SAN FRANCISCO — Donald Trump’s Republican rivals once viewed California as a lifeline. Instead, the Super Tuesday state with a massive delegate haul now looks more like a towering backstop for the former president’s campaign.
Enduring loyalty to Trump from millions of Republicans in the state combined with new delegate rules imposed by his loyalists are tilting the scales dramatically in Trump’s favor. It’s a rude awakening for the rest of the field as they descend on the state for Wednesday’s debate.
“The grassroots across California is all behind Trump,” said Bill Essayli, a conservative Republican state assemblymember from Corona, a city in northwestern Riverside County. “He’s the guy that excites them and energizes them and they think that he should have won in 2020. And they’re still behind him and 2024.”
That has left never-Trump Republicans “in denial,” and some deep-pocketed establishment donors desperately looking for another candidate, Essayli said. “The best you can say is they’re figuring it out. They thought it was gonna be [Ron] DeSantis, but he hasn’t manifested.”
Trump is refusing to debate on Wednesday at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, though he is coming to the state to address a party convention and appear at events with supporters across Southern California. Not that he really needs to.
Now polling above 50 percent among Republicans in the state, Trump’s grip on California is so firm that the few rivals with a presence here have dispatched foot soldiers to more competitive turf like Iowa to try to slow his ascent before the race gets to Super Tuesday. While some donors retain faint hope of somehow derailing the ex-president, few honestly believe it can still happen.
Rather than serving as the catalyst for a would-be Trump-slayer like DeSantis, the state is far more likely to play host to a coronation for the MAGA king’s third presidential nomination. If Trump’s huge polling lead holds, he will sweep all of California’s 169 delegates on Super Tuesday, cementing his rein in the state that nurtured the rises of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
Ron DeSantis and others are taking a stand in Iowa. The most that they can hope for in California is that the race shifts somewhere else.
