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Key win gives Democrats first majority on Orange County Board of Supervisors since 1976 [1]

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Date: 2022-11-21

Things were less acrimonious in the all-Democratic race for the District 2, which is the first majority-Latino Board seat in county history and was open because Foley ran in the new District 5. Santa Ana Mayor Vicente Sarmiento leads Garden Grove Councilwoman Kim Bernice Nguyen 51.6-48.4 with most of the ballots counted; Sarmiento had the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Foley, and the county party, while Kim had the backing of prominent progressive Rep. Katie Porter, the sheriff deputies union, and GOP Supervisor Andrew Do. Do and fellow Republican, Don Wagner, both won four-year terms in 2020 and thus weren’t up this time.

Foley, who flipped a GOP-held seat in a 2021 special, ran for the new District 5 to succeed termed-out Republican Supervisor Lisa Bartlett, who lost the June top-two primary to challenger Democratic Rep. Mike Levin in the 49th Congressional District. This coastal seat, according to data from Dave's Redistricting App, backed Biden 52-46, but Foley only represented about 30% of the new district. She also very much looked like the underdog after she took just 42% of the vote in the June nonpartisan primary as Bates and two other Republicans grabbed the balance.

The Democrat, though, put together what she called “a coalition of unlikely allies,” including the well funded deputies union. The Orange County Register also says Foley’s supporters included “organizations representing the county’s deputy sheriffs and public defenders, representatives of business and environmental groups, and health care workers’ unions as well as hospital administrators.” It was enough to give her party control of the local government in a large and increasingly diverse county that never voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in all the time between FDR’s 1936 landslide and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 countywide win.

Republicans held a monopoly on the Board of Supervisors for much of this long period, though Democrats briefly enjoyed a resurgence during the Nixon era. The change began in 1968 when Robert Battin, whom a local historian would later say “had a much more liberal agenda than anything they had ever seen in Orange County,” became the first Democrat to hold a seat since the Great Depression.

Four years later, Battin’s party undertook what the Los Angeles Times characterizes as “a concerted effort to break a Republican monopoly on county politics.” It worked: While the Yorba Linda born Nixon carried the county 68-27 during his 49-state landslide, two more Democrats joined Battin to take a majority in a county already known as a national conservative stronghold.

However, the party was soon beset by a major scandal involving Democratic power player Louis Cella, a hospital developer who was ultimately convicted of tax evasion and Medicare fraud. Several other prominent local Democrats found themselves in hot water as well including Battin, who was found guilty of using his county staff on his failed 1974 run for lieutenant governor; Battin, who spent 30 days in prison, always affirmed his innocence and called the county district attorney the “chief soldier of the Orange County Republican Mafia.” Republicans retook their majority in 1976, and they wouldn’t relinquish it until 2022.

Democrats still maintained a presence on the Board for another 10 years, but the GOP gained all five seats in 1986. Democrats would win exactly one supervisor election over the following three decades when Lou Correa was elected in 2004, but he left just two years later after being elected to the state Senate. Correa tried to return in a 2015 special but lost to Do by 43 votes; Correa the following year won the state’s 46th Congressional District, which he still holds. Team Blue regained a spot in 2018 after Chaffee pulled off a tight win, and he’ll likely be the most powerful member of the new Democratic majority.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/21/2137692/-Key-win-gives-Democrats-first-majority-on-Orange-County-Board-of-Supervisors-nbsp-since-1976

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