Former GOP Bastion Fades to Pink

You know things are getting bad for the Republican Party when it is sliding toward losing a majority in Orange County, California - a county that Ronald Reagan once carried by 75% .  But like so many other areas of the country, the GOP's anti-minority policies - can we say thinly veiled racism? - and social policies that alienate younger voters are taking a toll even in Orange County.  Locally, Romney carried Virginia Beach - typically a GOP Bastion - by slightly less than 5,000 votes out of the 193,590 votes cast and George Allen lost to Tim Kaine.  The Los Angeles Times looks at the phenomenon in Orange County which is a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere, particularly in states with soaring Hispanic populations. Here are some article excerpts:

Orange County was once an instant synonym for Republican power, and the GOP's dominance looked impregnable. Now, battered by the recent election results and dismayed by the slow, steady decline in party registration, Republicans here are struggling to craft a new strategy.

The percentage of registered Republicans has eroded — it now stands at 41% — and the party has long since lost control of the political districts that envelop the county seat of Santa Ana, a Latino-dominated city of 330,000, and surrounding communities in the county's core.

This month's election brought more blows. For the second time, the once-red city of Irvine voted for Barack Obama over the Republican candidate. And a northwestern chunk of the county fell to the Democrats when GOP Assemblyman Chris Norby, an outspoken conservative, lost to Latina schoolteacher Sharon Quirk-Silva.

Asked to explain the loss, Scott Baugh, chairman of the county's Republican Party, attributed it to "not fully appreciating the demographic shift and not seeing it in time."

To appreciate the scale of the countywide political shift, consider that in mid-1996, when registered Republicans eclipsed Democrats 52% to 32%, no Orange County Democrat held a single partisan elected office on the county, state or federal level.

By a recent count, about 34% of the county's roughly 3 million people are Latino — a powerful voting bloc with strong Democratic leanings. In the presidential election, President Obama won 71% of the Latino vote nationwide to Mitt Romney's 27%.

For the Orange County GOP, the effort to capture the Latino vote has proved elusive, in no small part because the county has a reputation as a cradle of border-crackdown activism, such as Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative intended to cut public services for illegal immigrants.

Irvine offers a window into the GOP's struggles.  Joseph Cruz, an Irvine tax attorney and second-generation Filipino American, went to the polls feeling no hesitancy about which party to vote for. A path to citizenship for America's undocumented population was a top priority, which he said aligned him with Democrats.  "People assume it's a Latino thing," Cruz said of immigration reform, but as an Asian American, he feels estranged from Republicans who "haven't said anything that's really solution-based."

The GOP might make inroads among the large ranks of the county's independent voters if it is somehow able to adapt to changing demographics and fashion a more inclusive message, said Fred Smoller, a professor of political science at Brandman University, a division of Chapman University.

"If the true believers are unwilling to compromise, then they're dead," Smoller said. "Older white guys are dying off, and they're being replaced by 18-year-old Latinos. And young people are just generally more tolerant."

As is the case everywhere, since the GOP sold its soul to the Christofascists and Tea Party, it is going to be most difficult to get those elements of the GOP base to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.