Los Angeles: Nearly 1 Million Voters Have No Republicans Down-ticket

The Los Angeles Times reports that some 818,000 voters in Los Angeles County will not have a single Republican candidate to vote for, outside the presidential race featuring Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

Thanks to the state’s “top two” or “jungle” primary, under which the top two vote winners in the primary advance to the general election regardless of party, there are many parts of Los Angeles where not a single Republican qualified for the general election for federal, state, or local offices.

The “dead zones” include downtown Los Angeles and eastern portions of the San Fernando Valley. As the Times explains:

For the first time in a statewide contest, voters have two Democrats only to choose between in the open U.S. Senate contest between Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez.

But for those 818,000 voters in parts of Los Angeles County, such as the San Fernando Valley and Central Los Angeles, the dearth of GOP options stretches much further down the ballot, according to an analysis of voter registration conducted for The Times by Political Data Inc.

For the most part the local Republican parties have given up on this territory, focusing instead on defending seats in the Antelope Valley and the Palos Verdes Peninsula along the Pacific Coast, where Republicans Tom Lackey and David Hadley picked up two Assembly seats from Democrats in 2014.

…

That means the party pretty much ignores parts of the San Fernando Valley such as Sylmar, Pacoima and Van Nuys.

A few of the races feature independent candidates, and even write-in candidates from the Libertarian Party.

However, 13 years after California voters voted to recall a Democratic governor and replace him with a Republican, the GOP is nonexistent in parts of the state.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.