California is sending the country's largest delegation to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next week, with its leaders convinced the Golden State can deliver crucial wins for the party in November.
"Enthusiasm and excitement has built and now we're all here and we get to experience Milwaukee, we get to nominate President [Donald] Trump, and more than that, California gets to bring the most delegates of any single state in the nation," Jessica Millan Patterson , chairwoman of the California GOP, told the Washington Examiner on Friday.
Patterson and California's 166 delegates and three members will be among tens of thousands of party loyalists making the pilgrimage to Wisconsin to see Trump accept the party nomination in a four-day event beginning Monday.
Patterson, who was elected as the first Latina to lead the statewide organization in 2019, believes her state will be instrumental in helping Republicans secure the majority in the House . The California GOP is targeting nine seats in the general election, six in districts they are protecting. They are going on the offensive in three others.
"Following the primary election, we feel very good about the position that each one of our candidates and members are in," she said from Milwaukee. "We're really enthusiastic about where the candidates are, we are doing fantastic on the fundraising, voter contact is going great, and we couldn't ask for a better environment."
The uncertainty in the Democratic Party surrounding President Joe Biden's nomination has only added to the momentum.
"President Biden is quite the drag on the ticket," Patterson said. "We feel very, very good about a less popular Biden in the 2024 cycle in not only being able to protect every single one of our incumbents but going after three additional [House] seats."
Patterson has helped build a robust election integrity unit in California made up of lawyers, staff, and volunteers.
"We didn't start doing election integrity after the 2020 election cycle, we were in there deep in 2020," she said.
Once people started getting excited about election integrity following Trump's 2020 loss to Biden, the number of people who wanted to get involved in protecting the state's election system skyrocketed.
"We went from having 60% of all ballots being watched in 2020 to 93.5% of all ballots being watched by lawyers," she said. "We have an election integrity chair in all 58 counties. We have a lawyer assigned to every single one of the 58 counties. We've done hundreds of election integrity trainings. We have trained thousands of volunteers."
The number of Republican voters registering in California has also climbed.
Since October 2023, Republicans have picked up 160,000 new voters in the state. "We have gained Republican registration in every single congressional district, every single Assembly district, every single Senate district, and every single county in the state," she said.
The party has also helped people get jobs with their clerk's offices.
"We have people on the inside," Patterson said. "We are incredibly vigilant when it comes to election integrity."
In Milwaukee, all the hard work the party has done will pay off for delegates. The California GOP will be hosting events at the ultra-exclusive Wisconsin Club, the Grain Exchange, Harley-Davidson, as well as a couple of breweries known for their "beers, brats, and curds."
"We're really excited to give some of our delegates, who have never been here before, a great taste of Milwaukee and a great taste of Wisconsin," Patterson said.
One person not attending is Steve Garvey, the Republican candidate taking on Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) for the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein's open Senate seat.
"It's not a priority in this campaign," Garvey's campaign spokesman Matt Shupe told the Sacramento Bee.
Garvey also skipped the state Republican convention in May and is polling significantly behind Schiff, according to the latest poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.
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The nonpartisan organization has Schiff at 62% to Garvey's 37%.
It is unclear where Garvey will be.
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