Republicans win 1998 governors race in California, how badly does this torpedo them long term?

The gubernatorial term from 1999-2003 was a poisoned chalice for any governor in California coming into power, since many of Pete Wilson’s chickens started coming home to roost.

IOTL Gray Davis didn’t do that bad a job with the shit he had fall in his lap, but a lot of it like the power crisis and CalPERS unfunded liabilities were driven by events outside of his control. With the power crisis being driven by Enron and the CalPERS bomb being caused by the dot com bubble and a bill that had unanimous support in the legislature.

So if Dan Lungren somehow gets elected in 1998, would he also get recalled over the power crisis? And would that tar the entire CA GOP with the accusation that they were complicit in the power crisis?
 
The GOP in California was torpedoed long term by demographic changes to the state, the biggest one being that unlike Texas, Hispanics who moved to the state largely remained Catholic and largely were shut out of home ownership by the state's reflexive NIMBYism and other regulatory factors. It has been torpedoed to the point where it can't even get on statewide general election ballots anymore because of the open primary system.

In Texas, many Hispanics converted to Protestantism, especially in some of the megachurches like John Hagee's in San Antonio, Osteen's Lakewood church, and some others; the states relatively lax zoning laws also made homes affordable for ownership (not that there wasn't NIMBYism, but the state embraced sprawl early on and lacks a green lobby). The two biggest factors in American politics that trend towards Republican voting habits are being Evangelical Protestant and owning your home.

So I don't think this would do all that much from a long term perspective.

1998 might have been a poisoned chalice though, sure. The dot com bubble would hurt badly enough for whoever is in office. I think Davis was more incompetent than most would have been, but he didn't have an easy road of things.
 
It could have effects on the national party. There were a group of prominent heterodox Republicans with serious general electorate appeal that came to relative prominence in the early 2000s. Not exactly moderates when you classify them as a group, but each featuring significant deviations from the conservative party line. In addition to Giuliani, McCain, Bloomberg, Powell, and even Romney at the time, Schwarzenegger was a national ambassador to non-ideologues that the GOP could maybe possibly potentially have a home for them.

Now it turned out this was not to be the case- several of those people have since swung far to the right, and the rest have either left the party or gone into total political irrelevance or both.

But how many people do you think they convinced? How many GOP politicians won with a coalition of true-believers and less extreme voters willing to give the party a chance?

Butterflying Schwarzenegger alone could keep a statistically significant number of people from opening a GOP pamphlet in the first place. You have one less support beam in this idea of a non-doctrinaire GOP so the whole edifice looks weaker. The narrative doesn't play quite as well in the press, so they circulate it less. The idea dies somewhat sooner. Now it's kinda dead by the 2008 campaign anyway, but it might die before people go to the ballot box rather than after.

If that's the case, you get a statistically significant percentage of moderates who gave McCain one last chance IOTL changing their minds ITTL.

Based just on this one breakdown (and please pardon my math if it's wrong), you had Obama winning 60% of the self-described moderate vote, or about 26% of the electorate. If he'd won 65% of the moderate vote, that's a swing of 2% points in his direction. If that's uniform across the country, it's enough to flip Missouri and Montana into his column. In the senate it flips the Georgia race to the Democrats. The Democrats could gain up to 20 additional seats in the House with just this swing.

Caveats: self-described moderates aren't always moderate. Swings are hardly ever uniform.

But for academic purposes it's a pretty interesting result for just a slight change in how the party is perceived. And that's not even getting into the less numbers driven data, like the kinds of candidates the party can recruit and how those butterflies build over the course of the decade.
 
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