trump anyway. The split could echo the kind of divide that has emerged among Republican-voting Latinos. According to polling cited by the Chronicle, “about 26 percent of Latino Republicans back Trump, 33 percent are for Cruz, 4 percent back Ohio Gov. John Kasich, 27 percent are for another candidate or undecided, 6 percent refuse to answer, and 3 percent will not vote.” Millennials interviewed by the Orange County Register “agreed on this: The political system is broken, and partisanship isn’t helping. If shared by others of their generation,” the paper concluded, “that last agreement might matter a lot.” Pro-Trump millennials compared the candidate favorably to “a stick of dynamite” and a way out of “the left-right divide.”

In Santa Clarita — “one of the few strongholds of conservatism in a state dominated by Democrats,” as KQED noted — the network found millennials at the College of the Canyons gravitating toward Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. “The sentiment that is driving students” on the left “to Sanders is turning others,” whom the state GOP might otherwise bank their future hopes on, “toward Donald Trump.”

“As of the end of February, active registrants who were 18 to 29 years old in California made up 17.5 percent of registered voters in the state, according to an analysis by CIRCLE. They are outnumbered by older voters, who tend to vote for more mainstream candidates.”

Republican risk

Influential GOP stalwarts in California have found it hard to surmount the Trump insurgency, with many supporting Ted Cruz. Although the mogul has attracted a significant slice of younger Republicans disillusioned by the party’s national old guard — and the more mainstream candidates that have competed for the GOP nomination — broader trends have painted a picture of a generation with sharply decreasing enthusiasm for Republicans of any stripe. “The GOP is poised to permanently lose a generation of voters, and not (only) because of its odious and uncommonly disliked presidential front-runner,” the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell suggested, referring to Trump. “New survey data suggest that young people have become increasingly averse to just about every plank in today’s creaky Republican Party platform.”

Heavyweight liberals, by contrast, have seized on the energy around Sanders as a way to leverage increased participation in the already Democrat-heavy state. “Young voters have a terrible record for actually going out to the polls, but billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer thinks spending $25 million will change that,” Southern California Public Radio observed. Steyer, one of the Democrats’ biggest spenders, underscored that the cash infusion would be spread across a number of battleground states — which inherently excludes California — but vowed that his organization will “be doing more in California than in any other state.”

California Attorney General Kamala Harris lost a high-profile lawsuit over her attempt to obtain donor records from an organization in the orbit of the Koch brothers.

Judging First Amendment protections to exceed what Harris had characterized as the confines of state law, U.S. District Judge Manuel Real ruled that “a nonprofit backed by conservative billionaires David and Charles Koch does not have to reveal its donors,” as the Los Angeles Times noted. Real “found that the Americans For Prosperity Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity organization, can ignore Harris’s demand to turn over the names and addresses of those who have donated more than $5,000.”

“In court, state lawyers argued that the donor documents allow investigators to track improper loans and unfair business practices by nonprofits. But attorneys for the Americans For Prosperity Foundation countered that donors feared for their safety if their identities were somehow revealed. Judge Real agreed.”

Political motives

In a 12-page decision, Judge Real decided Harris’s argument was farfetched: “While Attorney General Harris argued that she needed donor disclosure to identify lawbreaking like ‘self-dealing’ or ‘improper loans,’ that was a stretch,” the Wall Street Journal recalled in an approving editorial. Real concluded that, “over the course of trial, the Attorney General was hard pressed to find a single witness who could corroborate the necessity of Schedule B forms in conjunction with their office’s investigations.”

Harris, as Bloomberg noted, has continued a policy of maintaining confidentiality with regard to names on donor lists. On the other hand, she has also established a track record of trying to expand state authority in what appears to be a partisan manner. “An ally of the plaintiff’s bar and unions as well as a candidate for U.S. Senate, Harris recently surfaced as a key player in the alliance of state attorneys general intent on using criminal investigatory powers to probe so-called climate denial at non-profit research and advocacy groups as well as at energy companies like ExxonMobil,” as Walter Olson noted for the Cato Institute. “That makes at least two episodes in which Harris personally has signaled interest in novel, aggressive steps to pry open the internal workings of private advocacy organizations that take positions opposed to hers.”

A federal fight

But the federal policy that lent Harris’s approach an imprimatur of reasonableness has become a target of reform in the wake of Judge Real’s decision. “Like other nonprofit groups in the state, the foundation was asked by Harris’s office to turn over a tax form listing its biggest donors that it already provides to the Internal Revenue Service,” according to the site. Now, the role of the IRS in donor databases has landed the agency in the crosshairs of congressional Republicans. “The House’s powerful tax-writing committee approved a bill Thursday that would ban the IRS from collecting the names of donors to tax-exempt groups, enraging campaign-finance watchdogs who say the move could open the door to secret, foreign money in U.S. elections,” as KGW reported. 

The Ways and Means Committee approved the bill, the Preventing IRS Abuse and Protecting Free Speech Act, by a 23-15 vote along party lines, with Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., arguing that groups exempt from taxation “should not be forced to expend precious resources on unnecessary documentation and tax administration rather than focusing on their charitable missions,” KGW added. 

Critics bracing for the bill’s passage unsuccessfully scrambled to stop its progress. “Campaign finance reform and transparency proponents issued a letter calling on members of the Ways and Means Committee to oppose Roskam’s bill,” the Huffington Post noted. “Those backing the letter include Brennan Center for Justice, Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, CREW, Democracy 21, Public Citizen, Sunlight Foundation and Rootstrikers.”

But even strong advocates for campaign finance reform and donor transparency have acknowledged that the IRS itself played a potent role in mobilizing Republican support for protecting tax-emempt organizations from excessive federal scrutiny. “Attempts to push disclosure legislation have repeatedly run aground on Capitol Hill amid forceful GOP opposition. Republicans in Congress also attached a rider to a spending bill last year that, for the moment, blocks the IRS from even writing new regulations to draw clear parameters around political activity,” according to the American Prospect. “Republicans are still livid that the agency targeted Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations seeking tax exemptions in 2013.”

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.”

With Republican party leaders casting about for a way to stop Donald Trump, California has emerged as a possible firewall. Although a new poll of likely Republican primary voters, issued by the Public Policy Institute of California, showed Trump besting Ted Cruz by 38 to 19 percent, with John Kasich at 12 percent, Cruz’s ability to wring an advantage in delegates out of states where he lost the vote outright has contributed to a sense that the Trump phenomenon might not be a disaster for established GOP officials.

Surmounting Trump will be a challenge. With Marco Rubio removed from the lineup and voters’ second choices incorporated into the poll, PPIC showed Trump still stands at 38 percent, with Cruz up to 27 percent and Kasich at 14.

“Trump continues to surpass expectations,” as the San Jose Mercury News reported. “He is the leading candidate across age, income, education and gender groupings, the poll found, despite being targeted by a multimillion-dollar negative ad campaign and being called ‘a phony’ and ‘a fraud’ by the GOP’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney. Trump’s poll numbers have soared since the last major survey of California voters — a January Field Poll — which showed Cruz with a narrow lead.”

Because of California’s increased relevance this election, however, and Trump’s polarizing effect, the state GOP could find a silver lining in other ways. “The way the delegate math works out could hand Donald Trump the delegates he needs, or it could guarantee a contested Republican convention,” Reason noted.

Boosting turnout

At the same time, some analysts have predicted that the Trump effect “could bring 15 to 30 percent more Republicans to the polls — both to vote for and against him,” as the Chronicle reported.

“The immediate beneficiaries of a Trump bump could be the Republicans on the U.S. Senate ballot, none of whom has been given much chance to finish in the top two in the race and advance to the general election in November,” the paper added. “Typically, about 46 percent of the voters in a California primary vote Republican. But the Trump factor — and the love-him-or-hate-him voters he is expected to drive to the polls here, as he has elsewhere — could boost Republican turnout enough to vault one of the Republicans into the top two.”

Unlike some states where Trump has fared especially well, California is a so-called closed primary state, allowing only Republicans to vote for Republicans seeking their party’s nomination.

The change from California’s usual tail-end position in the primary-season doldrums has added more drama to an already disruptive race. “When George W. Bush ran in 2000 and 2004 and Sen. John McCain in 2008, California wasn’t a factor. In 2012, despite a high number of candidates early in the race, Mitt Romney was safely on his way to the nomination when California Republicans voted. Los Angeles County only drew 16.3 percent of eligible voters when Romney and President Barack Obama were the party nominees,” according to the Los Angeles Daily News. “San Bernardino County didn’t fare much better, bringing in just 15.4 percent of eligible voters. But the Trump phenomenon has seen a surge in voting on the Republican side.”

The day after

That surge has come at Trump’s expense as well as in his favor, as voting patterns in California-adjacent states have suggested. In Nevada, Trump touted his ability to draw in new voters from across the demographic spectrum. At the same time, however, his decision to question “whether Arizona Sen. John McCain — a prisoner of war for more than five years in Vietnam — is an authentic war hero sparked furious rebukes from his fellow GOP presidential candidates and from veterans groups,” as the San Francisco Chronicle recalled separately. But Trump later swept the Arizona primary.

Results like that have left some California Republicans worried that Trump could wind up acing out the competition in California but leaving behind an even more divided and dispirited state party.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Accustomed to languishing at the tail end of the party primary calendar — a dispiriting position for a state that has long been treated as an ATM for East Coast candidates seeking national office — Californians have awoken this year to the prospect of much greater influence on selecting Republican and Democratic presidential nominees.

“It’s totally conceivable that both the Democratic and Republican primaries could stretch on for months,” as the Los Angeles Daily News surmised. “Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are locked in a tight Democratic race that no one imagined a few months ago. And three or four strong GOP candidates in a still-crowded field could easily emerge from the battles of Iowa and New Hampshire as front-runner Donald Trump continues to amaze and confuse most political observers.”

Wild cards

But analysts, keenly aware that the fluid race could also result in a surprise consolidation of the fields, suggested “waiting at least a few weeks before getting too excited,” according to the Daily News.

“By then, we’ll know if Sanders is able to upset Clinton in Iowa and whether Ted Cruz managed to wrest any [more] victories away from Trump ahead of Super Tuesday on March 1, when voters in 11 (12 for Republicans) mostly Southern states will cast ballots.”

Even more importantly, for Republicans, the national GOP jiggered its rules for apportioning delegates in a way that could work to extend uncertainty well into the primary calendar. The Republican National Committee has required all states holding Republican primaries in the first half of March to “award delegates proportionally to candidates who clear a certain threshold,” as the Los Angeles Times reported, “between 5 percent and 20 percent of the vote.” That means that key votes, including all the Super Tuesday primaries, won’t offer campaigning Republicans the chance of scoring any winner-take-all prizes.

“Why is this change so important? Because nearly half the national delegates will be selected during this two-week window. Proportional representation suggests split outcomes in most, if not all, of these key Republican primaries.”

Opinion remains divided, however, on the question of which sort of Republican candidate is most likely to cash in on California’s primary. Some analysts portrayed Golden State Republicans as more likely to advantage candidates mustering a relatively more diverse coalition. “Early voting states like New Hampshire and Iowa get all the fanfare, but their populations are anything but representative of the nation’s diversity,” suggested San Jose State University professor emeritus in the Times. “Republican voters in California — a true cross section of the party’s electorate — will deliver a long overdue reality check of the GOP’s true values.”

But the conservative grassroots, more in tune with the insurgent candidates leading in the early states, has envisioned a different scenario. John Berry, media coordinator for the Redlands Tea Party Patriots, told the Press-Enterprise that party activists could play kingmaker. “We’d get to flex our Tea Party muscle,” he said, putting Donald Trump or Ted Cruz ahead over a “token establishment guy.”

As for California Democrats, a quirk of their state party’s primary rules has upped the stakes for Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. As the Sacramento Bee noted, the California Democratic Party, has allowed independent voters to cast votes in its primary for over a decade. “If the heated contest between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont continues past earlier primary states, California’s independent voters would be a significant target for both Democratic campaigns leading up to June 7,” observed the Bee.

A mixed bag

Californians haven’t always had to worry about bringing up the rear of the parties’ primary seasons. But under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, their experiment with an early debut in the race went awry. “Candidates did come to California, and they did talk about issues pertinent to the state, such as clean energy and immigration. But 33 states moved their primary to Feb. 5 or earlier, weakening California’s influence,” the Press-Enterprise recalled. And shifting the timetable “cost the state $97 million at a time when California’s finances were strained,” the paper added, noting that the state’s presidential primary slipped back to June in 2011.

Matchmaker for strange bedfellows

According to reports, Sanchez’s insurgent bid faces an intertwined political and demographic challenge that has suddenly turned GOP voters from foes into potential allies. “To survive the state’s top-two primary election in June, Sanchez needs two of her biggest bases of political support, Southern Californians and Latinos, to defy their historically lackluster turnout at the polls,” said analysts, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Support from California’s growing group of independents and moderates — Republican moderates, in particular — may also be essential.”

That kind of coalition would require no small amount of political jujitsu. In recent months, the state and national political scene has frequently been dominated by acrimonious debates on immigration — often fueled by conservatives frustrated with the selective nonenforcement of current law. But that issue hasn’t exhausted the ideological differences that often keep Republicans from crossing over in California. “Crafting a campaign that appeals to this patchwork of voters, many with divergent views on taxes, immigration and other divisive issues, could be difficult,” noted the Times, although “Latinos and moderate Republicans do align on certain issues: creating jobs, strengthening the middle class and improving schools with such actions as weeding out bad teachers and embracing charters.”

Fractured opposition

In this sense, the challenge for Sanchez has less to do with bringing Latinos and Republicans together than convincing Republicans to cast their vote for a Democrat. That’s why her hopes have centered around the prospect of squaring off again against Harris after primary season. “If Sanc­hez makes it to the gen­er­al elec­tion, al­lies of the Or­ange County Blue Dog Demo­crat say her more mod­er­ate pro­file could help her pick up sup­port from in­de­pend­ents and maybe even some Re­pub­lic­an voters who wouldn’t have a can­did­ate on the bal­lot,” National Journal reported.

Here, the deep personal and political fissures in the California GOP could be decisive. “At the state Re­pub­lic­an Party con­ven­tion in Ana­heim last month, there was talk about con­sol­id­at­ing be­hind one can­did­ate if he pulled ahead of the oth­ers,” National Journal added. “But each of the men run­ning spoke zeal­ously about his own path to vic­tory, and Re­pub­lic­ans have not been op­tim­ist­ic about end­ing up with one stand­ard-bear­er — es­pe­cially be­cause oth­er can­did­ates con­tin­ue to eye the race.”

Moneyball

Sanchez’s scramble for a path to victory comes at a moment when the comparative size of her campaign war chest has also become the focus of horserace handicapping. Harris has outraised her by a significant margin. “Sanchez reported raising almost $1 million in contributions this year for her U.S. Senate campaign, well behind the $6 million” raised by Harris, according to financial filings reported by the Times.

But Harris has also been quick to allocate her resources, “burning through campaign cash nearly as rapidly as she raises it,” according to the Sacramento Bee. “She is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on mail fundraising appeals, a large campaign staff anchored in Los Angeles and prominent fundraisers scattered across the country.” Between July and September, the Bee added, Harris spent $1.4 million out of $1.8 million raised, tacking on $400,000 of debt. Separately, the Bee reported, Harris also availed herself of some $300,000 in loans.

Republicans, for their part, have come in far under the fundraising level of either Democrat. Although some of the three GOP Senate contenders have gotten off to a relatively late start, none have exceeded $250,000 since entering the race, according to the Bee.