This story has been updated.
Monday, the Republican Party of San Diego County is set to re-elect Paula Whitsell as its chair and not everyone is pleased.
Backstory: Former Chair Tony Krvaric chose Whitsell as his successor two years ago before vanishing from the public stage where he had been a provocative and very present leader for the party in San Diego for more than a decade. He had followed an equally ever-available and always-quotable chairman whom he considered a mentor, Ron Nehring.
In contrast, in her two years as chair, Whitsell has almost completely avoided the public conversation about politics. She steadfastly avoided our and others’ interview requests and didn’t exactly substitute email or social media communications. The sudden absence of a vociferous chair of the San Diego County GOP seemed itself like a symbol of the end of the party’s relevance in San Diego politics.
But the party did OK this cycle, with wins in Escondido, San Marcos, Carlsbad and Chula Vista. With the last votes finally counted, Republican Laura Lothian in La Mesa has kept her seat on the City Council by a margin of just 11 votes out of about 35,000 cast.
And we finally had a chance to talk with Whitsell briefly.
“We did very well this go around,” she said. “They asked me to stay for another two years and I decided I would.”
Again, “very well” is relative. For the first time anyone active can remember, no Republican is in elected office in San Diego City Hall – the mayor, city attorney and all nine City Councilmembers will be Democrats after next week.
But yes, there were some wins.
The dissent: Brad Gerbel was elected the executive committee of the Republican Party’s Central Committee alongside Whitsell in January 2021. He’s going to stay on the Central Committee but he’s now not running alongside Whitsell and he’s deeply disappointed in her leadership.
Gerbel has been Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey’s campaign manager and he writes a well-read newsletter in local conservative politics called the Republican Roundup. His takes seemed to get hotter after the election in November.
He suggested the party convene a meeting to digest the results of the election much like one we wrote about that occurred after the party was crushed in 2018.
“… but who is going to have the courage to do this?” he asked.
Then he got more pointed. On Nov. 30, he came out strong against Whitsell.
“Two weeks from today, the Party will re-elect the weakest Chair we have ever had. A Chair that doesn’t do media interviews, a Chair that does not have a social media presence, a Chair that has not developed relationships with the donor community,” he wrote.
Gerbel said he had talked to candidates and grassroots activists and said most of the feedback about the party was bad.
“A common compliant I heard was that the Chair did not call them back and when she did call them back they felt that they were treated rudely, in a condescending manner. I heard this complaint over and over this election season,” he wrote.
Whitsell declined to respond to his points. Gerbel also declined to do an interview to elaborate on his points.
The Trump Factor
We recently did a sort of exit interview for the podcast with Councilman Chris Cate who is now in his last days on the Council and we asked about the future of the Republican Party. He said he was optimistic the Republicans could build on successes this cycle, recruit even better candidates and get some real gains.
We asked, though, if that was possible if former President Donald Trump is also on the ballot in two years, which seems more likely than not. Democrats have used Trump relentlessly to sink local Republican candidates, even those with the most tenuous ties to supporting him.
“It’s going take leaders who are willing to push against those that are most, um, ardent and fervent in support of him. So, I’m hopeful that that can occur,” Cate said.
Then he made a prediction about Trump.
“I personally think he’ll be on the ballot or will be the nominee in ‘24,” he said. Realizing this was something of a bold take he joked that we should make the timestamp of that comment so we can remind him of it an a little more than a year when the Republicans begin choosing someone to run for president.
We did.
We asked Whitsell about that idea, whether Republicans locally would be hurt if Trump again leads the party in a presidential election year.
“That’s a national race and my responsibility is San Diego. There will be a lot of water under that bridge in two years and it’s premature, at this point, to make any comment on who should be the nominee for president,” she said.
While that’s not the kind of push back Cate may want to see, it’s also not an endorsement of Trump from a woman who demonstrated pretty ardent support for Trump a couple years ago.
Democrats Expected to Maintain Current Party Leadership in Early ’23 Elections
It’s been seven months since Will Rodriguez-Kennedy went on leave from his position as the chair of the San Diego County Democratic Party, following a sexual misconduct allegation that became the subject of a lawsuit in September after local prosecutors said they would not bring any charges over the event.
Since then, Rebecca Taylor has served as the party’s acting chair, a period covering an election cycle that included some good news for Democrats – they now control every seat on the San Diego City Council, won their first countywide elected office and flipped a state Senate seat – and some bad news – they lost control of mayoral offices in Chula Vista, National City and Escondido, among other seats.
Now, though, as the party gears up for the start of the 2024 cycle, we were curious what its plans were for a more permanent leadership arrangement.
The party’s bylaws call for biennial meetings in which the party’s central committee chooses the officers that will lead the organization for two-year terms. That’s expected to occur over two meetings in January – one on Jan. 10, where they’ll elect vice chairs for each of the five areas of the county that the party organizes itself into. The next, on Jan. 17, will serve as the election for the next chair. Individuals running for any of those seats will need to nominate themselves by Jan. 3.
Changes to the party’s chair used to be pretty quiet affairs, until just after the 2018 election cycle, when Rodriguez-Kennedy ran against Craig Roberts, and the party’s internal selection became a quasi-public race that played out in the press.
Now, Rodriduez-Kennedy’s second term, which he took leave from following the allegation against them and has never returned to, is due to simply expire, leaving an empty seat to be replaced.
Taylor, who has been the acting chair since he left, is running for the full term. She told us Friday that she decided to run after talking to party membership and elected officials, and she’s confident she will win.
Taylor said she intends to maintain “the SANDAG strategy” — an initiative started by Rodriguez-Kennedy in which the party prioritizes races that could result in seats on the SANDAG board.
“We’re going to focus on building our bench, and reaching out to people about how they can help the party throughout the year, recruiting candidates in advance and mobilizing people year-round,” Taylor said. “This way if a community priority emerges, we can act on it.”
She said she has not heard of anyone who intends to run against her, but that could change.
“I take nothing for granted,” she said. “Until then, I’m just reaching out to members and getting their feedback, and unsurprisingly it’s mostly to better organize and to find people that reflect the community they represent.”
Sara Ochoa, the South Area Vice Chair who is running for another term in her seat, said she isn’t anticipating significant changes in party leadership.
“We’ll see what the membership decides in January, but I think a lot of the current leadership has made great effort at increasing transparency and access to the party, and I think that’s reflected in the fact that I think the majority of the leadership is going to remain the same,” she said. “In my area, there were some disappointing losses — we lost a couple mayor seats, and a council majority in Imperial Beach, but as a region, we’ll maintain control of some big regional boards like SANDAG. Compared to projections of how Democrats were going to do nationally, locally we won 77 percent of our races and ballot measures, and those ballot measures had some significant oppositions to overcome.”
- The immediate SANDAG strategy: After Republican John McCann won the Chula Vista mayoral race, there’s been a lot of attention on whether he’ll end up representing the city on SANDAG. The city still has a Democratic majority, though, and Taylor said the party is already engaged with elected officials there and elsewhere about board appointments.
“We’re having early conversations with stakeholders and elected officials to make sure we work together to get folks in those appointed positions that reflect our priorities,” she said.
Update: This story has been updated to include comments from Rebecca Taylor.
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