A GOP stronghold goes wobbly

It’s a sign of the GOP times: Republicans in California’s Orange County, once a conservative citadel, are worried about the future of the party.

From a Los Angeles Times report:

Orange County was once an instant synonym for Republican power, and the GOP's dominance looked impregnable. Now, battered by the recent election results and dismayed by the slow, steady decline in party registration, Republicans here are struggling to craft a new strategy. The percentage of registered Republicans has eroded — it now stands at 41% — and the party has long since lost control of the political districts that envelop the county seat of Santa Ana, a Latino-dominated city of 330,000, and surrounding communities in the county's core.

Orange County is no ordinary county. It holds a storied place in Republican lore, a locale Ronald Reagan once described as where “good Republicans go to die.”

In the 1960s, when its explosive growth and exuberant conservatism led the East Coast media to regularly parachute correspondents in to explain the suburban behemoth to a curious nation, a local politician joked that he joined the John Birch Society “to get the middle of the road vote in Orange County.”

In the 1980s, the local GOP had good reason to boast that it was “the most Republican county in the nation” — Reagan carried the county by 429,000 votes in his reelection bid.

Now, however, the OC continues to slip through the party’s grasp, another once-mighty GOP machine laid low by demography. Mitt Romney won 53 percent here, a far cry from Reagan’s 75 percent in 1984, or even George H.W. Bush’s 68 percent in 1988.

A new approach on immigration would help stop the erosion, GOP county chair Scott Baugh told the L.A. Times.