You are free to challenge what you want. My experience in the GOP here in California is different.
I was on the CA-GOP Board and the only conservative - and only life-time GOP. All the others were “ex-dem’s” that switched as the conservative community we lived voted right leaning. Each candidate they supported was a union school teacher that talked a good game but once elected headed left.
Tom McClintock was a good friend and each election was difficult as the local GOP supported other “less conservative” candidates.
That’s the difference. You’re talking about California, while I’m thinking of the South. In the South, there are still a lot of folks - especially older, especially in rural area and smallish cities - who really are Democrats because they’re great, great, great granddaddy was a Democrat who voted (and fought) against Lincoln. That mindset really does permeate a lot of the South even to this day. That’s why Southerners will vote for Republicans, yet the majority of voters are registered Democrats. In 2004, our county GOP had a whole bank of telephones dedicated solely to phoning (largely receptive) registered Democrats to encourage them to vote Republican.
Much, but not all, of the nationally-observed switching in 1994 was by Southern Democrats becoming Republicans - and most of them really were conservatives who continued to vote like it. In fact, the only disappointing party-switcher (let me qualify with “that I can think of at the moment”) was Ben Campbell, who ended up being a RINO - but he was from Colorado.
For this reason, and given the fact that Griffith appears to have a solidly conservative voting record in the one year that he’s been in the House, I don’t see any reason to suspect that he’s some sort of super-secret deep cover agent reporting directly to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.