Memo to the California GOP:
Rough couple of weeks, huh?
First you found out that the number of registered
Republicans in California has dipped below 30%, which means we are fast
approaching the day when the entire state membership can fit into two golf
carts.
To make matters worse, of the 1 million people
who used a new online voter registration system this election cycle, only 20%
registered as Republicans. And 60% of those who registered were under 35, which
means your future's not looking great.
Then the dominoes really started to fall.
Gov. Brown's Proposition 30, the first general,
statewide tax hike in two decades, passed so easily that the ghost of Howard
Jarvis threw himself in front of a truck.
Proposition 32, an all-out attempt to defang
public employee unions, got pummeled despite an infusion of last-minute
anti-labor cash from Arizona.
What could be worse? I'll tell you what. In the
state Legislature, Democrats won supermajorities in both houses. Do you know
what that means? It's like handing your teenager a credit card, a checkbook and
the car keys so he can drive to an all-night orgy.
Meanwhile, on the national front, two states said
yes to recreational marijuana and three states said yes to same-sex marriage.
And Mitt Romney proved that when your only loyal supporters are aging white men
who still drive Buicks and watch "Matlock" reruns — in a country with
an ever more diverse population — you're cooked.
It was a wipeout, a blitz, a disaster.
So now what?
This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times. To read more of this article please click here.