How Golden State turned blue

Here’s How Dept.: Michael Gates, once the controversial city attorney for Huntington Beach, is running for the state Attorney General in the Nov. 3 election, and – frankly – he doesn’t stand a chance.

There hasn’t been a Republican elected to statewide office since 2002, which – coincidentlly – was the last (and only) time the Angels won the World Series.

If you want to know why California, for a long time a “purple” state, became deep blue you only have to look back to the 1988 election for a state Assembly seat in Orange County. Curt Pringle had made three unsuccessful runs for the Garden Grove City Council, but had more success when he got the GOP nomination after the death of incumbent Dick Longshore.

On Election Day, the Orange County Republican Party hired a security guard company to send uniformed operatives to polling places in Santa Ana to “protect” against voting by illegal aliens in the contested district.

Charges of voter intimidation were leveled and a controversy ensued.

An investigation by the FBI cleared Pringle of any involvement, but the Orange County GOP paid $400,000 in a settlement of a civil lawsuit. Pringle won the election but the widely-publicized incident gave legs to the idea that his party was not the friend of Hispanics, and there began the shift of that ethnic group toward the Democrats, which has been crucial to their party’s ascendancy.

His career was not sidetracked. He went on to become the Speaker of the State Assembly in 1996 and mayor of Anaheim in 2002.

He did OK, but his party did not. To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, “you can’t poke a man in the eye and expect him to buy you flowers afterwards.”