Donald Trump wasn’t on my radar until I got a stringer call from a wire service, which asked me to drive to Beverly Hills and cover a press conference he was leading on illegal immigrants who commit crimes against American citizens. Ahead of his appearance at a secret society of Republicans in Hollywood, the now-disbanded Friends of Abe, Trump met with a Los Angeles-based family whose son was shot to death by an undocumented gang member, as well as other families — flown in from around the country — whose loved ones had been killed by undocumented immigrants.
On that sticky July day, we waited for Trump in a conference room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Less than a month prior, the billionaire had announced that he was running for president, shocking Americans with his pronouncement that Mexicans were criminals and rapists. He marched toward us with several other families in tow, a united front. If someone could measure the feeling of tension between us reporters and the people who had faced unimaginable losses in front of us with a thermometer, they would’ve seen that red liquid rise quickly. Trump and his guests berated members of the media for perpetuating “lies” of undocumented immigrants as hardworking contributors, while many of the reporters sniped back and challenged Trump on how he portrayed them as misleading the American people.
I came out of that press conference, honestly, a little dazed.
Since then, Donald Trump has referred to Megyn Kelly “with blood coming out of her wherever,” has said that he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue and still have support, and that he even wished violence on protesters at his rally. At Uproxx, I write a few posts a day about some other controversial thing he says or does. As of this March, I had long stopped expecting that he would do something so crazy that people would stop supporting him, and that he would topple from the frontrunner position for the Republican nomination. After all, he may have lost the Iowa Caucus, but went on to win the majority of caucuses and primaries after that.
Then on March 15, he lost Ohio to John Kasich, and the LA Times came out with an article about how the California Primary was now important for this reason:
Because Donald Trump lost Ohio’s primary on Tuesday night, ceding the state’s 66 delegates to its governor, John Kasich, the race to claim the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination seems unlikely to be settled before California votes on June 7.
Trump needs those 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination outright. Because he hasn’t been playing the delegate game that well, he’s unlikely to do that before June 7. Being that California has 172 delegates up for grabs, this finally puts the state into play, whereas in previous election years, everything would have already been decided by the time Californians vote.
Unfortunately, California’s Republican primary is closed to Democrats and independents. So what’s a liberal Californian who desperately wants Trump out to do? “I kept wishing there was something, anything, that I could do to help stop Trump, but with the closed Republican primary, I felt like there wasn’t anything I could do,” says Tara*, a Bay Area resident. “Then I realized I could switch to vote Republican in the primary and switch back for the general election.”
Before this, Tara was registered as a Democrat, but in the past she has also been registered as “no party preference,” the official designation for an independent voter in California (NOT to be confused with the American Independent Party). She’s a self-described “liberal voter,” who grew up in a Republican household, so she ordinarily has a lot of respect for conservatives. She explains:
I wouldn’t have been happy if, say, Romney had won the presidency, but I don’t think it would have been a global catastrophe for the U.S. But I do feel that would be the case with a Trump presidency. I wouldn’t want to be part of a country that would elect such a bigoted, ignorant, arrogant, belligerent person.
Tara is alright with either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee, and her district races will likely go liberal, as well. “I live in one of the most liberal precincts in one of the most liberal districts in the state,” she explains. “My vote as a Republican is far more likely to make a difference.”
After posting about her change in registration epiphany on Facebook, Tara’s friend Jen Maiser, who lives in Los Angeles, was inspired to switch from “no party preference” to Republican, as well. With her vote against Trump, she’s aiming for a contested Republican National Convention.
“There’s a chance that if enough people vote for a Republican who is not Donald Trump, then that will help the delegates at the convention, and maybe it will start a conversation at the convention that wasn’t able to start,” Maiser says. In other words, she hopes that the Republican party will have to negotiate at the convention, and therefore examine whether it really wants Trump as its nominee. “I just don’t like that the world is watching us promote a man who is racist and has very, very extreme ideas about things,” she says.
Richard Mehlinger, another Bay Area resident, is not as optimistic about a “hung convention,” suggesting that only an expert could predict what would happen among the wheeling and dealing such a thing might bring. “Who knows what will happen?” he shrugs. “It does, however, seem like the only way that stopping Trump is possible. I don’t think the other candidates can mount a majority at this point.”
Mehlinger thinks that Trump would not only be dangerous as president, but as the nominee, as well, and that he’s building a fascist movement around him that’s not “so easily put back in the bottle.” He puts it bluntly:
Trump is dangerous. People should vote against him. People should take every opportunity they can. If that means switching your registration to Republican to vote against him, they should do it.
All three are waiting to see whether Ted Cruz or John Kasich is more likely to cut into Trump’s delegate count, before deciding who to vote against him for.
It doesn’t seem like enough Californians will follow Mehlinger, Maiser and Tara’s examples, though. California political data analyst Paul Mitchell wrote in Capitol Weekly that while there has been a spike in independent and Democratic voters re-registering as Republican in March, it hasn’t been enough to make more than a one percent difference on the Republican primary.
However, the California primary is winner-take-all by congressional district. “Unless Trump is winning statewide by huge numbers, then Cruz or Kasich could target specific seats to flip them. Some are really small on the republican side,” says Mitchell. He says that Cruz could do well in heavily Latino districts, and that Kasich “should be targeting districts with high numbers of white affluent Republicans.”
There’s also the possibility that Trump will win the nomination, but lose the presidency. These three California voters aren’t willing to take that risk, though. Says Tara:
Ironically, I think it might probably be better for the Democrats if Trump did get the nomination, as more Republicans would cross party lines to vote for the Democrat, or simply stay home. But that’s not a gamble I’m willing to take. Nobody ever thought Trump would make it this far — who knows what could happen?
* Name has been changed to protect anonymity.