It’s only June, but it sure seems like Christmas morning with the state’s Citizens Redistricting Commission dropping new maps into stockings all over California today.
While the full impact on the GOP won’t be known for a few days (or a few months, if you believe the Commission that this is only a “first draft”), interesting races are emerging. Aside from a lump of coal or two delivered to coastal GOP State Senate districts, there are two new interesting districts in Southern California yielding fresh GOP blood that will prove to be particularly exciting.
South Bay – Los Angeles
The first is the newly-drawn district across the South Bay communities of Los Angeles. You may remember Nathan Mintz, the South Bay Tea Party founder and dynamic twenty-something aerospace engineer who ran a respectable campaign against the far-left’s trial attorney lobbyist Betsy Butler last fall. While Nathan fell short of victory in that matchup, he came closer to winning than any candidate in recent history – by a long shot. (In case you were wondering, the last Republican to run in that district won approximately zero precincts.) And today, it’s a whole new ballgame.
The new district map out today couldn’t have been drawn better if Nathan had sat down and drawn it himself. Turns out, Mintz won 2/3rds of this new District in last year’s election – more than 60% of the new District by population. And, he won at least 6 of the 12 communities and did so as a rookie candidate with very little party infrastructure in the area and less than something like $150,000 in the bank.
But that’s not all. A few weeks ago when the new maps leaked out, Nathan swung into action, opening a campaign account and securing the endorsement of the Lincoln Club of Los Angeles County – an organization that rarely endorses and certainly never this early in a race. And he has already begun to collect checks from the Club’s top backers. Having run – and won votes – in this District before, the advantage is all Nathan’s. With last year’s run under his belt, he knows his way around a campaign and is in it to win it in 2012.
Riverside County
An interesting district has also emerged in southwest Riverside County, and it appears that Phil Paule – longtime top adviser to Congressman Darrell Issa – is throwing his hat into the ring for State Assembly. Word is that Congressman Issa himself found the new district so interesting, that Issa personally phoned Paule last weekend and encouraged him to run. Since then, Paule hasn’t wasted a moment. This week he secured top campaign strategists Gilliard Blanning & Associates to run his campaign, and has already named Congressman Issa and one of California’s most powerful former State Senators, Ray Haynes, as Honorary Chairs of his campaign.
Already an elected official as a Board Member of the area’s Municipal Water District, Paule has deep tentacles in the district. Add to this, his work in the region as District Director for a Congressional office, as well as running the ground operations for the 2003 Statewide Recall Election to oust Gray Davis, and Paule is the automatic frontrunner. Any GOP who goes up against this Republican political machine will have an uphill climb, and that’s putting it mildly.
For more information or to view the maps for these two districts, visit http://www.WeDrawtheLines.ca.gov.