As he bows out as California’s GOP chairman, Jim Brulte claims ‘success’ amid the losses

Not that he’s counting down his days to freedom or anything, but Jim Brulte seemed keenly aware that the end of his time as California Republican Party chairman was 11 days away — not 10, not an even dozen — as he sat for an interview Thursday at his house in Fontana.

Brulte’s successor will be chosen Feb. 24 by delegates to the state party convention in Sacramento, and take over the next morning. He’s staying neutral in the election among declared candidates Travis Allen, Jessica Patterson and Steve Frank. Whoever wins, he said, he’ll offer congratulations and some sobering advice.

“Make sure you disengage your ego,” Brulte said he’ll tell the next man or woman. “You play one part in an electoral (production) that has many leading actors. And, at best, you can win an award for best supporting actor.”

It’s a lesson Brulte has learned the hard way — and might still be learning.

Six years ago, he entered the party-chairman job admired for his tactical acumen, a reputation built as Republican leader in both the California Assembly and state Senate during 14 years representing parts of San Bernardino County.

It has proven to be the toughest job of his life. And he knows some casual observers will think of him as the man who presided over the California GOP’s decline to record lows in voter-registration and catastrophic electoral defeats.

In what sounds like a combination of ego-soothing and reality check, Brulte, 62, claims some success during the longest tenure of any California GOP chairman in history. He also admits a major measure of failure. And he offers more ominous advice for future party leaders and candidates.

The successes:

He has led a rebuilding effort for a state party organization that was in disarray. When he took over from chairman Tom Del Beccaro, in March 2013, the state party had $1.3 million in unpaid bills (most more than 300 days overdue), 40,000 emails unanswered over an eight-month period, and a shuttered Sacramento headquarters.

And he has fulfilled a promise to his mother to define success in his political career by more than victories and defeats.

“I’m now 11 days from no longer being chairman of the party,” Brulte said. “I’ve worked about as hard as I can work. I haven’t compromised my principles. I haven’t shredded my integrity. And so from a personal point of view, my job has been a success.”

The failure:

“My biggest failure was (not) convincing enough candidates to talk about issues that the fastest-growing voter groups care about,” Brulte said.

Casual in a salmon-colored shirt open at the neck, Brulte spoke from a sofa in the living room of a house he owns in the hills of Fontana, in southwest San Bernardino County, though he lives primarily at a townhouse he owns in San Juan Capistrano. Still, the decor offers hints that the owner is big in the Republican Party.

An elephant sculpture holds down center space on the fireplace mantle. One of the signs that marked the California delegation at the 2016 GOP national convention in Cleveland stands nearby. Here and there are photos of Brulte with political allies, and a framed collection of Reagan-Bush ’84 campaign buttons in dozens of languages.

The buttons might be symbolic for a man who has been preaching for years that California Republicans must do more to expand its base of support.

Voice of warning

“Unless and until Republicans can figure out how to communicate much more effectively to non-white voters, we’re going to have trouble in states like California,” said Brulte.

It’s not impossible, he said. He pointed to charter schools — something the GOP has backed — as an example of a conservative cause that can find an audience among Latino, Asian and black voters.

But his party hasn’t spread many messages like that, and has lost ground among non-white voters.

California is one of five “majority minority” states today, but projections say that by 2044 more than half of the United States population will be non-white. Minorities tend not to register and vote Republican, turned off in part by the image and actions of the party that, in recent years, has been shaped by policies out of Washington, D.C.

In a widely quoted op-ed on The Hill political website in December, Brulte warned that the California GOP’s unpopularity in California should be viewed by national Republicans as a “canary in the coal mine.”

As bad as 2018 was for his party, Brulte suggested said Republicans in California are likely to continue their more than two-decade decline.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Brulte said, his voice rising above its usual calm, careful tone.

“That is not defeatist. That is a clear-eyed, rational look at what’s happening. I said it in the ’90s. I said it in the 2000s.”

The 2018 election saw California Democrats pick up seven U.S. House seats, add to their already huge majorities in state Assembly and Senate, and again sweep statewide elections. Republicans also slipped from second to third in California voter registration last year, the GOP’s 24 percent trailing not only the Democrats’ 43.5 percent but also “No Party Preference’s” 27.5 percent, according to state data.

It’s pretty bad when John Cox’s 23.8 percent loss to governor Gavin Newsom was actually the closest race for any Republican seeking state office in California last year — and that Cox has been invited to be keynote speaker at the GOP state convention to talk about growing the party’s base.

Yet, using apples-to-apples comparisons of Republican candidates’ results in similar districts, Brulte can make a case that the GOP’s losses in California last year were no worse than in many other states.

And although Republicans’ voter-registration deficit versus Democrats has grown from 15.0 percentage points before Brulte took over to 19.4 percentage points in October, the decline hardly began on his watch. The current 1-point-a-year rate of decline is actually less than the rate in the six years before Brulte.

Dan Schnur, a former Republican spokesman and strategist who now is a professor at USC’s Annenberg Center, said Brulte shouldn’t be blamed for the GOP’s woes.

“He’s one of the smartest political minds in California — who happened to coincide with the Republican Party’s worst stretch here in its history,” Schnur said. “He didn’t cause those problems. They were the result of forces far beyond his control.

“If California Republicans ever decide to remake themselves to be competitive in the state, Brulte has provided them with an infrastructure that can make that happen,” Schnur added.

The state party seemed to recognize that. It extended a usual two-year term limit to allow Brulte to win two more terms as chairman. And Schnur said Brulte couldn’t have stayed popular with party activists if he’d pushed back too hard against their drift to the right. While always insisting state party leaders’ job was “nuts and bolts,” and that decisions about ideological direction must be left to candidates, Brulte wasn’t shy about supporting Donald Trump for president.

‘Never an ideologue’

Brulte was recruited to run for state party chair and won the position in a vote of delegates to the California Republican convention in March 2013. Prior to that, he’d served 14 years in the Legislature. He’d been Assembly Republican leader from 1992 to 1995, missing out on being speaker when a Republican’s defection to the Democratic Party cost the GOP a majority. He’d led the Senate minority from 2000 to 2004.

In Sacramento, he played hardball. In 2003, for example, he angered some Republican senators by threatening to oppose their re-elections if they voted to raise taxes to attack a state budget deficit. He made some missteps, such as a 1996 electricity industry deregulation bill he authored, a plan later blamed for the electricity shortages that led to Gov. Gray Davis’ recall in 2003.

Brulte teared up Thursday as he talked about his favorite piece of legislation, a 2000 bill he sponsored that allows mothers to anonymously abandon newborns at hospitals without fear of prosecution.

Legislative colleagues viewed him fondly.

“Jim was never an ideologue. It was almost like, ‘Nothing personal, I’m just representing my party,’ ” said Sheila Kuehl, a Democrat who served with Brulte in the Assembly and Senate and now is a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Kuehl, who was the first openly gay person in the California Legislature, remembered meeting Brulte for the first time in 1994, when it appeared Brulte was going to be Assembly speaker. Brulte joked that he would seat her next to Republican David Knowles, whom Kuehl remembers as “one of the worst homophobes in the Assembly.”

“I looked him in the eye and said, ‘Would that be punishing me or him?’ ” Kuehl said Friday. “He paused, and then he laughed. I think he was surprised this person he saw as a grim feminist had a sense of humor.”

Brulte had to go along with immoderate party policies, such as Republican fundraising “based on fighting the ‘gay agenda,’ ” in order to maintain his influence and try to make the GOP more inclusive, Kuehl said.

Next act

Born in New York, Brulte moved to Ontario at age 4 with his parents, Bill, a pricing manager in the aerospace industry, and Helen, a pediatric nurse, older brother Bob, who runs the state capitol’s radio station, and younger brother Rick, a teacher at their alma mater Chaffee High.

Jim’s first political activity was placing Ronald Reagan-for-governor stickers on cars in 1966.

“I was 10. I didn’t know you had to get people’s permission,” he said.

Before running for the Assembly in 1990, Brulte worked for U.S. Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, President George H.W. Bush and the Republican National Committee. He later was the top California strategist for President George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign for the White House.

What he’ll do after leaving the California GOP chairman’s office is an unanswered question.

Still single as he nears his 63rd birthday in April — he has “a wonderful relationship with a woman in San Juan Capistrano” — Brulte said he doesn’t know what he’ll do next besides tending to two consulting firms he’s involved with. He views his adult life in four acts, the first two of which were public service and building his businesses.

“The fourth act is heaven,” Brulte said. “I’m trying to figure out what the third act will be.”

It will have something to do with public service, he said, but it will not involve running for office again.

One thing he knows for sure: He and the next state GOP leader will be in touch.

“I predict,” Brulte said, “whoever replaces me will call me sometime in the future and say, ‘Geez, I didn’t realize how tough this job is.’ “