Last week the California Republican Party sent one of its own cease-and-desist letters, accusing Assemblyman Carl DeMaio of running “a coordinated, brazen and unlawful campaign to deceive California voters.” The party’s own logo, its own voters, its own brand — appropriated by a man who has spent two decades discovering that outrage is easier to monetize than it is to govern with.
San Diegans should not be surprised. We’ve watched this act longer than anyone.
Begin with the product DeMaio is best known for: Proposition B, the 2012 measure he authored to strip defined-benefit pensions from new city workers. He sold it as fiscal courage. What it actually did was target the retirement security of the police officers and firefighters who run toward danger when the rest run away — workers who, unlike most Americans, are excluded from Social Security, meaning the pension is their safety net.
As a City Councilman, DeMaio spent his tenure trying to slash first-responder pay and benefits. The resentment was so deep that, 14 years later, public-safety unions crossed party lines to fund his Republican primary opponent.
And here is the part DeMaio doesn’t put in his fundraising emails: Proposition B was unlawful. The state Supreme Court ruled it was improperly placed on the ballot, the state ordered it rescinded, and a court ordered San Diego to compensate roughly 4,000 employees anyway. The “reform” failed in court — but by then DeMaio had already moved on, brand intact, to the next outrage.
That is the pattern, and it is not Democrats describing it. It is Republicans.
Reform California, DeMaio’s political vehicle, has been called by his own former mayoral strategist “a promote-Carl organization” — money that “goes to Carl’s priorities, not what’s good for Californians.” A veteran Republican election lawyer documented a six-year cycle: raise money on a hot cause, leave much of it unspent, pocket the surplus, repeat.
After the failed 2018 gas-tax repeal, the group ended the year with $405,000 in the bank. Organizers of the Newsom recall said DeMaio routed signatures to his own group’s address — roughly 700 of them — and never delivered them, while collecting credit and donations. A volunteer who did the actual work told him to his face: “You did nothing. Stop taking credit for it.”
He didn’t stop. DeMaio’s campaign has faced formal complaints over a reported $260,000 television ad buy it never disclosed. The machine raises millions from small-dollar conservative donors who believe they are funding a movement. They are funding a man.
Which brings us to the wreckage. In March, San Diego County Republicans failed to endorse a single candidate — for the first time in memory. They blamed DeMaio, who had ousted the county party chair for refusing to bend the knee to his 2024 campaign and is accused of packing precinct committees with recipients of his group’s money.
The outgoing Republican Senate leader warned that this division “only fuels the sweeping advance of Democrat rule in San Diego.” His own party’s general counsel now says he could not have violated the state’s truth-in-endorsements law more squarely “if you had set out to draft an example of prohibited conduct.”
I am a Democrat, but this is not a partisan column. It is an accountability column. When elected officials and party leaders stay silent in the face of conduct they know is deceptive, that silence becomes permission.
Carl DeMaio has lost a race for mayor and two races for Congress. The one thing he has never lost is the ability to sell San Diegans something — and to make sure he profits whether or not it works.
The Republican Party finally said so out loud. The rest of us have known for years.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service.
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