Republicans on the Peninsula

Yes, my children, Republicans once roamed the Peninsula freely.

There was a time in the 1960s, when San Mateo County was sufficiently conservative and Republican that it was regarded as “Orange County North.” Of course, that was a time when Orange County was so solidly conservative as to serve as a metaphor.

This began to change slowly in the 1970s. In 1970, a young attorney, Arlen Gregorio, was elected to the state Senate. In 1972, then-Assemblyman Leo Ryan, a former South San Francisco councilman, was elected to Congress.

But even then, Republicans held legislative seats throughout the Peninsula and most of the municipal and county nonpartisan offices.

By 1980, the Republican Party began turning on its own.

Ryan was killed in Guyana, in 1978, not long after he had been reelected. Republican County Supervisor Bill Royer won the special election to replace Ryan, aided, in part, by a Democratic Party that was rife with infighting. But in 1980, Royer lost to Democrat Tom Lantos, who liked to note he was one of only two non-incumbent Democrats to win a congressional race in the midst of the Ronald Reagan presidential landslide win over Jimmy Carter.

The GOP always had conservative strains and Reagan was the standard bearer. But Reagan also was pragmatic and practiced a brand of amiable politics that made it possible for him to work with Democrats.

His partisans, however, adopted a version of Reagan conservatism that became increasingly cartoonlike — one-dimensional and divided into Them vs. Us.

While this new, harsh strain of conservatism dominated the Reagan years, the Peninsula had its own brand of Republicanism — moderate to liberal on social issues, including the environment, women’s rights and abortion; conservative on fiscal issues and government spending.

There is a surprisingly long list of Republicans who won office on the Peninsula with this distinctive brand of politics. When Rep. Pete McCloskey gave up his congressional seat to run for the U.S. Senate, he was followed by Republicans Ed Zschau, Ernie Konnyu and Tom Campbell. The Senate seat held by Gregorio was won by Republicans Becky Morgan and then Campbell. The main Assembly seat in San Mateo County was held, in succession, by Republicans Dixon Arnett, Bob Naylor and Bill Duplissea.

This would the right time to take note of the presence of a remarkable political player, Tom Ford, a true gentleman, philanthropist and prodigious fundraiser, who single-mindedly sought out and advanced credible moderate Republicans. Ford died in 1999 and no one has, or could, step up as his replacement.

This brings us to the 1990s, when everything changed.

Campbell ran for the U.S. Senate in 1992, and he was replaced in Congress by Democrat Anna Eshoo. Campbell went back to Congress in 1994 and was replaced in the state Senate by Democrat Byron Sher. Duplissea lost his Assembly seat to Democrat Ted Lempert.

None of those seats has been held by a Republican since.

At the same time, the conservative revolution led by Newt Gingrich took conservatism to a new, even harsher level, and it showed up in the voter registration statistics in San Mateo County.

In 2000, Democrats were 51% of the county’s registered voters, Republicans were 28.5%, and Decline to State (later No Party Preference) voters were 16.3%

In the latest voter registration numbers reported last week, Democrats are 56.2%, Republicans are 13.9% and No Party Preference is 24.6%

There are dozens of people I know, some of them current or future officeholders, who meet the description of what used to be a Peninsula Republican — moderate on social issues and the environment, conservative on fiscal issues. Nearly all of them now are Democrats or NPP.

Essentially, they have been driven away from the party, first by the hardcore version of Reaganism, then by the conservative rhetoric of Gingrich and, finally, by Donald Trump, however his politics might be described. It is not just the views and positions of those leaders. It is the intractability of their adherents.

Will the GOP ever revive itself on the Peninsula? Fifty years ago, it would have been hard to predict the turnabout that took place in the 1990s. But if the Republican Party is going to become a meaningful factor in Peninsula politics, it will require a brand of conservatism that has been all but extinct for three decades.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.