Show Notes
New reports of homeless people in Los Angeles being paid by political operatives to vote in the Los Angeles mayoral election two weeks ago, along with a late vote surge of mail-in ballots for city council member Nithya Raman, have raised the specter of election fraud, but LA County GOP chairwoman Roxanne Hoge believes the city’s problems are much deeper.
“LA Democrats couldn’t run a lemonade stand if you spotted them sponsorships from Minute Maid and Solo Cup,” she said.
Hoge would not rule out the possibility of election fraud in the LA mayor’s primary but, as many observers have noted, California’s politics have legalized practices such as ballot harvesting and not requiring voter ID, so the results were foreordained.
“I have no doubt that they will continue to discover things that are on the edges of legality, even for California,” Hoge told investigative reporter Susan Crabtree and co-host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of the On Background podcast. “But what people in the rest of the country don’t understand, and what they’re seeing now, is that this cake was baked in 2010.” She was referring to the state’s move to “jungle primaries,” where only the top two finishers in a bipartisan primary election would go on to the general election ballot.
“Then in 2013, the legislature said, ‘Hey! We should give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. What could possibly go wrong?’” she told the hosts. “They set that up to take effect in 2015 and – oh my goodness, what a surprise! – that was the same time they instituted motor voter and gave voter registrations to everyone who walks into the DMV.”
Hoge, a Jamaican-born television and movie actress who has appeared in dozens of TV shows as Roxanne Beckford, chairs the largest county-sized Republican organization for an area that hates the Republican Party brand so much that it trails voters who declare “no party preference (NPP).”
She was thrilled by the performance of fellow-actor Spencer Pratt in the race against LA’s current mayor, Karen Bass, but understands that the splashy, viral ads that his campaign created are not good enough to succeed in a solidly blue area like LA. She cites her own neighbors as examples.
“There’s nothing worse to them than the concept of being Republican, not a ‘Trump Republican,’ because this predates Trump. The concept of being a Republican is anathema to very well-heeled, very well-educated people who live in very nice homes that are the ones that were getting robbed and who have to step over dead and dying people in the streets,” she says. “You need to understand those people, they all vote. Yes, there are problems with Skid Row. Yes, there are problems with illegal voting, but you try to tell my neighbors who have a ‘Resist’ yard sign in their window that it’s okay to clean up the streets and they will fight you.”
“Leftism is a religion, and you can’t talk people out of their religion,” she says, noting that the leftists she observes in the area are always more emotional about politics than conservatives. “You can’t reason someone out of a position that they emoted themselves into in the first place,” she says.
She told the hosts that the Republicans’ problems in LA are “math, message, and money.” The math is the party registration deficit, which she believes is ripe for a recovery, but only with a resonant message. “We need to raise the money to fix the math so we can deliver the message,” she says. Hoge, who became the chairwoman of the party last year after the catastrophic Palisades fire, acknowledges that new party registrations are a tough challenge.
“In the business world, customer acquisition always costs more than customer retention. So, there’s an ROI there that just has to do with like donors,” she tells the hosts. “By the time this election is certified on July 10th, ballots will drop in 90 days for the statewide offices. Do we have time to mount a huge voter registration drive?”
“My pitch to everyone who’s disappointed about the Spencer Pratt situation and others is just drop the ‘D.’ I get that you are ‘blue no matter who,’ but your party has been taken over by communists. So, become an NPP. If you’re an NPP, register Republican.”
She added that she believes a better investment of the party’s money is in working with Republicans in the surrounding areas of Orange County, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino County. “Those five counties are 55 percent of the electorate in California,” she stresses. “Too much of our conversation has been about maintaining the assembly seats up in the Central Valley. While that’s important, if we want to drag Steve Hilton across the statewide finish line and anyone else who made it, they have to lose LA County and that Southern California bloc by less.”
She watched as Republican hopeful Pratt’s campaign took second place on election night, then was overtaken by later tallies from mailed ballots. She though he ran a perfect campaign, full of common sense and personal charisma. “Charisma is defined as ‘public self-acceptance,’” she adds. “You need to be yourself and comfortable with yourself. And that’s what Spencer was. He’s also intelligent and he did his homework.”
“The issue is that 80 percent of people in regular elections vote by mail. And they always skew left,” she added. Those later ballots broke for incumbent mayor Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, overwhelming Pratt’s strong initial showing based on in-person voting.
The hosts turn to the gubernatorial election, in which Republican candidate Steve Hilton did make it into the top two against Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra, both overtaking a big money challenge from billionaire Tom Steyer, whose candidacy she disparaged. “Tom Steyer was just a terrible candidate. You can’t buy your way in. You have to have some sort of ability to finish a sentence. And he did not have that.”
