LOS ANGELES — California Republicans are about to experience an event many of them have never seen — a primary that could determine a presidential nomination.
Because Donald Trump lost Ohio’s primary on Tuesday night, ceding the state’s 66 delegates to its governor, John Kasich, the race to claim the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination seems unlikely to be settled before California votes on June 7.
Barring another big shift in the race, such as a decision by one of the three remaining candidates to drop out, the contest for California will be critical to the outcome. How important is it?
So important that Kasich gave the state — home to one of every eight Americans — a shout-out in his nationally televised victory speech Tuesday night.n
“I’m getting ready to rent a covered wagon, we’re going to have a big sail and have the wind blow us to the Rocky Mountains and over the mountains to California,” Kasich told cheering supporters outside Cleveland.
California’s 172 delegates — 14 percent of the 1,237 required to win the nomination — will be chosen on the last big day of the presidential calendar, which also features voting by New Jersey and a smattering of other states.
California has moved up its primary day in past cycles in order to boost its importance, but now appears ready to seize that role on its traditional voting day: the first Tuesday after the first Monday in June.
After Tuesday night, “California’s primary delegates became the pot at the end of the rainbow for the campaigns,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran GOP lawyer who has long been involved in the nomination process.
The party now looking at an outsized role has been losing heft in California for years. The most recent registration numbers show 4.76 million Republicans registered in the state, or 27.6 percent of registered voters. That represents a loss of nearly a million voters from the party’s registration peak in 2004.
The Republicans who will decide this year are more similar to their counterparts in other states than they are to California as a whole. Republicans in this majority-minority state are 76 percent white, 62 percent married and 33 percent over the age of 65, according to a September University of Southern California Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. In all those areas, those numbers greatly exceed the percentages among registered voters.
The USC/Los Angeles Times survey, conducted less than three months after Trump entered the race, had him in the lead, with 24 percent compared with the next finisher at the time, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, at 18 percent. The other two candidates who now remain in the race, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. Kasich, barely registered.
A more recent poll, a January survey by California’s Field poll, found a very different race: Among likely Republican voters, Cruz had 25 percent to Trump’s 23 percent, a statistical tie, with Kasich nearly invisible.
The Field Poll results suggested that California’s campaign will rest on the same dynamic that has defined much of the GOP battle across the country this year: whether voters are attracted to Trump’s take-no-prisoners economic appeal, or are put off by the controversies that have surrounded his campaign as a result of his comments on women, Mexicans, other Republican candidates and violence toward protesters at his rallies.
The way Republican delegates are awarded in California creates the potential for a tactically complicated campaign. The vast majority of delegates are awarded, three at a time, to the winner of each of the state’s 53 congressional districts.
Cruz has pursued the strategy of targeting Republicans in overwhelmingly Democratic districts, most recently in Missouri. Cruz, who launched his effort here last summer, is by far the best organized candidate when it comes to California.