This is the first election cycle where no Republican is running for an office in the city of San Diego. All the candidates for mayor, city attorney and City Council are either Democrats or nonpartisan.
Just four years ago, several members of the City Council and mayor were Republicans. Now? None.
San Diego used to be more conservative than other cities in California. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan loved it. Reagan’s last campaign rally of his political career was at Fashion Valley in November 1984. He called San Diego "my good luck city."
What happened? Can Republicans ever come back?
San Diego’s local races are technically nonpartisan. But parties can help candidates raise money and send mailers about their endorsed candidates.
Republicans really started to lose traction about 16 years ago when Barack Obama was elected president. Then Donald Trump won. And in San Diego, he was not popular.
During that time, Democrats learned all they had to do was tie a local candidate to Trump and they could doom the candidate.
Take City Councilmember Lorie Zapf. Zapf was running for reelection in a coastal district in 2018, two years after Trump won the presidency. Incumbents like her almost always won re-election.
But Democrats and labor groups inundated voters with messages connecting her to Trump. And she lost by 15 points.
What's happening now
This year, we’re watching a new test. Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, one of the last Republicans in city politics, is running for county supervisor. He hopes to oust an incumbent, Democrat Terra Lawson-Remer.
And now Lawson-Remer is doing the same thing. She put up a billboard in Ocean Beach that says "Trump Republican Kevin Faulconer."
Why it matters
If Faulconer wins, the Republicans have a chance to regain the majority on the County Board of Supervisors, which they had for many decades until about four years ago.
Meanwhile, the split has shifted. Many business groups have shifted focus and support more conservative Democrats. Will they continue to do that, will the Democrats just fight among themselves, or will the Republican Party rebuild here?
We asked Victor Lopez, the executive director of The Lincoln Club, what local Republicans should do.
"What needs to happen if Republicans want to win elections in any race, not just in the city of San Diego, everywhere else, you have to have infrastructure, and you have to have community name ID, and you have to be able to have issues and representations that are best aligned with the district that you're running for, Democrat or Republican," he said. "If you don't have infrastructure, if you don't have a plan, if you don't have good community backing, you're going to have a really tough time getting elected."
The first thing to look for is that county supervisor race. If Faulconer the Republican wins, maybe former President Trump no longer is holding local candidates back.
But they’ve got a long way to go before Republicans refer to San Diego as their lucky city ever again.
