I never like suggesting a course of action without also suggesting a strategy and plan to implement that course. Yesterday, I said fight, and choose a Republican leader who will fight. But “fighting” without a strategy and a plan is simply flailing. Flailing is not fighting, and you can’t fight something with nothing.
I believe we are on the cusp of major changes in California, but those changes will not occur on their own. Republicans will need to be prepared and need to be ready to work to achieve those changes. It won’t happen in one election cycle, it will occur over several, but Republicans need to have a plan to exploit the unease most voters feel about the continuing Democrat majorities. These changes have occurred in other states over time, and came from the same reasons. Voters felt the unease and the Republicans in those states were ready with an agenda and a plan to implement that agenda. Voters were unhappy with Democrats in those states, and Republicans exploited the unhappiness over several elections cycles and ultimately took over those Legislatures.
The first step in taking over any legislative body is to articulate the goal the legislators are looking to achieve. During my time in the Legislature, because of my position as Chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators around the country, I was able to meet and talk with a number of legislators who began their legislative careers as a significant minority (worse off than California Republicans are now). It took many of them ten to sixteen years to achieve that majority, and when I asked them what they did to achieve their majorities, they all said the same thing. Know the job to do based on your goal. What is your job, I asked. They all said the same thing:
“The job of the minority in a legislative body is to become the majority. Nothing else, focus on that, policy changes will follow the political changes.”
So, once the goal is articulated, what is the plan?
First, identify which legislative districts represent the best opportunity for political change.
How do the Republican members do that? I can tell you what we did in preparation for the only time we had the only majority in the Assembly between 1970 and today. A group of us met once a week, every week, from March of 1993 through August of 1994. We first spent our effort identifying the vulnerable districts. We then took our time to go into those districts to find potential candidates against the Democrat in that district. We then settled on the best candidate in each district, and did our best to help that candidate. We would go into their districts, communicate with media outlets, business groups, volunteer groups, opinion leaders and basically anyone who would listen there to let them know what the Democrat in that district was doing to undermine the values of the majority of the voters in that district.
It’s important to understand that those of us who took on this job did not get a single vote from the districts we visited. We were working to get a majority. We were not the only ones doing it, the R leader at the time was also focused on getting the majority. We worked as a team to get there.
Our next effort was to gather the votes on bills necessary to prove that the Democrat officeholder in that district was not what they represented themselves to be in the district. In competitive districts, they represent themselves to be bipartisan, paying attention to their R voters. Those of us who are political activists know they are not, but we have to prove it by actual votes, so our group would review bills before the Legislature, and figure out ways to get the most popular issues that support the conservative agenda to the floor and get a vote on that issue.
The purpose of the committees in the Legislature is to protect the legislators in competitive districts from voting against popular R issues. For instance, in 1993, when crime was a major issue, then Assemblyman Bill Jones introduced the three strikes bill. It was killed in committee by the more liberal legislators, but two Ds were allowed to vote in favor of the bill, but there were still not enough votes to get the three strikes bill out of committee. We needed to prove that these legislators were actually against the bill, but voting for it just to protect themselves.
So, we had to get the substance of the bill on the floor. In those days, the rules allowed for what was known as a “motion to withdraw.” Then Speaker Willie Brown insisted that his members abstain from voting on a motion to withdraw publicly on the floor of the Legislature in order to “protect the committee system.” The two legislators we were targeting abstained from pulling the bill from committee, while still claiming to support the idea. When three strikes became an issue in 1994, their hypocrisy became evident, and they lost their election. Voters were not fooled.
Now, when we started our strategy of motions to withdraw in 1993, we had no idea what issues would be important in 1994, so we put together a strategy of putting several issues on the floor and gathering the votes. We had votes on illegal immigration, crime, taxes and about 10 other issues. It turned out that crime and illegal immigration became the issues in 1994, and we were able to defeat 9 Democrats that year, with those issues and good candidates.
Democrats have since changed the rules to eliminate motions to withdraw as an option, but there are other ways to collect those votes, so the R members need to know the rules of the house, and use those rules to collect the votes. Good candidates and the right mix of issues will ultimately create the majority, but it will take dedicated, collective effort to fight the fight, and achieve the majority.
I came up with a plan in 2003, my “adopt a district” plan, that outlined this strategy in more detail, but no legislative leader wanted to spend the effort to implement the program. Quite frankly, I don’t care if anyone wants to implement my plan, but any Republican leader needs to have strategy, a plan to implement that strategy, and the willingness to fight, to become the majority. If they don’t, they don’t deserve to be the Republican leader. Nothing but the majority matters, and the next ten years will be critical to obtaining that majority.