[ElkGroveDan]

In 1994 we won 4 statewide offices, Treasurer, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Insurance Commissioner and Governor. Matt Fong who won Treasurer is hard to categorize, but is often labeled as a conservative, Attorney General Dan Lungren - conservative, Secretary of State Bill Jones - conservative, Ins Comm Quackenbush - liberal, Gov Pete Wilson - liberal, so that's 2-1/2 to 2-1/2. Conservatives also took control of the Assembly that year, but it took 12 months before we were able to put conservative Curt Pringle in as speaker, thanks to moderate Paul Horcher who decided to vote for Willie Brown. moderate Michael Huffington running for U.S. Senate lost that year as did conservative Tom McClintock running for controller.

If you look at 1992 when conservative Bruce Herschensohn and moderate John Seymour were running for the two US Senate seats that were open you will notice that Herschensohn came within a whisker of beating Boxer, thanks to a last-minute dirty trick, but Seymour lost by a huge margin on the same ballot with the same group of voters.

If I had the time I could go on and on about 98, 2000, 2002, and how moderate nominees get beaten really badly and conservative's lose by small margins. In 2002 the party establishment threw about amillion dollars at the end to really liberal Republican Gary Mendoza running for Insurance Commissioner, who lost substantially. Everyone flipped the bird at McClintock who came within a fraction of a percent of winning.

[finnman69]

Exactly, you have to go back to 1994 for 2nd tier political offices for a statewide conservative win and even further back for the big offices like Senator and Governor.

[Tamzee]

Thanks for the link to smoking gun, but I'm looking for his press conference transcript :-)

how moderate nominees get beaten really badly and conservative's lose by small margins

Thanks for posting this, it really proves something the supposedly-misguided Arnold supporters have been pointing out. Moderates get beaten badly and conservatives only lose by small margins? This can only be happening if these masses of "pure" conservatives are withholding votes from any moderate Republicans. A political party is a coalition... if one portion refuses to work with the rest, you have only yourselves to blame for the failure of the entire effort.

Imagine how less damaged California would be if socialism hadn't had an almost entirely free reign for the last decade. Imagine how much easier it would be to sell "pure" conservative ideals RIGHT NOW to liberal voters who had felt comfortable voting for moderate Republicans in the last few elections. McClintock would probably have won last year...