If you say so. I thought Pete Wilson was a good governor.
Arnold was a disaster, but then he was not a Republican. He was a celebrity who ran with an R on his back. He was as much Republican as Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi.
I can tell you exactly when it died under Pete: The 1996 General Election. Before that date, the Republican Party was competitive across the board. It was only expert Democrat gerrymandering that kept them from winning majorities in the Congressional delegation and the legislature after the 1960s.
1996 established the following dynamics: #1, the GOP ceased to be able to be competitive to win both the Assembly and Senate. They lost the Assembly that year and have never won it since. #2, they ceased to be tied or competitive with federal Congressional seats. Going into the 1996 elections, the GOP had half, 26 out of 52 House seats. Today, that number has dropped to 14 out of 53. No CA Republican has defeated a federal Democrat incumbent in 24 years, not since 1994.
#3, No Republican has won a downballot statewide office since 1994. #4, Presidentially, the last time a Democrat was below 50% was 1992. #5, Wilson himself ran for President in 1996, happy to abandon the state to Gray Davis (something which Deukmejian refused to do with Leo McCarthy in 1988 when offered the VP slot by GHW Bush).
You can generally judge a Governor by the state of the party that he leaves behind. Now unless there’s an internecine situation going on, coupled with a bad national climate (which was why Reagan was unable to hand off the Governorship in 1974 to another Republican), generally a Governor can be viewed as the “President” of his state. Look at Deukmejian in 1990: He easily passed off the state to another Republican, Wilson. The state was on sound footing.
Fast forward to 1998, the party was dead. Wilson handed it off to Davis, and that was that. The sad irony, the man who buried the CA GOP after Wilson killed it was the execrable Communist Ah-nold, was to the left of Gray Davis. His goal, of course, was to make the CA GOP a mirror image of the Democrats. Of course, there’s no reason to have two ultra-leftist parties, because one does the trick. Of course, he knows that. And now, thanks to that top two candidate bullcrap, Republicans may not even get to compete in a general election. You get the honor of picking a Stalinist or a Maoist.
Who knows, if California had had a Governor like McClintock instead of creepy and treacherous Communist sex maniacs like Ah-nold, perhaps the state would’ve still been competitive. Now it’s a sad, feudal, one-party Marxist totalitarian slave state. Thanks to RINO Pete Wilson for giving it that shove over the cliff.