The last time the Republican Party flipped four House seats in California, Ronald Reagan had just trounced Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.
That was 40 years ago, and in the intervening decades we as a country have watched the state that once called Reagan governor become a seemingly indomitable deep navy-blue stronghold. Leftist.
Aside from a few holdouts, such as the state’s 23rd District where Kevin McCarthy holds sway, we’ve come to take it for granted that the Golden State is a safe harbor for Democrats.
But this year, the unthinkable happened; the GOP made significant gains in California in races that seemed longshots just a year ago.
Republicans flipped four House seats, all that were lost to the Democrats in the 2018 cycle.
There are myriad reasons for these upsets, as in any election cycle. But if you want a simple explanation, look no further than Reagan himself and his landslide victory in 1980.
Reagan was a fresh face with fresh ideas.
While not a young man, he nonetheless offered voters a reasonable, stable solution to their problems after four years of utter despondency under Carter.
Most Americans who are in the middle of the political spectrum looked at Reagan and saw him as a man who, while conservative, was wise enough not to get lost in his own convictions and could make sensible judgment calls for the good of the country.
How else would Reagan have won so many Democratic voters to his side?
Which brings us back to 2020.
After the shellacking it took in 2018, the Republican Party was in need of fresh faces who could provide stable, pragmatic ideas as a counter to the new wave of progressives elected.
And not just progressives; they're flat out, unashamed Marxists with delusions of utopia.
It's no wonder that Nancy Pelosi’s House has done nothing of note during the last two years.
While the entirety of 2019 was spent searching for a way to impeach Donald Trump and 2020 was spent blocking COVID relief, Pelosi’s caucus used its free time to go to war with itself.
The centrists who knew better than to advocate for socialism clashed constantly with AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.) and the liberal wing’s farcical pushes for socialized medicine and a Green New Deal with an outrageous $93 trillion price tag.
Enter the GOP. And not to The French Laundry for a maskless dinner party.
If there’s one thing House Republicans and the National Republican Congressional Committee did correctly this cycle, it was recruitment.
Many of the newly elected Republicans this year are veterans, women, minorities, or other categories the media would have you believe can’t be reached by Republicans.
But here’s a dirty little secret; minority Americans are just that, Americans.
They’re good people who work hard, love their country, don’t give a hoot about identity politics, and were downright terrified by the talk of embracing socialism and defunding the police that took over the Democrats.
This, coupled with Nancy Pelosi’s inability to control her caucus and failure to accomplish anything with her majority, made the alternatives offered by the GOP look like the gold at the end of the rainbow.
In the four aforementioned California seats, the alternatives looked like the ever-growing diverse population that makes up our country’s electorate.
Mike Garcia is a former Navy fighter pilot who is the son of Mexican immigrants.
David Valadao, who took back the seat he lost in 2018, is the son of immigrants from Portugal, while Michelle Steel and Young Kim were born in South Korea.
It was these four fresh Republican recruits and their stable, reasonable new or tried and true ideas that swept out the ineffective, unstable Democrats and secured four critical House seats in our nation’s most populous state.
Like Reagan before them, these four each unseated an inept Democratic incumbent who had no business holding elected office.
Republicans like Mike Garcia and Young Kim are the future.
Republicans like Michelle Steel and David Valadao show what the party can become.
They are the Republican Party now, and no amount of media slandering or Democratic messaging can alter the reality that the GOP is the big-tent party the Democrats always claim to be.
These four, and their upset wins in California, have shattered the myth that the GOP has no room for non-whites and women. They proved that identity politics is a lie, and that conservative policies backed by strong leadership can appeal to a broad coalition of voters.
They demonstrate that the Republican Party is indeed a place of optimism and fresh ideas, realistic and workable ideas actually providing results.
If the current Democratic Party understood anything about realism, then perhaps it wouldn’t have four outgoing members who are getting ready to file for unemployment.
Reagan’s old campaign manager, John Sears, used to say, ''Politics is motion.''
Indeed it is.
Craig Shirley is a Ronald Reagan biographer and presidential historian. His books include ''Reagan’s Revolution, The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started it All,'' ''Rendezvous with Destiny, Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,'' "Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years," and ''Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan." He is also the author of The New York Times bestseller, ''December 1941,'' and his new 2019 book, ''Mary Ball Washington,'' a definitive biography of George Washington’s mother. Shirley lectures frequently at the Reagan Library and the Reagan Ranch. He has been named the First Reagan Scholar at Eureka College, Ronald Reagan’s alma mater, and will teach a class this fall at the University of Virginia on Reagan. He appears regularly on Newsmax TV, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. Read Craig Shirley's Reports — More Here.
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