How California’s GOP Wasted $45 Million for Nothing
California’s Republican Party has zero influence over state politics. The Democrats control 60 out of 80 seats in the State Assembly and 30 out of 40 seats in the State Senate and have held every statewide office—Governor, Treasurer, Controller, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Insurance Commissioner, and Superintendent of Public Instruction—for nearly two decades. The last time any Republicans won a race for a statewide office was in 2006, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was reelected as governor, and Steve Poizner was elected as the state’s insurance commissioner. Democrats also control every major city, county, school district, and every other public bureaucracy.
Republicans are up against a tough coalition of special interests that control the Democratic Party in California: public sector unions, leftist billionaires, monopolistic corporations and public utilities, extreme environmentalists and the “renewables” industry, and trial lawyers. All of these special interests are united by the proposition that the more expensive and regulated the state becomes, the more power and profit they will reap.
California’s GOP also continues to contend with a toxic public image that has been carefully nurtured by the Democrats. They are effectively stereotyped as racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, climate deniers, and, in a brilliant bit of projection, captured by big corporations. Democrats outspend Republicans in California by margins anywhere from 2-to-1 to 10-to-1. They wield almost unlimited reserves of cash for campaigns and lobbying, all the while portraying Republicans as puppets of “big business.”
If Republicans in California are to have any chance to successfully cope with these disadvantages, they have to work smart, but they don’t. How they coped with Newsom’s “special election” is the latest evidence of the Republican Party’s dysfunction. They spent $45 million on a vapid, futile campaign to convince voters to reject Newsom’s Proposition 50, the partisan redistricting initiative. They might just as well have thrown 450,000 $100 bills onto a bonfire. At least that would have made a memorable TikTok video.
There’s only one place left where, right now, Republicans in California can still make a difference, and that’s in national politics. With Republicans holding a razor-thin edge in the U.S. Congress, the size of California’s Republican caucus matters. Every single seat matters.
With this much at stake, and Newsom’s Proposition 50 calculated to break up five more Republican-held congressional districts, opponents had three choices:
1 – Concede the election since the polling showed overwhelming voter majorities in favor of “sticking it to Trump” by approving Prop. 50. By not contesting the election, GOP donors and party strategists could have saved that money to support Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms. After all, diluting Democrat majorities in their safe districts in order to break up Republican districts is not without risk. With good candidates and a few missteps on the part of Democrats, it is possible that the 2026 results will not shift as many seats as they’re planning.
2 – Blow $45 million on television and social media ads. Lose anyway. Transfer donor wealth to consulting firms, ad agencies, and media properties. Accomplish absolutely nothing. Everyone knew that Prop. 50 was going to pass. The absolute vote count was 7,453,339 yes votes, 64 percent, against 4,116,998 no votes, 36 percent. The margin of victory was 3.3 million votes, and the total number of registered Republicans in California is only 4.1 million voters. California’s independent voters are estimated to break roughly 2-1 in favor of Democrats. Preliminary data indicate GOP turnout was only slightly lower than Democratic turnout. Democrats framed the whole campaign around stopping Trump; they spent $122 million; the outcome was never in doubt.
3 – Prioritize spending that builds GOP strength for future elections. This was the missed opportunity. Public opinion on Prop. 50 was highly polarized. Voters who were opposed to its provisions recognized the fundamental dishonesty of the proposition. It was not returning control of redistricting “to the people”; it was doing precisely the opposite. Nor was it about “leveling the playing field” in response to GOP actions in Texas, because California’s Republicans were already as marginalized as Democrats in Texas became after their recent redistricting. And voters who saw through Newsom’s scheme also recognize that Democrat policies have driven California’s middle class, its low-income households, and its small businesses into the ground.
For these reasons, California’s GOP had an opportunity to build for the future. They could have used a No on 50 campaign as a reason to reach out, door-to-door, to energize registered Republicans to vote, and to hire armies of partisan activists to walk, door-to-door, to households with one registered GOP voter in an attempt to register other members of those households. They could have also used this opportunity to knock on doors of Republican-leaning households in Republican-leaning districts, also in order to increase GOP voter registration.
Options 1 and 3 were the only rational choices for Republicans. If they’d saved all that money, they could use it in 2026. They should have learned in 2024 how important it is to adequately fund congressional campaigns, when California’s GOP gave up three more seats in Congress to Democrats. This dropped their representation from 12 seats out of 53 to only 9 seats out of 53. Twenty years ago, California’s GOP held 20 out of the state’s 53 seats in the U.S. Congress. They might consider the example of John Duarte, a GOP incumbent representing California’s 13th House District. Duarte lost his reelection bid by 187 votes. One hundred and eighty-seven votes, out of 210,921 total votes cast. Outspent by over $2 million, Duarte’s hair-splitting loss could have been avoided if the GOP had just spent more money on get-out-the-vote and voter registration, and a mere fraction less on ads on television and social media.
For California’s Republican Party, across every metric of political power, the last 20 years have been a story of decline. Between 2004 and 2024, their representation in Congress has dropped from 38 percent to 17 percent, and that will fall to 8 percent in 2026 if they don’t change their tactics. In the state legislature, in 2004, they held 40 percent of the seats in the Assembly and 38 percent of the seats in the Senate. Now those percentages have fallen to 23 percent in the Assembly and 25 percent in the Senate. There is no end in sight.
When quantifying the GOP decline in California, the story of party registration is even worse. In 2004, there were 5.7 registered Republicans in California. In 2024, there were 5.6 million registered Republicans in the state. In absolute numbers, the party lost over 100,000 registrants. In terms of percentages, their share of registered voters dropped from 35 percent to 25 percent.
Compare this to the performance of the Democratic Party over the exact same period. In 2004, they had 7.1 million registrants, and by 2024, that total had increased to 10.4 million. They added 3.3 million registrants and increased their share of registered voters from 43 percent to 46 percent.
Put another way, over the past 20 years, the absolute number of registered Democrats in California has increased by 45 percent, while the number of registered Republicans has decreased by 2 percent.
There are plenty of excuses. Democrats have more money. Democrats control the bureaucracy. Democrats use all that money and institutional power to stigmatize Republicans. That’s all true, but it ignores two powerful additional factors: Democrats have run the state into the ground, and it’s about to get worse, not better, and the Democrat brand is not as dominant as it ought to be if they were doing everything right. This is evident in the growth of registered voters in California who either “decline to state” or are members of 3rd parties. These two groups combined have logged astonishing gains in the past 20 years. In 2004, they numbered 3.7 million voters, and by 2024, their numbers had nearly doubled to 6.6 million voters, representing 29.2 percent of all registered voters.
In the 2025 special election, the state Republican Party didn’t even distribute yard signs to the GOP county organizations. They didn’t supply door hangers or flyers, either. They did almost nothing to support grassroots efforts. For just half of that $45 million, they could have not only distributed election paraphernalia, but they could have also paid party members to walk precincts throughout the state to raise voter turnout and register new voters. Democrats have enough money to saturate the media with ads, and, without exception in election after election, they also hire operatives to work door-to-door. Republicans have to choose one or the other. They could accomplish more if they chose to stay on the ground instead of trying to compete, totally outgunned, in the air.
Along with spending more of their limited funds to hire thousands of people to work face-to-face at the county and precinct level to build the party, California’s GOP could unify behind a coherent platform. That would cost nothing if the party had leaders with vision. Debunking the Democratic “abundance movement,” exposing it as a cynical fraud, is the opportunity of a generation for Republicans. Renewable energy, infill housing, and water rationing are “abundance” according to Democrats. Republicans may simply run on the antonyms of those seductive sound bites, because they are the solution. More compelling, more genuine moral virtue, and just as simple:
All energy is acceptable. All land is available for new homes. All water supply projects are eligible. All of these solutions shall engage in unsubsidized competition. Only corporate monopolies prefer “abundance,” according to California Democrats.
Put that message on the door hangers. Hire armies to spread that message. Go to work. California could be in play, but only if the playbook of the last 20 years is thrown away. New leaders and new strategies could take back California. The opportunity is there.
This article originally appeared in American Greatness.
Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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