Writing for the Las Vegas Sun, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez gets the results of the California recall election exactly backwards. His view is that CA Republicans need to run RINOs to win elections.
As RINO Schwarzenegger demonstrated, that is a lost cause, even if you win you lose. The Democrat-supermajority legislature coopted him completely.
The route to power in a one party state is to become a member of that powerful party and form common cause with others who believe as you do. You become a power bloc that horse trades for influence within the party, and achieve your goals that way.
That, as we noted yesterday, is the proven path for influence in one party states. Minority parties exist as protest vote venues and rarely get a real shot at power as they are the declared enemies of the party-in-power.
Republicans represent maybe 25% of CA voters. Running as Republicans they have little-to-no shot at influence. If they all became ‘Democrats’ and organized as a Democrat power bloc, the party would have to contend with them and at least sometimes they could make common cause with another bloc of Dems to achieve a policy aim they support.
For example, state and local government employees in CA are a Democrat power bloc. They are one of the few major groups of middle class people remaining in a CA which is hollowing out in the middle. Quite a few Republican-style policies are popular with middle class people - home ownership, public safety.
If CA’s Republicans became ‘Democrats’ who favored Republican-style policies and sided with public employee unions whose members favor the same general policies, might they not be able to shift the Overton Window in their direction? I believe they could.
Conclusion: The only route to power and influence in an elected one party state is within that party.
