John Cox and the Sad State of California's GOP
John Cox and the Sad State of California’s GOP
Republicans have become so disempowered in the state that their gubernatorial nominee is an Illinoisan who has lost every race he’s run.
By SCOTT LUCAS October 21, 2018
help is on the way.” That’s the message Republican John Cox hoped to deliver to voters on a recently concluded 30-stop bus tour of California in the waning days of the 2018 election for governor. Trailing his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, by double digits in most polls, Cox took his bid directly to the voters, meeting with workers who make Sriracha hot sauce in Irwindale, attending Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Indio, touring a homeless shelter in San Diego, and pressing the flesh at a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Fremont and a car show in Stockton. In Chico, he buttonholed drivers at the Costco gas station, until security asked him to leave.
It was an unusual itinerary for a statewide candidate—bypassing many of the big cities where the bulk of the state’s voters live. That’s because, for Cox, as for many Republicans here, there is little return on going to places dominated by Democratic voters who loathe President Donald Trump and the party that empowers him. Cox, as a result, has taken to the periphery with his moderate, business-friendly brand of Republicanism, crafted to broaden his appeal to lower- and middle-class voters worried about the high cost of living in the state.
“It’s all about affordability,” Cox said at a campaign stop in Sacramento, offering himself as the solution to the state’s housing crisis and voicing support for a proposition to repeal a recent increase in the state’s tax on gas. “How can I live when I can’t find a house I can afford or an apartment that I can afford, or my gas is climbing to almost $4 a gallon, if not over it in some parts?”
It’s a message that very well could resonate with voters—even if the messenger likely will not. Call it the Cox paradox: A cerebral, quixotic, 63-year-old Illinois snowbird with a personal fortune and a political résumé that includes three losing bids in that state, as well as an abortive presidential bid in the 2008 race, is running a campaign that not even other Republicans are eager to support. Yet he finds himself at the top of the ticket for the GOP here.
Some of his political allies freely admit he would be more suited to run for another office in California first. “It’s an odd hobby,” Pat Brady, a Republican consultant and former GOP chair in Illinois, says of Cox’s repeated quests for office. The best he is likely to do is to spur conservative turnout in the half-dozen most competitive House districts. The worst he can do? Well, it’s hard to go lower than the 10 votes he won in the Iowa presidential caucus a decade ago. (Cox declined to be interviewed for this article.)
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