BENSON BYTE: Lanhee J. Chen Breaks Down What Is Happening To Republicans In California

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Now it's time for another Guy Benson Show, Benson Bite, where we bring you the day's most interesting interviews in a bite size package. For the full episode, visit guybensonshow.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Guy Benson (0:47)

Who joins us now is Lanhee Chen. He's a fellow here at Hoover. He's very involved at Stanford. He was also a statewide candidate for the Republicans four years ago in that midterm election for state controller. Lanhee, welcome back to the show.

Lanhee Chen (1:02)

Great to be with you, Guy. Thank you.

Guy Benson (1:03)

Well, I would ask for you to give us any good news out of the state of California politically after last Tuesday. I know the ruinous wealth tax went down. We had one of your colleagues talking about that at some length earlier in the week. But I mean, overall, it's not just the destruction for Republicans all over the place. It's the margins too. I mean, a guy like Javier Becerra, who is so underwhelming and unimpressive, you know, winning by 35 points or whatever. I mean, a blue wave everywhere means a mega blue wave in a place like California. Can you give us something, anything?

Lanhee Chen (1:40)

I wish I could, Guy. I mean, it's a really difficult set of challenges we have in California. I mean, you have a socialist mayor of Los Angeles. You have a number of Republicans who had served in the Congress for some number of years who are out, including a guy called David Valadeo who represented Central Valley communities very, very ably since 2012 He's going to lose, I think, by over 30 points. You've got several members of the state legislature out. It's a very, very difficult environment. I mean, obviously, defeat of the billionaire tax, the wealth tax is one bright spot. But if you look around, there's just complete decimation here in California. The little infrastructure that Republicans had out here has been basically wiped out. We have a state party that's been unfortunately pretty ineffectual, and I think is getting even more ineffectual and irrelevant in this era.

Efforts to install voter ID were not successful. So it's difficult to find much of a silver lining out here in California except for this guy, which is that anytime the other side, anytime progressives have this kind of significant majority, they tend to overreach, and they tend to do things that people look at, and they say, you know what, maybe we don't want that. So I choose to say that the future will be better, that there will be opportunities in the years ahead, but right now it looks pretty dark.

Guy Benson (2:57)

I mean, part of what confuses and baffles me is a lot of Californians are unhappy with the state of play in this state or in the country, and, you know, unhappy, dissatisfied, all of that, and they recognize that their cost of living here is extremely high. A lot of that has been driven up intentionally by policies out here, and I guess the political maneuver by the Democrats is to blame it all on Washington, DC., and the Republicans and Trump, but the Democrats have absolutely ruled this place with an iron fist for years and years and years, and it seems like a lot of the voters, like in a place like California or even Los Angeles, let's say you mentioned the mayoral election there, they look around and they say, okay, yeah, wow, we're paying a ton for this government, they fail us in so many ways, look at the homelessness, look at the fires and the response there, we're going to get rid of the mayor, but what we're going to do because we're unhappy is we're going to go even further left.

I don't understand how the dissatisfaction and the failures don't translate seemingly at all into a suggestion like maybe we need a little bit more of a check and balance in this state, so it's not a total one-party fiasco.

Lanhee Chen (4:19)

Yeah, it's interesting because it does seem like the big animating issue for a lot of voters in this cycle was just, they wanted to send a signal to President Trump. Now, we can argue about whether that's the right thing or the wrong thing, but that I think is certainly part of it. And it was so interesting, Guy, I was watching some of the television advertising here in California in the close of the campaign. And you had complete non-sequiturs. I mean, it could have been a state policy to ban foie gras.