🍊 🇺🇸 OC Conservative Brief - 9.15.23

Good morning, happy Friday, and welcome to your end-of-week edition of the OC Conservative Brief, your run down of Orange County's local politics from a conservative perspective.

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This week, we have a potential truce in a high stakes, $100-million fight between Big Labor and the fast food industry, and a peek behind the scenes at the dynamic relationship between OC’s John Wayne Airport and airlines like Southwest. But first, a major skirmish in the 2024 Republican presidential primary is about to unfold right here in Orange County…

TRUMP VS DESANTIS DUEL IN ANAHEIM! Another rumble in the rivalry between President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis will be going down in Orange County later this month, as both presidential candidates are slated to speak to the California Republican Party’s fall convention in Anaheim … on the same day.

Per the schedule, Trump will be addressing attendees during a “Lunch Banquet” on the convention’s first day, Friday September 29th; DeSantis will be speaking to the “Dinner Banquet” just hours later.

While it’s unclear if either candidate will go after the other during their speeches, the more critical battle may be happening behind the scenes as operatives from both campaigns fight over the California GOP’s new delegate rules.

Earlier this summer, the California GOP quietly changed the rules on how it awards RNC Convention delegates to presidential primary candidates, with major implications for the state’s upcoming presidential primary in March.

• Elections Refresher: Presidential primary candidates win the national GOP party’s nomination after they win a majority of delegates from all the states; each state party holds a primary or a caucus to determine who wins how many of that state’s delegates, but not all states follow the same rules.

Before the changes, California awarded the vast majority of its delegates based on the winner of each of the state’s Congressional districts. In other words, a candidate could lose the state-wide vote but still win in certain districts and walk away with a chunk of delegates.

• …Why? California has 40 million people and expensive media markets. It takes a lot of time and money to win here if you aren’t a big front-runner. The system was designed to incentivize candidates to still compete in the state by allowing them to target specific districts, cities, and neighborhoods to win at least some delegates.
  

• Read Deeper: The LA Times wrote a primer earlier this year on why the Congressional district system was set up 25 years ago.
  

• But You Can Still Catch ‘Em All… In 2008, even though John McCain only defeated Mitt Romney by 8-points in the California GOP primary, McCain received nearly all of the delegates because he won almost every single Congressional district (McCain won Orange County by one percentage point that year).

That old system is in the trash, per the new rules set by the CA GOP this summer. Now, delegates will be allocated proportionally based on the state-wide vote, i.e. if you win 30% of the vote, you get 30% of the delegates. But there’s a catch. If any candidate wins over 50% of the vote - an outright majority - that candidate wins all of the delegates.

The change has major implications for 2024 and the campaigns haven’t been shy about acknowledging it:

• The new rules were supported by the Trump campaign. Given that the latest poll shows President Trump winning 55% of the California primary vote and DeSantis at just 16%, it’s not hard to see why. There’s a non-zero chance that Trump wins a majority in California and walks away with all the delegates. Trump’s political team has quietly been notching similar wins with other state parties for months.
  

• Meanwhile, the change prompted the DeSantis Super PAC Never Back Down to shutdown their door-knocking operations in California, arguing the new rules make “grassroots involvement impossible” and calling it a “Trump-inspired rigging.” .

Meanwhile, the state party says it didn’t make the changes to boost Trump but to make it more appealing for smaller candidates to compete here and win some delegates. If a candidate wins even just 10% of the vote, they can still walk away with 10% of the delegates (that is, assuming somebody doesn’t win over 50%).

Can the new rules still be unchanged? They can, with an amendment from the CA GOP rules committee and a majority vote from the state party’s delegates (no small feat). DeSantis’ team has every incentive to try to work the state party behind the scenes to reverse the rules…unless they want to potentially cede all of California’s 169 delegates, the largest prize in the primary calendar, to President Trump.

Yes, this may be an ugly look at how the sausage is made. But remember: at the end of the day, presidential nominations aren’t beauty contests. They’re won by winning the most delegates. 🤷‍♂️

As one election lawyer told the LA Times about Trump’s rivals on the delegate game: “They’ve been asleep at the switch.”

TERMINALLY POLITICAL? Planning on booking a Southwest flight out of John Wayne Airport soon? You may want to claim your seat. Southwest announced this month that it’s limiting how many passengers can book seats on its Orange County departures, and (for once) it’s not Southwest’s fault.

You may be familiar with (and thankful for) the time restrictions that John Wayne Airport (SNA), the third busiest hub in Southern California, places on arrivals and departures to limit noise. What people may not know, however, is that SNA also enforces a cap on how many passengers can fly out of the airport each year.

Airport authorities ensure that cap, which has been set at 11.8 million since 2021, isn’t exceeded by guesstimating how full any given flight will be and then determining how many flights each airline can be allocated to operate out of SNA each day.

But here’s the kicker: if airlines are filling more seats on flights than expected and thus threatening to exceed that cap, airport authorities will require them to cut back on their bookings. In other words, flights will depart SNA with intentionally empty seats (sorry, that empty row you had on your last flight may not have been because you’re lucky.)

This dynamic led authorities to tell the airlines this month that they need to begin “reducing capacity” on all of their SNA departures starting September 9 through December 21. Southwest, which is the largest carrier operating out of John Wayne and allocated with 44 daily departures this year, is the hardest hit, but the cuts apparently apply across the board.

This also explains why Southwest scrapped a popular SNA to Cabo San Lucas flight and other routes in 2019, saying “service cuts were needed because the airline has been allocated fewer seats by the airport.”

• It’s been happening for decades. Here’s a story from 1988 on how West Wings airline (remember them?) was ordered to ground half of its flights out of SNA after it got caught exceeding passenger quotas.

All of these limits stem from a landmark settlement agreement in 1985 between the county, the city of Newport Beach, the airport, and activists to contain SNA’s growth. Congress actually passed a law in 1990 which generally prohibits local airports from setting the kinds of restrictions that SNA now employs; but SNA’s restrictions were “grandfathered” in to that law and thus exist to this day.

• The OC Board of Supervisors is responsible for voting on whether and by how much to expand SNA’s flight capacity and passenger caps, which come up for renewal every few years.

This tension may not be political in the partisan sense, but it’s political nevertheless between the desires of the local community and the demands for growth from the airline, business, and tourism industries.

By the way, if you’re interested in political fights over airports, read up on the brewing battle in Congress over the proposed expansion of Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. Forget red and blue: if you’re a member of Congress and your preferred carrier has a direct flight into DC departing near you, you’re probably against it.

• The fight is blurring partisan and industry lines, putting Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) on the same team and pitting airlines like Delta, which has a small presence in Reagan, against American and United, which dominate flights in and out of Washington.

See? Even airports can be political if you look hard enough. In the meantime, good luck grabbing your seats out of John Wayne!

FOOD FIGHT CEASE FIRE? Big Labor and the fast food industry are on a major, high stakes, costly collision course in 2024 over a controversial ballot measure in California…or at least they were. A behind-the-scenes deal brokered this week between the industry and the unions has prompted both sides to call off that fight (for now).

At issue is a law known as AB 257, heavily-backed by California’s various labor organizations, which mandates a "council" made up of representatives from various parties set minimum wage and other regulatory standards for California's fast food industry.

The restaurant industry viewed such a powerful body, which they viewed would inevitably be in the pocket of Democrats and Big Labor, as such an existential threat that it generated enough signatures to put the law on the ballot in 2024 and pledged to spend up to $100 million to repeal it. Big Labor, in turn, geared up to organize and spend its own millions to keep one of their crowning legislative achievements intact.

The stakes were high:

• A humiliating loss by Big Labor would lead to the repeal of their law and potentially spook Democrats in Sacramento from acting on their demands in the future.
  

• Similarly, a game-changing loss by the fast food industry would embolden labor activists to go for the jugular again while wringing higher costs and burdensome regulations from the council around its neck.

Both sides seemed to recognize they were at the brink, which led to a last-minute deal negotiated this week that called off the fight. Key terms of the deal included a minimum wage increase to $20, down from the $22 the law called for, and agreement from the unions to back off of even more extreme bills that would jeopardize the food industry in California. The council’s power, while still intact, would be paired back under the deal.

So what really happened here? Neither party was on even footing with the other. The fast food industry would inevitably have been able to spend more money - potentially exponentially more - than labor organizations in the referendum fight. But labor was able to up the stakes on the food industry by introducing even more radical bills in Sacramento that gave them bargaining power at the negotiation table.

• One of these proposed bills would have made fast-food franchisors legally liable for labor violations committed by franchisees, which was so costly that it could have made the entire franchise business model inoperable in California.

In my opinion… as a pro-business conservative I’m not thrilled in this outcome. California is already notoriously hostile to industry, and we should be making it easier for businesses to operate here. Unions already have an outsized influence on lawmakers in Sacramento, as we saw play out here.

However, what the fast food industry craves most importantly is stability and predictability without any surprise curveballs from Sacramento. From their point of view, it’s a win…or at least the least-destructive outcome.

WAIT, THERE'S MORE...

🛢️ An OC federal judge approved a $95 million settlement plan this week over the 2021 oil leak off the coast of Huntington Beach with both the operator of the pipeline and the shipping vessels deemed responsible for rupturing it.

💰 A new poll this week found that 58% of California voters oppose the state paying reparations to descendants of enslaved Black Americans with just 28% in support, another blow to activists who are hoping to push the plan through next year.

🥑 Researchers at UC Riverside have invented a new type of avocado, the result of decades of research, that may soon be marketed to growers worldwide.

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Have a tip on a news item in Orange County conservatives should know about? Drop me a line at [email protected]