GARDEN GROVE — Party conventions generally serve as pep rallies for political nerds, but the California GOP edition over the weekend at the Hyatt Regency had many Republicans seeing the same shade of red as their Make America Great Again hats.
“Everyone is very, very pissed off,” Steve Hilton, a Republican candidate for governor, told The Standard.
The main source of their ire is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s effort to redraw the state’s congressional districts with Proposition 50, a measure that will appear on the ballot in November. Currently, an independent commission redraws California’s maps every decade based on new census data; Prop. 50 would move those lines, based on Newsom’s maps. Democrats say they are acting in response to President Donald Trump and Texas lawmakers’ efforts to redraw the lines in that state in order to add five GOP seats in Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
However, many Republicans at the convention disputed the effort as undemocratic, if not unconstitutional.
“It’s just their way for gruesome Newsom to take control of California,” said Susan Doan, a lifelong Republican from Newport Beach who — like many of her comrades at the convention — had a significant amount of flare in her wardrobe. Of the 40-plus pins running down the lapels of her sportcoat, two tout her love of Trump.
Doan said she has little faith in California elections after working on campaigns for friends and family. “What I saw and what I witnessed, the fraud was mail-in ballots,” she said.
Not everyone in Anaheim shared the opinion that California elections could be rigged, a claim that has no doubt gained steam due to Trump’s repeated efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election. But there was a sense that gerrymandering in California could galvanize long-ignored Republicans, who account for just a quarter of registered voters in the state.
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Hilton, who has unleashed a slew of DOGE-like policy papers outlining his plans to transform California, said that Democrats have awoken Republicans in a way that will backfire on the majority party.
“It’s such an obvious corrupt, cheating move,” he said of the redistricting ploy. “I mean, it’s just really, really brazen. And I think people are like, ‘No, fuck [Newsom]. Yeah, fuck this guy, fuck these people, fuck the corrupt Democrat elite.’”
On Thursday, Hilton’s campaign filed a federal lawsuit in Orange County to stop Prop. 50 from appearing on the ballot. The complaint accuses California Democrats of creating new maps that do not provide equal protection by ensuring districts have similar population size.
“There’s obviously no way that they could have guaranteed that with these maps, because there's no census,” Hilton said. “There have been massive population moves since the last census, people leaving the state, [Los Angeles] burning down.”
Hilton said his challenge is stronger than other attempts to block Prop. 50 that have been rejected by the California Supreme Court.
David Serpa, a U.S. Marines veteran and real estate agent from Temecula Valley who’s also running for governor, said Prop. 50’s passage could open the door for Republicans to mobilize in down-ballot races in 2026.
“Most people that are here will disagree with me when they say that they don't think it will pass. I think it will pass,” Serpa said. “There's a huge opportunity for a bunch of people that have never ran for office before, both on the Republican side and the Democratic side of things, to primary these swamp creatures that have been in there for 2030.”
Corrin Rankin, the chairwoman of the California Republican Party, said that efforts to defeat Prop. 50 will focus less on Newsom and more on educating voters. She compared the initiative to Prop. 47, a divisive initiative that reduced penalties for people convicted of nonviolent drug and property crimes. Prop. 50 is officially titled the Election Rigging Response Act.
“I take lessons from Prop. 47 with the disingenuous headline of ‘Safe Neighborhoods and Schools,’” Rankin said. “Those are the lessons that I'm looking at, the lessons where an attorney general is not honest about the way the ballot is titled.”
Brian Pannebecker, founder of the Michigan-based group Auto Workers for Trump, laid out the stakes of Prop. 50 in stark terms Friday during a California MAGA event. He noted how Prop. 50 could swing the House of Representatives back to Democrats in next year’s midterm elections, thereby sidetracking Trump’s agenda for his second term.
“We won a huge battle last November, but we did not win the war,” Pannebecker said. “There's another huge battle coming up next November, and if we lose three or four seats, guess who gets impeached for the third time? Donald Trump. And his entire agenda will be just like what he went through in his first term. It’ll come to a screeching halt.”