California's thin red line—so thin that in much of the state, it's barely discernable—crumbled a little more yesterday with the announcement from Orange County Republican Representative Ed Royce that he wouldn't seek re-election. Royce, who has served in Congress since 1992 without anyone really noticing, holds one of the four Orange County seats that Hillary Clinton carried last year, and had already drawn a passel of Democratic challengers.
Of the four Orange County Republicans in the Democrats' crosshairs (the other three are Darrell Issa, Mimi Walters, and Dana Rohrabacher), Royce represents by far the most racially diverse district, home to a notably large Vietnamese community. His ability to win re-election for so long despite the district's diminishing white slice of the electorate is partly due to the fact that Vietnamese refugees from communism—like virtually all refugees from communism—largely aligned themselves with Republican cold warriors (see: Miami, Cubans) at election time. As with Miami's Cubans, however, that alignment weakened a bit among the children of the refugees, and weakened a great deal among their grandchildren, most of whom are now of voting age.
The Orange County Four were already electorally endangered before any particulars of the recently enacted GOP tax bill were released. The new law's elimination of the ability to deduct from federal income taxes any sum greater than $10,000 on one's state taxes endangered those Republicans even more, as it promised to sock it to more than one-third of their voters, and in Rohrabacher's and Issa's districts, almost one-half. Issa and Rohrabacher had sufficient survival instinct to vote against the bill. Not so Walters and Royce.
Smelling victory, Democrats are restless. And now, Republicans are Royce-less.
