“The state that spawned the ‘Reagan Revolution’ and Richard M. Nixon just experienced a watershed moment — the California Republican Party was officially relegated to third-party status,” according to Politico.
“In the culmination of the withered state GOP’s long slide toward near-political irrelevance here, new voter registration data released this week show the once-robust party trails behind both Democrats and ‘no party preference’ in the nation’s most populous state. The California Republican Party is now outnumbered by independent voters by 73,000, according to Political Data Inc., which tabulates voter file data from county registrars.
“The new figures come as the state looms large in the national battle for the House, with a handful of Republican-held seats poised to play a pivotal role in November.
“Among California’s 19 million registered voters, the latest statistics — as of 15 days before the June 5 primary — show that Democrats now make up 8.4 million or 44.6 percent of the electorate.
“That compares with 4,844,803 no-party-preference voters, or 25.5 percent of the state’s voters and 4,771,984 Republicans, who both make up about 25.1 percent. The California Secretary of State’s office is expected to release its own official count later this week.
“A decade after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — the last elected GOP statewide official — was lambasted for warning his fellow Republicans that their party was ‘dying at the box office,’ the new numbers underscore the collapse of the GOP in California. The ranks of Republican voters have disintegrated by 10 percentage points since 1998, when they made up 35 percent of the voter rolls.
“Democratic numbers have also declined, though not nearly as dramatically — the party made up 46.8 percent of the voter rolls a decade ago. By contrast, the percentage of “no party preference” voters in the state has more than doubled in the past two decades, the latest data showed.
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