Discord in California as GOP rank-and-file back Trump, party leaders preach moderation

In coastal Ventura County, Republican Dirk Lay is in the middle of a fight that has already been settled in many other California counties.

Lay, 64, wants local voters to support more GOP candidates, convinced their governance can tackle local issues and help grow a conservative base in an overwhelmingly blue region. The way forward is clear, he says: Ventura’s “establishment” Republicans need to make way for "pro-reform" Trump supporters like himself. Lay and a slate of two other candidates are running to unseat members of Ventura’s Republican Central Committee, a localized arm of the party staffed by volunteers who face elections every four years, with equivalents in every county.

In a campaign flyer, the trio urges residents to “vote out” the “do-nothing Republican establishment” and “vote in your local America First Patriots for common sense change.”

“Donald Trump is part of the dividing line,” Lay said from his home in Camarillo. “I would say that the reform candidates, by and large, we are much more supportive of Donald Trump than the incumbent establishment.”

A few years ago, Lay’s coalition would have been considered a microcosm of the schism inside the GOP, laid bare by the growing popularity of Donald Trump and a MAGA Republicanism rooted in opposition to establishment party figures and policies. But in 2024, with the former president on a clear path to the Republican nomination and a GOP caucus quick to get in line behind him, the divide between pro- and anti-Trump wings is looking more like a foregone takeover. Even in one of the nation’s most ardently Democratic states, once a haven for traditional conservative Republicanism embodied by Ronald Reagan, California’s Republican voters have largely embraced former president Trump.

“I think that the people that like and support Trump are the people who defend themselves when they're attacked,” Lay said of one of his reasons for gravitating to Trump. “The other folks are the guys who just go along to get along, they want to be liked.”

Lay is less an upstart challenge to the status quo, and more a representation of how the state’s party faithful have moved further to the right. California may be blue, but much of the state’s red is Trump country. Latest polling from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies finds two-thirds of those most likely to participate in the state’s Republican primary plan to cast their ballot for Trump. It’s a jump from October, when pollsters recorded 57% intended to support Trump, with research consistently showing a majority of Republican primary voters in the state planning to vote similarly, along with support levels among conservatives at an even firmer majority. IGS Co-Director G. Cristina Mora said in the January report that the figures show California Republicans are not unlike Republicans in other states, adding to an overall strong preference for Trump in this year’s elections. His remaining opponent in the primaries, former South Carolina Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, has never been able to collect significant support.

“This is Donald Trump’s party,” former California GOP political director and Trump critic Mike Madrid said. “Yes, even in the California GOP, two-thirds of Republican voters say that, which is even more than in some other states.”

More: These Republicans say they won’t vote for Trump. Here are the options they’re considering

His hold runs deep. Trump counts support across nearly all regional subgroups, exceeding 70% among Republicans who voted for him in 2020.

Wesley Hussey, a political scientist at Sacramento State specializing in state politics, says this shift to the right didn't come out of thin air, pointing to a history of "dog-whistle politics" from party leaders he says primed Republican voters for socially conservative messages.

“Despite California’s laid-back reputation, the California Republican party for the last 30 years has been pretty socially conservative,” he said, describing the rift between GOP elite as one based in social ideologies.

"The GOP party elite was concerned more with business and economic interests," he said of the party before 2016. "Then Trump came along and Republicans thought, oh, finally, here's a guy who wants to talk about ethnic nationalism and great replacement theory and things that the state party was not interested in addressing."

While statewide polls indicate Trump is in a strong lead approaching the March 5 primary, some arms of the party are hesitant to embrace the polarizing former president or acknowledge the level of support he maintains. This has created a vein of discontent among a swath of grassroots Trump supporters, with disagreements breaking out not just in county-level GOP groups, but in statewide arenas as well. The party’s 2019 convention erupted in an open display of disunity over the election of moderate Jessica Millan Patterson as the next chairperson over a Trump hardliner. Patterson’s mentor, former Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, limped into an early retirement December after failing to reign in a faction of the caucus that considered the Trump loyalist to not be loyalist enough.

This friction has plagued the California GOP for the past few general election cycles.

The role of the Republican 'political class'

In Tehama County, a deeply red agricultural center ringed by national forests, Republican Central Committee Chairman Michael Holtsclaw says the party's ills are located nearly three hours south, in Sacramento.

“I’d say 80 to 90 percent of our committee supports Trump. What we are all tired of, that comes up in meetings, is the political consultant class in the Republican Party,” he said. They’re the advisors and strategists, he says, whom he and his committee feel are pushing party platforms and candidates too far to the center.

Republican candidate for California’s U.S. Senate seat Steve Garvey is considered a perfect example of this, he says. Over the past two debates, the former baseball star and political newcomer has refused to clarify his support for Trump, though acknowledged he did vote for him in the last two presidential elections. Despite repeated probing by his Democratic opponents and by debate moderators, Garvey has kept mum on the subject, largely interpreted as a ploy to appeal to the broadest number of Republican voters by neither praising nor rebuking the presidential candidate. The strategy is not without merit, considering Trump has an overall 63% disapproval rating across all California voters, of which 58% strongly disapprove. The state has an estimated 4.8 million independent voters as of January, about 500,000 shy of the number of registered Republicans, making them a key source of possible swing votes, though the majority back President Joe Biden over Trump, according to a November survey by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Betsy Mahan, chairperson of the Sacramento GOP, says a political consultant will always tell a Republican in competitive races to redirect questions away from presidential politics if they want a chance at winning in the state.

“More than 50 percent of people are going to be upset with you if you don't say you're going to support President Trump, and then maybe 40 percent or something will go the other way,” she said. “It might not be what the candidate wants to say, but the consultants will always say you need to focus on your own race.”

But with MAGA Republicanism seeping into every level of state politics, it’s unclear if that will remain a winning strategy, as grassroots and Trump supporters push for a greater embrace of conservatism and party leaders and consultants try to build a brand palatable to GOP rank-and-file and independents.

"There's a real effort recently to kind of moderate damage and be more professional and less conservative," Hussey said of the state GOP.

Hope placed in California's independents

In the very blue Marin and Alameda counties perched along the north and east of the San Francisco Bay, Republican committees are desperate to distance themselves from the toxic leader, insisting their members are disinterested in national and interparty quarrels, focused only on local issues.

Republican Utkarsh Jain is treasurer of the Alameda County GOP and candidate in a race for California's State Assembly. The 21-year-old and his local party's strategy mirrors what Mahan and others say is necessary for GOP wins in overwhelmingly blue areas, highlighting regional differences among party members in a state with a political geography separating coastal Democratic strongholds with inland Trump country.

"We have a really low Republican registration rate, so we all know that just getting the Republican vote is not gonna get us anywhere, even for local school board races," he said. "So we know that we have to change our strategy, so that we can attract both independents and even moderate Democrats that are disgruntled with the party or don't like how things are when it comes to issues like crime, homelessness, education, you know, energy and the economy."

It's similar to what Dirk Lay wants to do in Ventura County, placing emphasis on localized issues, which he and other Republicans operating in blue areas believe can boost party registration.

As much as local Republican activists and candidates try, they concede Trump is an ever-constant figure nearly impossible to shed. Yet political experts like Madrid argue the conversation over divisions along the pro- and anti-Trump line need to be reevaluated entirely in the face of Democratic hegemony.

“We need to stop discussing the [state] party in terms of a split along traditional means, that's not been the case for a long time,” he said. “The party is not struggling for relevancy. It doesn't care. In fact, it views its losing status as a virtue. It's a countercultural movement defined by what it is against, not what it's for.”

While California’s Republican party continues to wrestle with its identity and path forward, a significant majority of party members throughout the state appear to be two steps ahead, further inflaming years-old fault lines.

Kathryn Palmer is the California 2024 Elections Fellow for USA TODAY. Reach her at kapalmer@gannett.com and follow her on X @KathrynPlmr.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Super Tuesday: In blue California, battle rages in GOP over Trump