One would expect that an article about the difficulties the Republican presidential contenders face in running in California during the primary would include the actual process for winning that particular battle. That is unless you were reading Bill Whalen’s column in the WaPo today. He was up in his eyeballs on how difficult it will be.
Only, what’s good for California isn’t so swell for the top tier of Republican candidates — not at least the ones with a serious chance of securing their party’s nomination. That’s because the Golden State is a 24-karat headache in terms of how to approach it, how to campaign in it, and how to survive it without committing lasting political damage.
Let’s start with the sheer mechanics of the place.
I expected him to launch into a discussion of the fact that there will be 53 separate elections in California for the Republican delegate votes. The Republicans are awarding one delegate vote per congressional district. Whomever wins the majority of the vote in each of the districts gets a delegate. Since there is a wide range in Republican voting registration in each district, each Republican is not worth the same. A voter in a district like Nancy Pelosi is much more valuable than one in Dana Rorbacher’s. It totally changes the strategy behind campaigning. Obviously the media markets in the low Republican registration districts is pretty expensive: Los Angeles and San Francisco. Instead of recognizing the complexity of the strategic planning for this race, Whalen discusses California as if it was a winner take all system. I expected more from a fellow at the Stanford based conservative Hoover Institute.
More so a nation than a state, California is made up of a series of media markets few of which overlap, and each of which is too large to ignore: Sacramento, the Bay Area, the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, Los Angeles and San Diego. It’s also at one end of the country — meaning long flights just to get here, plus the high cost of jetting to all those media markets. So rather than earning media though public events, a candidate might decide instead that paid media is more time-efficient. The problem is, Los Angeles and San Francisco are two of the nation’s five most expensive television markets. This is why, in recent presidential contests, the two parties kept their advertising to cheaper cable news channels, even if it meant smaller viewing audiences, rather than the more expensive local network affiliates.
For the 2008 candidates, Plan B in California could be a smaller-scale “guerilla” campaign that’s more reliant on technology: e-mails, “robo” pre-recorded phone calls to registered Republicans, plus frequent appearances on conservative talk radio. It’s cheaper than a $5 million TV campaign. But high-tech is high-risk in that it’s doesn’t guarantee blanket coverage of a large audience (2.847 million California Republicans participated in the March 2000 primary — more than seven times the total vote in New Hampshire).
What Whalen writes is indeed correct. California is bloody expensive, because big media buys run in the millions of dollars per week for saturation. You can save money by purchasing some cable, but ignoring purchased media is risky, because it is still proven to move numbers better than the cheaper options.
I am still waiting to see a major political writer actually do a good piece on the strategy behind a good race in California for the GOP nomination. From a political organizing perspective the calculations are enormously complex and therefore interesting. This is new and interesting and there is no set playbook for them to operate from. The Democratic race in California is much less interesting, given the huge lead Clinton has run up here in the polls.
Ruck Pad 
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