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California has not elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006, but Lanhee Chen thinks this might be the year that one of the countrys bluest states shows a hint of red.

Chen, 43, is seeking to become controller, effectively the states chief financial officer. Hes running to succeed the incumbent, Betty Yee, a Democrat who is term limited.

The first round of voting in Californias all-parties primary system is in June, and the general election, when Chen and a Democrat would square off, is in November. The state has not elected a Republican controller since the 1970s.

While this is his first run for public office, Chen, a Stanford University professor, is no stranger to the political fray. He was the policy director for Mitt Romneys 2012 presidential bid and worked in the administration of President George W. Bush.

In an interview, he discussed why he is running, why he believes he could win and his partys two most recent presidential standard bearers. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Why run for controller instead of going big and running for governor, or starting local at the school board or City Council?

Its a tremendously valuable platform for somebody whos looking to bring change in terms of how the state runs its business the ability to audit any agency, you really can get in there and fix things. And Im about diagnosing the problems our state faces. And for me, the problems the state faces are primarily fiscal in nature. So this office to me is a great fit for the things I want to do and how I think we can fix the state, even if its not the most glamorous office.

What are the biggest challenges California is facing?

Cost of living is a big one no one can afford a house. And if they can, theyre saving up for decades to do it. The homelessness problem, which is related to quality of life and the general environment, has gotten worse in even the time Ive lived out there since coming home in 2013. Public safety concerns are very real, and those have become much more public with the smash-and-grab robberies over the summer.

California Republicans have historically won at moments of disorder. But can you still count on backlash politics in these polarized times, when people tend to stick with their party no matter the issue?

This has been something thats been building for a long time. If you had asked me the same question two or four years ago, the answer may have been no. I think now the situation has become so urgent. Look at how many recall elections were having, whether for governor or for school board and district attorney in San Francisco. The level of reaction to what were seeing goes beyond party, it goes beyond ideology it goes to the experiences people have. I think that anger, that frustration, is palpable. I hear it from Democrats, I hear it from independents and from Republicans. So that leads me to believe, yeah, this can transcend the partisan polarization weve seen.

How do you diagnose your partys problems in California? Why cant Republicans even compete statewide?

Party leadership in California has generally been focused on winning targeted state legislative and congressional races. You cant fault them for that rationale, but the problem is then you have no statewide voter contact infrastructure. Thats No. 1.

No. 2: There havent been candidates capable of putting together and articulating the kind of message and vision thats appealing broadly to Californians.

Lets say youre campaigning at a farmers market in, say, Santa Barbara or Monterey, and a voter approaches you and seems to like you. But theyre apprehensive about voting for the Trump Party. What do you tell them?

I think its really important to understand where Im coming from and why I think its important to have somebody whos got a different partisan alignment from the rest of people in state government. So start with the notion that checks and balances are important. But then I do move to talk about the Republican Party that I know and the kind of Republican Party I believe we can have again, centered around ideas like responsibility and accountability. At some point were going to have to move past individual personalities, and I dont know when that point will be.

So why not just run as an independent?

On the practical side, if youre not worth several billions of dollars, youre not going to be able to build that base thats required. But theres a more important point. I think authenticity counts for a lot in politics, and Ive been a Republican my whole life. Ive never been registered as anything else, and I think its important to be yourself.

As liberal as it is, California has millions of dedicated Trump supporters. How do you balance appealing to the political middle without alienating MAGA folks?

What Gov. Glenn Youngkin did successfully in Virginia: You focus on state issues and address the problems that are right before us. If you dont focus on those, you risk not only not doing the job, but talking about things that arent that relevant to the day-to-day lives of people in your state.

Lets say you get two phone calls: The first is from Mitt Romney, and the second is from Donald Trump. Both want to come to California to campaign for you. What do you tell them?

I would just say that Im doing my own thing. Now I have to say this: Obviously I have great respect and admiration for Mitt Romney. There are very few things I wouldnt do for him.

Jonathan Martin is a national political correspondent for The New York Times.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

CENTRAL CALIFORNIA

Weather warning: Snow is expected through Wednesday in high elevation areas across large swaths of Central California, including Yosemite Valley and the Grapevine.

Hiking deaths: The phone records from a family who died while hiking near the Merced River last summer reveal texts and calls pleading for help, The Associated Press reports.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

A neighborhood nuisance: A massive black bear known as Hank the Tank has broken into at least 28 homes in search of food in South Lake Tahoe.

Missing women: The Yurok Tribe issued an emergency declaration after a spate of Indigenous women have been killed or gone missing along the Northern California Coast, The Associated Press reports.

$1.8 million homes in California, Maine and New Mexico.

Todays travel tip comes from Al Evers, who recommends Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park in the Bay Area:

A hidden redwood forest lies off Redwood Road just a few miles over the ridge from downtown Oakland. The forests peaceful groves give little evidence of the parks bustling past in the mid-1800s the area was the scene of extensive logging to supply building materials for the San Francisco Bay Area. The logging era has long since passed, and a stately forest of 150-foot coast redwoods has replaced those cut down.

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. Well be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

A new book on the history of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley.

This week, a waterfall in Yosemite National Park is expected to transform for a few minutes at sunset into a ribbon of bright, fiery orange.

With sufficient rainfall and clear skies, Horsetail Falls which cascades down the east side of El Capitan can become a firefall for a few weeks each year in late February.

The angle of the light during sunset can make the stream of water glow and look like its on fire, a park spokeswoman said.

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Why Republican Lanhee Chen Thinks He Can Win in California - The New York Times

Speaker of the Oklahoma House, Rep. Charles McCall, R-Atoka, speaks on the House floor, Tuesday, ... [+] Jan. 5, 2021, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

Democratic opposition to school choice is well known. It is stated right in the partys platform, Democrats oppose private school vouchers and other policies that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system. But in several deep red states this spring, it is Republicans blocking school choice, not Democrats.

In Oklahoma, Governor Kevin Stitt led the legislative portion of his state of the state address by saying, We know education is not one-size-fits-all, and I pledge to support any legislation that gives parents more school choice, because in Oklahoma, we need to fund students, not systems! SB 1647, mentioned by the governor by name in his speech, would create a universal education savings account program. It has a very broad set of eligible expenses for students participating in the program, crucially including transportation costs to help students access the learning opportunities that their funds make available.

While the Senate Pro Tempore Greg Treat is championing the program, Oklahoma Speaker of the House Charles McCall stated that he did not even plan to give the bill a hearing. Note, he is not signaling that he would not whip votes for it or that he would vote against it. He doesnt even want to give the bill a hearing. Even though the Oklahoma house has 82 Republicans and only 19 Democrats, the bill appears to be on life support.

In Utah, HB 331 has been introduced to create the Hope Scholarship Program. It would create an education savings account program for eligible students. It offers an interesting wrinkle, though. While all students are eligible to participate, funding varies based parental income. For students from families earning less than 200% of the federal poverty line, their education savings account will get twice their weighted state per pupil funding. For those between 200% and 370%, they will get 1.5 times the per pupil amount. Those from families earning between 370% and 555% will get the standard per pupil funding, and those from families making more than 555% of the federal poverty line will get 75%.

In a state with a house comprised of 58 Republicans and 17 Democrats, a senate with 23 Republicans and 6 Democrats, and Republicans occupying both the governorship and the lieutenant governorship, this would appear to be a slam dunk. It is not. The governor, Spencer Cox, told reporters that he would veto the bill. His logic was confusing. After saying he was all in on vouchers, he said that Utah had a long way to go before we get there. Does all in mean something else in Utah?

There is a variation on the theme in Georgia. Speaker of the House David Ralston has declared dead a promising school choice proposal after being purportedly scandalized by the political content of a mailer backers of the bill circulated in several of his caucus constituencies. But politically fiery mailers are the norm, not the exception, and if that is all it takes to scupper a bill, it is hard to believe the speaker was really ever on board in the first place. Seems like convenient cover for what he already wanted to do.

The Republican party platform directly states, We especially support the innovative financingmechanisms that make options available to all children: education savings accounts(ESAs), vouchers, and tuition tax credits. In fact, it is in a section titled Choice in Education. The Oklahoma, Utah, and Georgia platforms unequivocally support for school choice, as well.

It is popular to look to Democratic politicians and their major funders like teacher and administrator unions and blame them for school choice bills stalling. In many cases, that is true. In more purple states where margins are thin, or in blue states where Democrats decide what bills become laws, school choice faces major obstacles. Now, it shouldnt, because according to our polling 72% of Democrats support education savings accounts, 68% support charter schools, and 65% support vouchers, but that is the way the cookie crumbles.

Oklahoma and Utah are not blue. They arent purple. They are deep red. And Georgia, while perhaps trending purple, still has a Republican advantage of 103 to 76 in the house and 34 to 22 in the senate. In states with such margins, there are only members of one party that can stop school choice. The Republican Party. The party of which, according to our polling, 65% of members support education savings accounts, 70% support charter schools, and 67% support vouchers. The party that has codified support for school choice in its platforms. The party where a minority viewpoint, at odds with its stated goals and the preferences of its membership, has been able to take hold.

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Will It Be Republicans Who Stop School Choice In 2022? - Forbes

Here we go again. Another Republican pretending to be a badass as they brandish a rifle in an anti-Democrat video.

This week, it's JR Majewski, an Ohio Republican candidate for Congress who attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally. In the video, he shows images of AOC, Ilhan Omar, Colin Kaepernick, and President Joe Biden, and then walks toward the camera with a rifle as he says he will "do whatever it takes to return this country back to its former glory." And then he cocks his gun.

Other videos threatening Democrats with guns include those by Michael Flynn, Lauren Boebert, and Arizona Senate candidate Jim Lamon and if you count swords, we can add Paul Gosar's bizarre video to the list, in which he fatally slashes a titan with AOC's head attached.

The theme might seem old and unimaginative at this point, but don't be fooled it's the repeated signaling they are going for.

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Here's yet another gun-toting Republican in an anti-Democrat ad who "will do whatever it takes" - Boing Boing

Over the past few weeks, President Joe Biden has repeatedly emphasized his friendship with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. At the National Prayer Breakfast in early February, for instance, he praised McConnell as a man of your word. And youre a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.

Bidens publicly professed affinity is weirdly at odds with the political situation. Going back to the Obama era, McConnell has led the Republican Party in a strategy of near-total obstruction which he has pursued with ruthless cynicism. It is true that he has, at times, signaled distance to Donald Trump and condemned the January 6 insurrection. But McConnell is also sabotaging any effort to counter the Republican partys ongoing authoritarian assault on the political system.

The distinct asymmetry in the way the two sides treat each other extends well beyond Biden and McConnell. Republicans immediately derided Bidens pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court while Democratic leaders are hoping for bipartisan support; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists the nation needs a strong Republican party meanwhile radicals like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who fantasize about committing acts of violence against Democrats, are embraced by fellow Republicans, proving they are not just a extremist fringe that has hijacked the Party, as Pelosi suggested. And when Texas senator Ted Cruz recently intimated that Republicans would impeach Biden if they were to retake the House whether its justified or not, the White House responded by calling on Cruz to work with us on getting something done.

Republicans could not be clearer about the fact that they consider Democratic governance fundamentally illegitimate, yet some establishment Democrats act as if politics as usual is still an option and a return to normalcy imminent.

There is certainly an element of political strategy in all of this. Democrats are eager to present themselves as a force of moderation and unity. But Bidens longing for understanding across party lines seems sincere. He has been reluctant to make the fight against the Republican partys assault on democracy the center piece of his agenda; Democratic leadership has proved mostly unwilling to focus the publics attention on the Republican partys authoritarian turn.

One important explanatory factor is that many Democratic leaders are old. They came up in a very different political environment, when there was indeed a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in Congress. There is no reason to be nostalgic about this the politics of bipartisan consensus more often than not stifled racial and social progress. But there was certainly an established norm of intra-party cooperation until quite recently. When California senator Dianne Feinstein hugged South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham at the end of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings in 2020, it was a bizarre throwback to those days of amity across party lines in the midst of a naked Republican power grab.

Beyond institutional tradition and personal familiarity, this inability to grapple in earnest with the post-Obama reality in which Democratic politicians are almost universally considered members of an Un-American faction by most Republicans has deeper ideological roots. The way some establishment Democrats have acted suggests they feel a kinship with their Republican opponents grounded in a worldview of white elite centrism. Their perspective on the prospect of a white reactionary regime is influenced by the fact that, consciously or not, they understand that their elite status wouldnt necessarily be affected all that much. The Republican dogma that the world works best if its run by prosperous white folks has a certain appeal to wealthy white elites, regardless of party.

From that vantage point, it is rational to believe that the bigger immediate threat is coming from the Left: an agenda seeking to transform America from a restricted, white mens democracy that largely preserved existing hierarchies to a functioning multiracial, pluralistic, social democracy is indeed a losing proposition for people who have traditionally been at the top. When Biden insists that Im not Bernie Sanders. Im not a socialist, and instead emphasizes his friendship with Mitch McConnell, he offers more than strategic rhetoric. Many establishment Democrats seem to believe that it is high time to push back against the radical forces of leftism and wokeism.

The constant attempts to normalize a radicalizing Republican Party also have a lot to do with two foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary: the myth of American exceptionalism and the myth of white innocence. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called liberal consensus of the postwar era, but much of the countrys Democratic elite still subscribes to an exceptionalist understanding that America is fundamentally good and the US inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be. This often goes hand in hand with a mythical tale of Americas past, describing democracy as being exceptionally stable. Never mind that genuine multiracial democracy has actually existed for less than 60 years in this country. What could possibly threaten Americas supposedly old, consolidated democracy? Acknowledging what the Republican party has become goes against the pillars of that worldview.

Finally, the American political discourse is still significantly shaped by the paradigm of white innocence. Economic anxiety, anti-elite backlash, or just liberals being mean whatever animates white peoples extremism, it must not be racism, and they cannot be blamed for their actions. The dogma of white innocence leads to elite opinion instinctively sanitizing the reasons behind the rise of rightwing demagogues, a common tendency in the commentary surrounding the success of George Wallace in the late 1960s, David Duke in early 1990s, or Donald Trump in 2016. The idea of white innocence also clouds Democratic elites perspective on Republican elites: Since they cannot possibly be animated by reactionary white nationalism, they must be motivated by more benign forces, fear of the Trumpian base perhaps, or maybe they are being seduced by the dangerous demagogue.

I actually like Mitch McConnell, Biden said during a press conference a few weeks ago, providing a window into what he sees in Republicans: No matter what they do, underneath theyre good guys, theyll snap out of it. Promise. Its the manifestation of a specific worldview that makes it nearly impossible to acknowledge the depths of Republican radicalization a perspective that severely hampers the fight for the survival of American democracy.

Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer

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The Republican party is abandoning democracy. There can be no politics as usual - The Guardian

The days events, which were supposed to be about unity, only served to highlight Republicans persistent division over Mr. Trumps attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as their leaders try to move forward and focus attention on what they call the failings of the Biden administration. More than a year later, the party is still wrestling with how much criticism and dissent it will tolerate.

Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol, Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, wrote on Twitter. Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.

He did not mention that the party chairwoman who presided over the meeting and orchestrated the censure resolution, Ms. McDaniel, is his niece.

The censure was also condemned by Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who, like Mr. Romney, voted to remove Mr. Trump from office for inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, and Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, also a Republican, who called Friday a sad day for my party and the country.

Republican National Committee members defended the measure, describing people who have been questioned by the Jan. 6 committee as victims in a broader Democratic effort to keep focus on the attack at the Capitol.

The nominal Republicans on the committee provide a pastiche of bipartisanship, but no genuine protection or due process for the ordinary people who did not riot being targeted and terrorized by the committee, said Richard Porter, a Republican National Committee member from Illinois. The investigation is a de facto Democrat-only investigation increasingly unmoored from congressional norms.

The Jan. 6 committee, which has seven Democratic members, has interviewed more than 475 witnesses, the vast majority of whom either volunteered to testify or agreed to without a subpoena. It has no prosecutorial powers, and is charged with drawing up a report and producing recommendations to prevent anything similar from happening again.

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G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack Legitimate Political Discourse - The New York Times