Scott Lucas is a writer in Oakland, California, and a contributor at San Francisco magazine.

“Help is on the way.” That’s the message Republican John Cox hoped to deliver to voters on a recently concluded 30-stop bus tour of California in the waning days of the 2018 election for governor. Trailing his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, by double digits in most polls , Cox took his bid directly to the voters, meeting with workers who make Sriracha hot sauce in Irwindale, attending Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Indio, touring a homeless shelter in San Diego, and pressing the flesh at a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Fremont and a car show in Stockton. In Chico, he buttonholed drivers at the Costco gas station, until security asked him to leave .

It was an unusual itinerary for a statewide candidate—bypassing many of the big cities where the bulk of the state’s voters live. That’s because, for Cox, as for many Republicans here, there is little return on going to places dominated by Democratic voters who loathe President Donald Trump and the party that empowers him. Cox, as a result, has taken to the periphery with his moderate, business-friendly brand of Republicanism, crafted to broaden his appeal to lower- and middle-class voters worried about the high cost of living in the state.


“It’s all about affordability,” Cox said at a campaign stop in Sacramento, offering himself as the solution to the state’s housing crisis and voicing support for a proposition to repeal a recent increase in the state’s tax on gas. “How can I live when I can’t find a house I can afford or an apartment that I can afford, or my gas is climbing to almost $4 a gallon, if not over it in some parts?”

It’s a message that very well could resonate with voters—even if the messenger likely will not. Call it the Cox paradox: A cerebral, quixotic, 63-year-old Illinois snowbird with a personal fortune and a political résumé that includes three losing bids in that state, as well as an abortive presidential bid in the 2008 race, is running a campaign that not even other Republicans are eager to support. Yet he finds himself at the top of the ticket for the GOP here.

Some of his political allies freely admit he would be more suited to run for another office in California first. “It’s an odd hobby,” Pat Brady, a Republican consultant and former GOP chair in Illinois, says of Cox’s repeated quests for office. The best he is likely to do is to spur conservative turnout in the half-dozen most competitive House districts. The worst he can do? Well, it’s hard to go lower than the 10 votes he won in the Iowa presidential caucus a decade ago. (Cox declined to be interviewed for this article.)

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Cox, to be fair, had an adequate showing in the June primary, placing 577,304 votes behind Newsom, but 840,094 ahead of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, and far ahead of the closest Republican opponent. In California, the top two candidates move on to the general election, regardless of party affiliation, leading nervous conservatives to fret that voters would shut the GOP out of the race entirely. By winning pluralities in the state’s interior, as well as Orange and San Diego counties, Cox avoided that ignominious fate.

Still, his chances seem slim in November’s general election in a state that’s become known as a bastion of the Trump resistance. If anything, Cox’s bid confirms a larger trend in California politics: how quickly and far the Republican Party has sunk here. It was some seven years ago that the last Republican to lead the state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, left office. The party’s gubernatorial candidate in each of the past two cycles—Meg Whitman, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, and Neel Kashkari, who oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program in the late Bush and early Obama administrations— each earned about 40 percent of the vote, a formidable showing. Now, a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll released this past week found that just 31 percent of likely voters support Cox, compared with 54 percent for Newsom. To most pundits, a Whitman or Kashkari would have been an improvement over Cox, whom Newsom, other than one debate on October 8, has studiously ignored. The reality is that running for statewide office in California just doesn’t appeal to all that many Republicans.

“B-list, I think, is a compliment,” Claremont McKenna College political science professor Jack Pitney, who studies California politics, says of Cox. (A lifelong Republican, Pitney left the party after Trump’s election.) “I’d go much further down the alphabet. Maybe G-list.”



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Cox has said he owes his early interest in politics to his mother and stepfather’s frustrations with corruption in Chicago, where he grew up. But it would be decades before he got into politics himself. An accountant and a lawyer, in 1981 he founded a law firm that focused on corporate law and tax planning, before starting a real estate firm in the 1990s and later hosting a conservative radio talk show on a low-wattage station, covering local and national politics. Along the way, he built a network of businesses that he describes today as a “ $200 million enterprise .”

It was in 2000 that Cox took his first leap into electoral politics. That year, he ran in the Republican primary for a House seat in Illinois, losing to Republican Mark Kirk, who went on to win the election. Two years later, Cox ran in Illinois’ Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, and lost again. Jim Oberweis, now a member of the Illinois state Senate, was one of Cox’s primary opponents in that race. Unlike other perennial candidates, who can vibrate to their own far-out frequencies, Cox never struck him as a lightweight or a crank. “He was a policy wonk, and a solid conservative with a good grasp of the issues,” Oberweis says. Cox’s fiscal conservatism was a constant then and now. Nevertheless, the two men “were both new to the scene” and both lost the Republican primary.

“[Cox] did terrible in the primary,” says Brady, the chairman of the Illinois state Republican Party at the time of the Senate race. “Not that he wasn’t a good guy, but he didn’t put a lot of money into it. He kind of ended up being a perennial candidate.”

John Cox at a May 2018 rally for his gubernatorial campaign. | Getty Images

Indeed, two years after his Senate bid, Cox ran again, but this time he downsized, vying to be the Cook County recorder of deeds, a position maintaining records like property deeds, against the longtime Democratic incumbent. Cox lost that race too. Then, despite his three previous losing bids in Illinois, he became the first Republican to declare his candidacy in the 2008 presidential election, formally entering the race in March 2006. In May 2007, the Weekly Standard dubbed him the “ sane fringe candidate .” All but ignored, Cox soon dropped out of the race—though he did receive those 10 votes in the Iowa caucuses.

Like many retired Midwesterners, Cox, a devout Roman Catholic and father of four, began to spend time in warmer climates, taking up full-time residency in Rancho Santa Fe, an affluent, unincorporated town in San Diego County, in 2011. He soon warmed to California’s progressive-era system of propositions and initiatives that allow voters to decide policy questions big and small. “I thought, ‘Gee, maybe some of my ideas about getting money out of politics and working against corruption could work in California, because you can do ballot initiatives and change the Constitution,’” he recently told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cox took a creative approach: In 2015, he proposed an initiative that would have required members of the state Legislature to wear patches with the logos of their top donors, similar to the advertisements worn by NASCAR drivers. The following year, he began a multiyear attempt to place an initiative on the ballot to raise the number of state legislators from 120 to 12,000—to “take our government back from the funders, the cronies and the corrupt,” as he later told the Los Angeles Times. The idea was widely panned. And none of these proposals received enough signatures to appear on the ballot.

Yet, two years later, when he announced his gubernatorial run, he proclaimed the legislative expansion a top priority. “I believe that’s our best hope for putting our state back on the road to financial accountability, to getting government off the backs of the small businesses that create jobs, and out of the pockets of those who today must often choose between buying groceries or filling their tank to get to work,” he said.



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Cox’s appeal in California’s more conservative areas makes sense. His politics match a certain kind of moderate Republican in the state perfectly: pro-business, socially moderate, skeptical of Trump and willing to entertain a few offbeat ideas. In his 2006 book, he portrayed himself as “ pro-life without exception, ” but he has said little about social issues during the campaign. During his debate with Newsom, Cox specifically sidestepped those kinds of hot-button issues, saying he is “not running to change [them] one iota.”

Cox has struggled to escape Trump’s gravity—and to figure out whether he should even try to.

Instead, he has cast himself as focused on the state’s high cost of living. To Cox, who developed apartments in Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois, the solution in California is more competition and less regulation. “Other states that have Democratic governors can build housing a lot faster, a lot less costly than California,” he said in the debate.

Cox has struggled to escape Trump’s gravity—and to figure out whether he should even try to. (Trump’s net approval rating in the state is negative 26 .) On May 28, Trump tweeted his endorsement of Cox , encouraging Californians to “vote for GOP Gubernatorial Candidate JOHN COX, a really good and highly competent man. He’ll Make California Great Again!” Cox responded that he was “proud to have @realDonaldTrump ’s support.”

But in July, Cox distanced himself from the president in an interview with a local television station in Chino. “President Trump isn’t on the ballot,” Cox said. “I’ve never met him. I’ve never talked to him. I didn’t even vote for him. I like what he’s done in many ways, cutting regulations and taxes.” In the debate with Newsom, Cox assiduously avoided mention of the president, except to say, “It wasn’t Donald Trump who made California the highest-tax state in the country. It was Gavin Newsom and the Democrats.”

Cox, who is mostly self-funded, did stumble in August, when he compared long wait times at the state Department of Motor Vehicles to the Holocaust. But in general, the campaign has reflected the man at the center: sober, well-reasoned and … likely going to fall short of its goal.

Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox shakes hands with Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic nominee, after a gubernatorial debate at the KQED studios in San Francisco on Oct. 8. | AP

If he loses, Cox will have plenty to point to besides his own candidacy. For the GOP, the numbers in California are daunting. A 2018 study by the Public Policy Institute of California , a nonpartisan think tank, found that 44 percent of the state’s voters were registered as Democrats, compared with 25 percent registered as Republicans. Of the state’s large block of voters who identify with neither of the two major parties, 47 percent lean to the Democratic Party, and only 28 percent to the Republican. Those numbers have been drifting leftward since the end of the Cold War. Today, California’s state Legislature, congressional delegation and statewide offices are dominated by Democrats. The key cleavage is more often between moderate and progressive members of the party, with Republicans all but a rounding error.

California’s Republican leaders had attempted to entice San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer—a popular moderate in the mold of Pete Wilson, who himself rose from San Diego mayor to governor—to run for governor this year. But Faulconer declined. “Faulconer would get 45, 46 percent of the vote,” Claremont McKenna’s Pitney says. That could be better than Cox does in November, but Pitney adds, “Closer doesn’t count. [Faulconer’s] calculation was ‘Why spend a year of my life, jeopardize the mayor’s office and still lose?’” (Faulconer was more circumspect, at least in his public comments, telling the Sacramento Bee , “My first commitment is to San Diego.”)

“I still believe that, at the top of the ticket, a hugely known or hugely self-financed Republican could still win, with the money and visibility to create his or her own brand,” says political scientist Thad Kousser of the University of California, San Diego. “Meg Whitman nearly did so, and Arnold Schwarzenegger succeeded at this perfectly. The problem for California Republicans is that their self-financed candidates in the past two governor’s races have been millionaires, not billionaires.”

Another part of the explanation is the continued nationalization of the parties’ identities. Even in California, local Republicans like House members Kevin McCarthy, Dana Rohrabacher and Devin Nunes have embraced Trump. “The national GOP has itself to blame for killing the California GOP. The brand, especially under President Trump, has simply become too toxic for the average California voter,” Kousser says. “Which is not dissimilar to the effect of the Democratic brand in many Southern or Mountain states.”

The Trump dance encapsulates the dilemma for Republican office-seekers in the nation’s most populous state. There are enough conservative voters in the primary to ensure that right-leaning candidates advance to the general, but not enough for those candidates to win in November.

Cox, at least, still seems determined to try. And if he loses—and the past is any indication—he might go on to run for a new office, anyway.