“Assembly Republicans are not talking publicly, but they’re meeting in small groups and buzzing among themselves about the possible overthrow of their caucus leader, Connie Conway,” according to the Sacramento Bee.
The Bee also reported that “A key question is whether any Republican can corral enough votes for a coup. No Assembly member has pushed publicly to succeed Conway, though veteran Don Wagner of Irvine and freshman Travis Allen of Huntington Beach are touted privately as possibilities. They did not respond to interview requests Monday.”
Wow. I bet Troy Edgar feels pretty lame just about now! You may recall that Edgar, a pompous tax-raising Los Alamitos Council Member, had all the momentum going into the race for the 72nd Assembly District, but Allen beat him anyway, by highlighting his awful pro-tax record.
Wagner is a good fiscal conservative too but he is on the socially conservative side of the scale, so we prefer to see Allen ascend to the Assembly GOP leadership.
Conway represents Tulare, as in who cares? While Orange County’s GOP delegation lost two Assembly seats last year, only one of them, the 65th Assembly District, leaned their way. That seat was lost when the incumbent, Chris Norby, hired John Lewis to run his campaign. The same John Lewis who ran the campaign of a Democrat, Tom Daly, in the 69th Assembly District. Well, Daly won but Norby lost and the California GOP is now in a world of hurt as the Democrats can ignore them while raising our taxes again and again.
The OC Political blog had this to say about Wagner and Allen:
First elected in 2010, Wagner terms out in 2016. First elected in 2012, Allen terms out in 2024. (In both cases, I’m assuming that they are both re-elected the maximum number of terms allowed and serve those terms consecutively.)
In either case, Wagner or Allen would be the first Assembly Republican Leader from Orange County in a dozen years.
They predict that the next California GOP Assembly leader will have these tasks ahead of him:
The next Assembly Republican Leader has exactly two priorities: protecting seats currently held by Republicans and winning seats occupied by Democrats. The top three seats the leader needs to protect are Jeff Gorell‘s Ventura County seat, Mike Morrell‘s San Bernardino County seat, and freshman Eric Linder‘s western Riverside County seat. Target #1 is the Antelope Valley seat held by freshman Steve Fox (D). Target #2 will be in the leader’s backyard (assuming Wagner or Allen is the next leader) with the North Orange County seat occupied by freshman Sharon Quirk-Silva (D).
I liked the way that Travis Allen mailed last-minute pieces to Democrats in his district proclaiming that he was a “new kind of Republican” . Those mail pieces noted that he had contributed to Democrats and featured the endorsement of OC Democratic Party chair, Frank Barbaro his father-in-law.
Travis built a winning coalition by uniting Republicans and Democrats in his district. It would be a shame to see him become a part of the partisan divide.
Rather than looking for a way to get rid of Quirk-Silva I would rather see him focus on ways to work with her to find common ground. As someone who lives at the dividing line between the two districts, we have a great deal of opportunity to find the common issues that unite us rather than work on dividing the communities that border one another over politics.
Where does this all lead? If Travis does take the leadership role I think he has an opportunity to find the places where the two parties can agree and make that his goal, to make California better by not running a party of “no”, but by stating that he disagrees on the tax and spend priorities of the Democrats, but supports things like a refocus on education and possibly doing all he can to reduce the number of people we put in jail and pay for with tax dollars for crimes against themselves rather than crimes against others.
There are innovative ways that we can go after our fair share of federal funds (we are a creditor state, we provide the feds MORE than we get back) and we can do so in ways that make sense for both parties to be fighting for.
By uniting along a middle ground between the two extreme ends Travis can build a long term coalition looking out for the future of California. A ten year plan that includes things like elimination of tax loopholes (like the commercial property loopholes in Prop 13) along with innovative investment in new technology and infrastructure projects that create working class jobs. Because creating working class jobs is what will increase the tax rolls and allow us to really invest in things that make California better, like a revamped education system that doesn’t rely on the outmoded assembly-line model that is failing, but leverages technology to allow the delivery of JIT (Just In Time) education that better prepares our students to compete in the global economy.
So, if this is just an opportunity to recycle the old Us verses Them, then I would rather see someone other than Travis at the helm, because that old model doesn’t lead anywhere good and wasn’t what the Democrats that supported Travis thought we were getting when we hired him to be our representative.
Sharon will be hard to beat and the Republicans who seem to want to run against her are rather unimpressive.