A new president usually lifts all boats in his party.

But Donald Trump lost California by a 2-1 margin, the worst loss for a major-party presidential nominee here since 1936. The Republican share of the state’s voters is 26 percent and shrinking, and the party faces a deep divide on how to reverse its fortunes.

Many say the party needs to soften its posture on undocumented immigrants and social issues to attract more Latino, Asian and young voters.

Others, particularly in the GOP’s traditional voter base, counter that Trump’s victory nationwide is proof that a stronger stance is called for.

At stake is the very relevance of the Republican Party in California.

“Logically, they cannot win elections the way they’re going,” said Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of CSU Los Angeles’ Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs. “But if they go a different direction, it’s going to create a big fight within the party.”

The dilemma reared its head Dec. 5, the first day of the state legislative session.

The 72 Democrats in the Assembly and Senate all voted for a resolution critical of President-elect Donald Trump’s various campaign proposals on immigration. Two Republicans supported it, voting with Democrats, and 19 abstained. Only 17 Republicans stood with the incoming GOP president and voted against it.

“The bill (said) a lot of good things about the contributions of immigrants,” said Sen. Janet Nguyen, R-Fountain Valley, a Vietnamese immigrant who abstained. “I’m a product of that. … My family was on welfare and I have held minimum-wage jobs. Not everybody who is on welfare is abusing the system.”

While she objected to the combative approach of Democrats, she supported many aspects of the resolution. Republicans, she said, should focus on common ground for all Californians.

“We need to be able to talk about health care and education, and continue to talk about jobs and the economy,” she said.

Nguyen, a former county supervisor and city council member, is one model for Republican success. While her working-class district has more Democratic voters than Republicans and more Latino voters than Vietnamese, she easily beat former Assemblyman Jose Solorio, a Latino Democrat, to claim her seat in 2014.

Nguyen supports a pathway to legal status for most of those in the country illegally and empathizes with families fearful of being broken up because of deportation.

Redlands’ John Berry, a California coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, is on the other side of the GOP divide. He wants undocumented immigrants deported.

“Republicans need to take tough stances on social issues and immigration,” he said. “Like so many Republicans, I’m very frustrated with the California Republican Party. They don’t stand up for anything.”

He said Tea Party activists knocked on 15,000 doors in his hometown on behalf of Trump.

“Our key issue was illegal immigration, and our people were well-received,” Berry said. He believes the issue can attract Latino and Asian citizens to the party, arguing that Trump did better with those groups than Mitt Romney did four years ago.

Exit polling by the National Election Pool, whose data are used by TV networks and The New York Times, found that 29 percent of both Latinos and Asians voted for Trump. Romney received 21 percent of the Latino vote and 18 percent of the Asian vote, according to the group.

“As they establish their roots in this country, they see how illegal immigrants are hurting the country,” he said, saying undocumented workers undercut wages, among other things.

But others dismiss that part of the National Election Pool’s exit polling, calling it an unreliable outlier in measuring minority voter sentiment. Sonenshein is among those who favor Latino Decisions’ bilingual polling of Latino voters, which showed 18 percent favored Trump nationwide.

A ground plan

Jim Brulte, chairman of the California Republican Party, is intensely aware of the need to connect better with the growing populations of Latinos (now 28 percent of the state’s voting-age citizens) and Asians (11 percent).

Sitting on a post-election panel last month, Brulte laid out the future demographics in stark terms: Of Californians who will reach voting age in the next decade, 52 percent are Latino and 11 percent are Asian. Just 16 percent of Latinos and 23 percent of Asians now register as Republican, he said.

“We didn’t get in trouble overnight,” he said at the event, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “It took 30 years. And we’re not going to be out of trouble” overnight.

California is not historically a Democratic stronghold. Since 1920, it’s voted for the Democratic presidential nominee 13 times and the Republican 12 times. It voted for the Republican every election from 1968 to 1988.

But it’s gone with the Democrat each year since. Every statewide elected official, including the governor and both U.S. senators, is a Democrat, and the state’s congressional delegation skews heavily Democratic, 39-14. Democrats also picked up four seats this election in the state Legislature, giving the party a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers.

“California is a state that wants to vote Democratic,” Brulte said at the event. “It’s going to be that way for a long time. It’s been trending that way for a long time. And now the Democrats get to own it. I’m fascinated by who they’re going to blame when the economy cycles down and the mythology that we have a balanced budget exposes itself.”

But he’s also not sitting idly on the sidelines.

“Our plan has been to rebuild from the ground up,” he said.

That means tilling the fields at the school board, city council and county supervisor level. While demographic changes have pushed Democrats to within 4 percentage points of Republicans among voters in the traditional GOP stronghold of Orange County, all five of the county supervisors are Republicans – as are the vast majority of city council members.

Republicans, who have a dedicated organization called Grow Elect to recruit and support Latino candidates, also boast that they now have two Latino Republicans on the school board in heavily Democratic Santa Ana.

Republicans also hold all five seats on the board of supervisors in San Diego County, where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.

Part of the GOP’s success on the local level has to do with the relative absence of partisan immigration and social issues. In that, lies a lesson.

“The challenge going forward is to find issues that the base and the rapidly growing new voter group agree on,” Brulte told the Register. He pointed specifically to charter schools as a winning issue for low-income areas and to GOP-favored initiatives to create jobs.

“The way you grow any organization is to focus on the issues that unite you and divide the other side,” he said.

“If we can ever figure out how to get it right, we will provide a road map for the country,” he added. “Because the country is looking a lot more like California.”

Transcendent candidates

But having a strategy and actually turning around the steady declines are two different things. That’s especially true with illegal immigration rooted as a central issue for much of the GOP’s traditional base and unlikely to be easily reconciled between the two Republican factions.

“For internal reasons, it’s going to be quite difficult for them to change in California,” Sonenshein said.

Immigration aside, the state’s voters gave plenty of other signals in November that they prefer left-leaning policies, approving ballot measures legalizing recreational marijuana use, increasing gun control and banning plastic bags.

But examples of what has worked for California Republicans come up repeatedly, and they are often stories of individuals like Nguyen who transcended political partisan labels by tapping directly into the gestalt of their communities. San Diego’s Kevin Faulconer and Fresno’s Ashley Swearengin, both Republican mayors of Democratic cities, are among others mentioned as doing the same.

“You spend all this time discussing what the party should do and then somebody shows up and runs with a message different than the party and they win,” Sonenshein said, citing both Trump and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as such renegades.

After Romney’s 2012 loss, the Republican Party produced a road map for the future that called for numerous changes, including an approach to immigration reform that would appeal more to Latinos and social policies that were more in tune with young voters.

Trump turned his back on many of those recommendations – as well as some more traditional GOP positions, including free trade – and created his own winning formula.

“You don’t create a candidate by talking about direction the party should go,” Sonenshein said. “The candidate shows up and defines themself.”

Contact the writer: mwisckol@ocregister.com