Storm Clouds Hang Over California GOP Convention in San Diego

[This column was reported for Political Breakdown, a bi-monthly newsletter offering analysis and context on Bay Area and California political news. Click here to subscribe.]

This weekend in San Diego, the California Republican Party’s worker bees, also known as grassroots volunteers, will gather for a statewide convention named “Turning the Tide, Together,” and it will do so after a tsunami of bad news has washed over the party, dimming its prospects for the midterm elections.

“It kind of reminds me of the movie Rocky,” said Jon Fleischman, a former executive director of the state Republican Party. “The first half of the movie just gets worse for him and worse and worse, and worse. And then he turns it around and wins in the end because he had come from such a low point. We’re still in the part of the movie for California Republicans where we’re trying to find the lowest point.”

Surely one low point is Proposition 50. After Texas redrew its congressional maps at President Donald Trump’s insistence to benefit Republicans, California voters punched back — overwhelmingly passing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Prop. 50, which redrew the state’s lines to favor Democrats.

“Prop. 50 was pretty, pretty harsh for Republicans,” Fleischman acknowledged. It’s not just the loss of their few remaining congressional seats. When more districts were competitive, “there was a lot of money coming into California to fight for House seats that is now not going to come to California at all,” he said.

Other than a place to raise campaign cash, the national GOP, Fleischman noted, barely needs California anymore: “They don’t need to go through California to win the White House … [or] to have a majority in the Senate. And now they don’t really need to compete in California to have a majority in the House.”

Then came Sunday night’s Trump endorsement. Democrats had been fretting that nine of their candidates might divide the vote so badly that two Republicans — Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News host Steve Hilton — could lock them out of the top two spots in the June primary. Trump throwing his support behind Hilton changes that math, and sends a strong signal to Republican voters choosing between him and Bianco.

“I think it definitely can help rally the base behind a candidate and generate some noise and some enthusiasm,” said California Republican Party communications director Matt Shupe.

While that might help seal the deal for Hilton, it could sink the ship for Bianco, a loyal Trump supporter who has plenty of support among California Republican Party insiders.
Since February, Bianco has seized more than 1,400 boxes of ballots from Riverside County – about 650,000 ballots – from the November special election in which voters approved Prop. 50.

Attorney General Rob Bonta sued to block Bianco’s actions. On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court unanimously ordered Bianco to “pause the investigation into the November 2025 special election and preserve all seized items.” Bianco was a Trump presidential delegate in 2024, and his seizure of ballots echoed Trump’s long-running and baseless claims that elections are rife with fraud. Nonetheless, Trump gave Hilton his “complete and total endorsement.”

Democrats couldn’t be happier.

“If this sticks and we don’t have any twists in the road, this should consolidate the vote on the Republican side,” said political data consultant Paul Mitchell, who helped Democrats draw the Prop. 50 congressional map. “The importance for Democrats is that now instead of having to get a candidate to 20% to feel safe, any candidate that gets 15 (percent) now probably makes the runoff.”

Mitchell, who built a primary simulator that calculates the likelihood of each candidate advancing to a runoff, cautioned that if Trump’s endorsement fails to give Hilton a significant lift, leaving him and Bianco neck and neck, Democrats will have to go back to worrying about being locked out in June.

Prop. 50 reshuffled the congressional maps in other painful ways, too. Twelve-term Republican Darrell Issa was forced to retire. Meanwhile Rep. Ken Calvert decided to run for the seat that includes part of his old district. That puts him in a competitive battle with fellow Republican Young Kim, setting up a potentially divisive race between the longest serving Republican in the California delegation and a younger, more moderate rising star.

“We want them both in Congress. The fact that they’re running against each other kind of puts everybody in a tough spot,” California Republican Party chair Corrin Rankin said.

“It’s definitely reduced us down to a limited number of seats that we’re going to have to fight extra hard for,” Rankin said.

The unexpected death of northern California Rep. Doug LaMalfa, — in a newly redrawn seat the party was already likely to lose — only deepens the hole.

And if that weren’t enough, GOP Rep. Kevin Kiley, whose post-Prop. 50 district now leans Democratic, announced he was switching his registration from Republican to “no party preference.” It’s a Hail Mary in hopes of shedding the Trump drag in a district Kamala Harris carried by 10.5 percentage points in 2024.

No Republican has won a statewide election in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon, especially with Trump’s endorsement of Hilton. But the convention won’t be entirely grim — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is slated to speak, and workshops on using AI for fundraising and organizing are on the agenda.

As for party chair Rankin? She’s keeping her expectations modest. “My main goal is fun and training. Those are my two priorities,” she said.