Mysteries of the Central Committee Explained

by Dale Francisco

There’s an article on San Diego public radio station KPBS’s website plaintively titled “Primary Election 2024: What is the Central Committee and why can’t I find any information about it?”

Santa Barbara Republican voters might ask the same question.

Party central committees are a special form of political action committee (PAC). What differentiates them from other PACs is that (1) they are allowed larger individual contributions and can make unlimited donations to statewide candidates for office, and (2) the committee members are, theoretically, elected every four years during the presidential primary.

I’ll get to why that theory doesn’t always work out in practice.

There’s a party central committee for every formally recognized political party in the state. Because of their special status regarding contributions and expenditures, they are often the most visible face of a party in each county, and may be pivotal in registering and motivating voters, developing and recruiting candidates, and supporting candidates both financially and strategically at election time.

Challengers This Year

Central Committee seats are apportioned by population. In our relatively low-population county, there are 22 members on the Central Committee. Each county supervisorial district is represented by a number of committee members proportional to the number of Republican voters who cast ballots in that district in the previous gubernatorial election.

Every four years there may be seats up for election to the little-known Santa Barbara County Republican Central Committee (I’ll abbreviate it SBCRCC—it’s “County Committee” on your ballot). But if there are no challengers to the incumbents, there’s no election.

That’s usually what happens.

This year, very unusually, there are challengers in three of the five supervisorial districts: the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.  Up for grabs are four seats in the 1st supervisorial district, four seats in the 2nd, and five seats in the 3rd.

I want to explain why this election is important, why it matters who you vote for, and what this election might mean for the future of the Republican Party in Santa Barbara County.

Republican Candidates Rise and Disappear

If you’re a registered Republican voter in southern Santa Barbara County, you’re inured to seeing Republican candidates for elective office come out of nowhere and quickly go down to defeat, never to be heard from again. With a few honorable exceptions, this has been the way of Republican campaigns here for years.

I had never heard of the SBCRCC when, as a political neophyte, I first ran for Santa Barbara City Council in 2007. Apparently, the committee hadn’t heard of me either, though I was the only Republican in the race. I barely heard from them during my run for re-election in 2011, though that wasn’t a problem, for by then I knew more than did most committee members about running a political campaign. Then as now, committee members were enthusiastic about politics, but most had never worked on actual campaigns. With very little fundraising and scant electoral expertise, the committee was far from playing a leading or even a supporting role in local politics.

Members Regularly Back Themselves

One could argue in defense of the longtime core leadership team—Chairman Bobbi McGinnis, Assistant Treasurer Julie Bischoff, and senior political activist Jim Worthen—that the Republican party faces a chicken-and-egg problem. Because the voter registration in south county is so lopsidedly against Republicans, because Republican fundraising is dwarfed by the money that flows into the Democratic Party via a corrupt bargain with the public employee unions, and because college-age political recruits attend leftist dominated SBCC and UCSB, forging a solid Republican Party organization is a daunting task.

But even if that could excuse the committee’s failings over the years, it can’t excuse a blatant financial conflict of interest.

If you’re a registered Republican, you’ve probably received in the mail a “Santa Barbara County Republican Party Official Voter Guide.” Perhaps you assumed that there was some special knowledge, insight, and strategy behind the recommendations in that guide. Don’t count on it. Many of the choices simply identify whichever sacrificial victim has an “R” after his or her name.

But astonishingly, what the leadership team has done with that slate mailer is devote half of the candidacy advocacy space to promoting their recommendations for Central Committee candidates – which of course include themselves, and pointedly excludes the people challenging them.

Going back to that article at KPBS, I’ll quote from San Diego Democratic committee chairman Becca Taylor, who says that “even though it's the No. 1 question we've gotten – 'Who to support?' [for Central Committee] –, it's a conflict of interest if we were to tell voters [who to vote for]."

No kidding.

Paula Whitsell, chairman of the San Diego Republican committee, a committee that has a statewide reputation for being one of the best run and most successful, notes that “[e]very person that's running on the Central Committee, they're in charge of running their own campaign. So, I know people are doing postcards, they're doing social media, they're going to different groups and explaining, ‘I'm running for Central Committee, and this is why you should vote for me.’"

That’s as it should be.

Reasons for Optimism

McGinnis, Bischoff, and Worthen have done lots of good for the party over the years. But when, as a leader, you come to believe that your personal interest is identical to the organization’s interest, maybe you’ve been on the job too long.

There are newcomers who’ve already made important contributions to the party. One of them, Colleen Estrada, completely redesigned the party’s website, that hadn’t been updated in years. Another, Cheryl Trosky, was a member of the Citizens Redistricting Commission that redrew the boundaries of the supervisorial districts; she has been a strong advocate of precinct-by-precinct organizing. The newcomers also include Santa Barbara native Mary Hudson,  an experienced newscaster in her own right and the founder of two charismatic churches. She also happens to be the mother of pop music icon Katy Perry. These and others, such as local education activists Christy Lozano and James Fenkner, say they’re ready to do the hard work of rebuilding the party. They have a website where you can find out more about them and make up your own mind.

Something needs to change if our moribund Republican Party is ever to have an influence in south county.

This election may be the long-hoped-for opportunity for that change to begin.