Chad Mayes

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I'm sitting here recording alone in a hotel room in Wilmington, Delaware.

This is what counts for a Democratic convention this year.

I was one of about just 30 reporters and photographers allowed into an otherwise empty room in Joe Biden's hometown to see first Kamala Harris and then Biden deliver their speeches.

It was a weird weird experience.

It included three days of COVID tests, temperature checks, and then sitting in a room made out like an abandoned model of the convention floor, complete with the signs for the states, but without any of the people.

Conventions are usually when members of a party come together and tell the country what they're all about.

Well, since the coming together part is gone, we just have the telling what they're all about part.

So, with Democrats wrapping up their argument and the Republicans getting set to begin theirs, I wanted to talk with someone making a different argument.

Chad Mays wouldn't fit in at the Democratic Convention or the Republican Convention.

He's the former Republican leader of the California State Assembly.

Former, because first the Republican Party kicked him out as its leader, and then he took himself out of the Republican Party.

But unlike many Republicans who have felt disassociated with the National Party under Donald Trump, he decided to keep running anyway.

And he's trying to hold on to a seat, running as an independent.

And so far, he's done surprisingly well.

California has an unusual top two primary system, and Mays edged out both the Republican and the Democrat for the most votes.

Now he faces the Republican again in November in a district that went for Trump in 2016.

But beyond holding on to his assembly seat, Mays hopes his race is a test case for the country.

He thinks there's hope for politics that isn't tied to one of the two parties, and he hopes his success proves it.

He isn't a national name like most of the people that we have on this podcast, but he is someone who just a few years ago led a a major party in the largest state in the country.

And you know, California to me and to many people has for decades been sort of the preview of American political changes.

It was the home of Richard Nixon and where Reagan started modern conservatism, where between Reagan and then Schwarzenegger, celebrity politics took hold before it went to the rest of America.

And so that's what I wanted to talk to Mays about.

We talk a lot about national politics on this podcast, but most of national politics ends up being arguing about what to do.

And most of what actually gets done is at the state and local level.

Mays is a unique figure, this year at least, to talk about how what's happening in national politics seeps down into local politics and into the decisions that get made that affect all our lives.

Take a listen.

Assemblyman Chad Mays, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Thanks so much for having me.

Your biography is the sort of almost boilerplate of a Republican.

Your father was a minister.

You went to Liberty University.

You were an intern for John Ashcroft.

Do you remember deciding that you were a Republican or was it just you were a Republican?

You know, it's a good question.

I'm not sure anybody's ever asked that.

I think it was probably like most, right?

You grew up in a Republican family.

I remember my dad screaming at the television when he would watch the news.

I remember him, he and my mother praising Ronald Reagan.

I think I just always was a Republican.

I grew up in a Republican household and I just was a Republican.

And you start deciding that you want to actually run for office yourself, which is always good.

I did.

Yeah, it was actually, it might have been when I was an intern in Ashcroft's office.

I remember watching him give a speech and then being back in the office thinking to myself, you know, I could do this.

And I ended up moving home then.

A seat came open on the Yucca Valley Town Council, my hometown.

And at 24, I started running for it.

25, I'd gotten elected.

And it worked out pretty well.

You get yourself into the assembly not long after that.

And then you're the Republican leader of the Assembly in California.

Yeah, so I ended up running for Assembly in 2014, had gotten elected.

And nine months after I was in the state assembly, my colleagues basically made me the Republican leader.

They said, you know, Chad, you're the guy that's going to lead us into the next step.

And we want you to be leader.

I think it's important important to think about what time period that was in politics everything the last couple years has become so intense it's hard to remember where things were before that but so you are then

taking over the republican leadership of the california assembly in the years after obama has won reelection but as the republican midterm wave turned the senate republican and uh was good for republicans and state legislatures all over the country obviously you're still the minority leader in california pretty,

at this point, democratically leaning state.

But it's before Trump emerges as a big player.

The night Trump wins,

you knew it seems like right away that this was going to be a problem for California Republicans.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

In fact, it was on election night when then a speaker, still the speaker, Anthony Rendon and I were sitting at one of the local drinking holes.

There's the two of us going over all the polls, and we wanted to start this new tradition that we would do this every year.

And at that time, I did not believe that Trump was going to win.

Of course, by the end of the evening, we all knew that Trump had won.

And I was at the Republican headquarters in Sacramento.

And while there was lots of cheering going on by many folks that were there, I and some of the other political folks that were there knew that this was going to be a disaster for the Republican Party in California.

And it turned out to be.

Anthony Rendon said afterwards that when he was talking about you, he told another reporter that he felt as though,

that you felt as though a lot of the morality that you'd seen and believed about the Republican Party suddenly seemed to vanish overnight.

What was it that vanished?

Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, here, again, you know, I had grown up in a very conservative home.

I'd been taught

Christian values.

I've been taught that America was this exceptional country.

I was taught to believe that our leaders were to be above reproach.

And we'd never had somebody at the head of our party who was just completely morally bankrupt.

In fact, you know, I'll share with you using that word bankrupt, the moment I knew that I had a problem with Trump being our nominee was when there was a question asked in one of the debates when someone said, you've filed bankruptcy four times and his response was something to the effect of well yeah i use the law to my advantage see in my household you would never file bankruptcy Or if you had to, it was because something devastating happened to you.

You would never go out and think that you were going to use that to your advantage because there's somebody on the other end of that that was being harmed.

You would never do something.

You would never swing your arm with a purpose of hitting somebody in the nose to be able to do them harm.

So that's what I mean by that being morally bankrupt.

And it seems as though that's what.

conservatism had all of a sudden become.

You know, at one point in time, you know, conservatism was this idea of liberty, this idea of rugged individualism.

But at the same time, there was this deep sense about

responsibility.

It was both liberty and responsibility.

You could swing your arm, but you certainly weren't going to swing your arm to where it was going to connect with somebody else's nose.

What we've gotten to today is, you know, I'm going to swing my arm and you got in the way.

That's bad on you, not on me.

That's not what Republicanism, that's not what conservatism always was, but it's what it's become.

And what I began to realize is that after the election is over, even if Trump loses, he's not going to go away like Barack Obama went away.

He's not going to go away like Bush went away.

He's not going to go do a library.

He's going to start tweeting the day after.

He's going to continue to want to be in the public's eye.

And the Republican Party, the activists within the Republican Party, are following this man almost like they would be following a cult-like leader.

And I believe that after this is all over with, those folks are going to continue to keep following.

What strikes me about it, though, is that the modern Republican Party is sort of an outgrowth, an extension of the historical California Republican Party.

The immigration rhetoric that animated Trump's rise had a lot of roots in Pete Wilson, the former governor of California.

You had Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who

were not only economic conservatives, but Nixon pioneered the Southern strategy.

So I wonder how you think that 2016 was this special breaking point?

Because it seems like the historical Republican Party and the state party in California isn't immune to the criticism that the modern party has faced.

Yeah,

I'm trying to figure out where I want to go with this because I feel like I could talk about this for some time.

You know, when I become the Republican leader in 2014, you know, I set out and I, again, I've been a brand new member of the legislature and said, okay, guys, what's the plan?

You know, Where is the data?

Where are the demographic studies?

What do Californians believe?

How can we put a legislative agenda together without knowing where Californians are at?

So we actually set out to do that.

We spent a couple hundred thousand dollars doing, we did

polling across the state.

We did a ton of research and we had voluminous information that had come back.

And what we found out from that, we call it the California Republican Project.

And the idea was, is at the end of all of this, that California Republicans were going to separate themselves from national Republicans.

And we got some fantastic information back.

One of those things was in California, not just Democrats, not just independents, but even Republicans believed that climate change was real and the government had a responsibility to do something about it.

And so we took that data and we said, okay, now we're going to go out and we're going to start, we're going to put a package of a legislative package together and we're going to go to where people are at in California.

The problem was after President Trump had gotten elected, the Republican Party, the National Republican Party, and in fact, Republicans in California weren't interested in taking the Republican Party to the people of California.

They weren't interested in being inclusive, right?

They were interested in being exclusive.

They didn't want you to be a part of that party.

If you weren't with them, they wanted to push you out.

In fact, that's what they ended up doing to not just me, but others.

You know, they called us rhinos, Republicans in name only, which is you're not really one of us.

And so we'd prefer that you just leave.

And so all of these members of Congress, all these senators, state reps across the country, all thought if I speak anything ill of Donald Trump or if I don't toe his line, that I'm getting beat this next primary.

So we've had this problem that's occurred.

And back to your point with California, is that back in the 1990s, if you go back and look at it today, we know that with Governor Pete Wilson and Prop 187 was the high watermark for California Republicans.

There's almost 38% of registered voters that called themselves Republicans at a time when it was about 43% of registered voters were Democrats.

But today,

in 2020, there are 45% of the state registered voters are registered Democrat, and only 24% are registered Republican.

It's two to one.

In fact, there are more no party preference registered voters in California than there are Republicans in California.

And the question is, well, why?

Well, for a number of reasons.

California isn't as white as it once was in the 1990s.

There are now more Latinos in the state of California than there are white people.

And because the Republican Party has now become some sort of white grievance party, and that's what the national narrative is.

So in a state like California, you just can't compete.

And so California really was the canary in the coal mine.

If you go back to the 90s of where California was then, it's what the country is going to be 20, 25 years from now.

I've tried to tell my colleagues across the country that if you think that somehow this is a winning strategy today, the brand, the toxicity that will come of this is going to last not just for five years or 10 years, it's going to last for generations to come.

Yeah, I want to talk about what

we're going to come back to what California has to tell the rest of the nation.

When you bring up the

trends in California, in 2007, Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he was governor, he gave this famous speech that was the dying at the bottom.

Dying at the bottom stage, right?

And of course, it's with him, so it's a movie reference.

And this is what he said.

He said, if our party doesn't address the needs of the people, the needs of Republicans themselves, the voters, registered Republicans included, we'll look elsewhere for their political affiliation.

And

when I was going over that line, preparing for this, I was thinking about a line from Martha McSally, the senator from Arizona, right next door to you,

in an interview a few weeks ago.

And she was saying that part of the reason why she was arguing she should be reelected is to stop Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico from becoming states because Republicans can't win there, even though Republicans have one state, territory-wide in Puerto Rico.

So

it's a strange argument because he's saying we can't even compete in D.C.

and Puerto Rico, so they can't become states.

And you can get into the,

well, that seems like a strange reason to say the residents and citizens of those places shouldn't have the same rights as other Americans.

But it also is an admission of defeat in saying, I guess, because the assumption is that there is a

heavily black population in Washington, D.C., and obviously a heavily Latino population in Puerto Rico, almost exclusively,

that it's like saying, well, we can't get to those voters anymore.

Yeah,

I mean, and I would argue that it's not maybe just perverse, but even corrupt to be able to say that.

You know, getting elected, you know, you run, you campaign for office, but when you get elected, she's a United States senator.

Your job is to govern.

Your job is to make policies that try to make people's lives better.

Your job isn't to try to game the system so that your party can stay in power.

That's not what it's supposed to be.

And it reminds me of a colleague of mine, a Republican colleague of mine from Orange County, where a few years ago we were debating some housing policy.

And I remember in a private conversation I was having with him, where he said, you know, we really shouldn't be building any more apartments in Orange County because those aren't our voters.

Now, again, it's this idea of just to your point of it's we can't even compete with people who are living in apartments.

We can't compete with people who are not white evangelical Christians.

And so we're not even going to try to.

And it's that idea, instead of trying to include these people and share our values, whatever those values might be, it's just like, nope, we don't want them.

And that's a losing strategy.

It was a losing strategy in California.

It continues to be a losing strategy in California.

And it's going to be a losing strategy across this country.

We're going to take a short break.

When we come back, Maze explains the issue that first divided him from the Republican Party.

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The first real crack for you in the way that this was playing out professionally, you were having the conflict sort of internally about what was going on with the Republican Party and how to find yourself in it.

But where it becomes a break with your colleagues in an active way seems to be when you voted for the extension and expansion of the climate laws in California.

And

America is the only country on earth really where climate is as a partisan a divide as it is here.

Does it surprise you that that vote, and you were one of seven Republicans who voted for it in the Assembly, that that became such a big issue?

Well, it really was.

It was for a number of different reasons because one, cap and trade in and of itself was a Republican idea.

In fact, Reagan had done it, both Bushes had done it.

And it was this idea of using the market versus command and control, you know, the market using free enterprise, ideas of free enterprise and choice versus, you know, government mandate and saying you must.

So those were supposed to be Republican principles.

And we had actually done that.

The law that was on the books was going to tell businesses how they had to comply.

And what we did is we said, okay, we're going to go back to the system we had before with cap and trade and say okay businesses you get to make decisions on how you're going to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions and so when presenting that to the board of directors they didn't like that in fact some of the conversations that they had is you know chad because you did this you took money away from the ability for us to be able to raise money into the party coffers and you know i was just so um

I'm looking for the right word.

What ended up coming out of it, there's some level, there was some level of bitterness because I couldn't understand why a party that said they believed in these market principles and they believed in using those market principles to try to make people's lives better.

That when we did that, they said, No, we don't want you.

In fact, not only that, we're going to sanction you and we're going to suggest that you are no longer the Assembly Republican leader any longer.

I thought we were about ideas.

I thought we believed in these things, and here we went and did them.

But because we worked with a Democrat to be able to get that done, then Governor Brown in California, we worked with him to get that done.

That somehow was a violation of orthodoxy and I was a heretic and I needed to be burned at the stake.

It was crazy to me.

It was crazy to me.

The real breaking point for me, and I would say if there was a moment when I began to even think the unthinkable, which was to leave the Republican Party, was when I had been primary, actually back in the 2018 election, because of my work on cap and trade and a handful of other things as well.

So I went out like you do in a campaign and I polled my district.

And you go through like you do in polls, ask them all sorts of questions.

And one of the things that you do is you ask this more likely question or less likely question.

Are you more likely to vote for Chad if X, Y, or Z?

Are you less likely to vote for Chad if X, Y, or Z?

And I actually asked the question that said,

are you more likely or less likely to vote for Chad?

knowing that he stood up to Steve Bannon and white nationalists within the California Republican Party.

And amongst Democrats, it went up, it was more likely.

Amongst Independents, it went up, it was more likely.

Whereas amongst Republicans, it actually went less likely.

And I remember when the pollster was giving me this presentation, and I actually say, wait, can we stop there?

As he was going through the numbers, I said, let's just stop there and ponder for that just a little bit.

And it had this amazing impact on me because I thought, wait a minute, this is not who I believed.

that Republicans were.

I never wanted to believe that Republicans were xenophobic, which is a form of racism.

I never wanted to believe that the Republican Party were white nationalists, and yet here I had in my own district, over the half of the Republicans were less likely to support me because I stood up on a very strong American principle.

I mean, you mentioned Steve Bannon, and obviously he's been a figure for the last four years in a lot of people's minds because of his role in the Trump campaign.

We are recording the afternoon when he is pleading not guilty to some serious charges.

To think that that is a person who has been as involved and instrumental in the republican party at this point with uh

what his business dealings have been what his uh political beliefs have been and and in injecting that into the republican party what does that do for you well again it's once believing that republicans were the good guys um because at one point in time you know those are the sorts of people if we go back and we think about this and you know there's a book that was written recently by stuart stevens who worked on mitt romney's campaign Who worked on Mitt Romney's campaign?

And the name of the book, it was all a lie.

And it was this idea that somehow those individuals were sort of this

recessive gene.

You know, there may be a few of them that show up to central committee, but kind of the idea of like, oh, no, those people aren't really part of the party.

They're not the ones that are controlling the party.

They're not setting the agenda for the party.

And it turns out that they're not the recessive gene, that they're the dominant gene, or maybe there was some sort of gene mutation

along the way to where it went from being recessive to

being dominant.

I didn't study sciences, so I might have

gotten that wrong.

I was an English and philosophy major.

It's okay.

Yeah, so you're with me.

So you can't correct me, but if you understand my point, is that all of a sudden, this shift began to occur.

And what was once a party where Reagan was the hero who talked about this city on a hill to all of a sudden saying, no, we are the party of white nationalists and white nationalism.

And to me, that was shocking.

So let's go back to this decision to leave the party.

You got the results back on the poll about the Bannon question and you have that thought process.

Look, the Republican brand is a toxic brand.

I had tried, not just as Republican leader in the Assembly, but also through an organization that Governor Schwarzenegger and I had put together called Miu Way California.

We had tried to set out to reform the Republican Party.

Because, look, we have a two-party system in this country, and it'd be incredibly difficult to be able to come up with a third party.

And so we had set out on this mission.

What I found out was, in doing that, is that the Republican Party was not interested in changing.

They liked what they were.

It didn't matter whether they were going to lose election after election after election, because the party activists themselves were comfortable and fine with the party as it was.

And we didn't need to change.

It didn't matter that there was once 38% of Californians that were registered Republican.

There's only 24%.

Now, that didn't matter to them.

What mattered to them is that they were a delegate or there was somebody in the party and had some power within the party.

And they had this leader back in Washington, D.C., who had won on some of these tactics that had been used.

And they thought that all you had to do was do that.

They weren't interested in changing the party.

And at some point, you have to be introspective enough to think, you know, maybe I am a Republican in name only.

These people don't want me to be a part of their party any longer.

They're asking me to leave.

And the question then becomes:

well, maybe I should actually leave.

As we're speaking, there are wildfires that are raging in parts of California.

There's recent news that President Trump had wanted to cut off support for California wildfire victims because the state was, as he saw it, not part of his political base.

You are a Californian.

You are a former member of the president's party.

You're a member of the Assembly.

What do you make of that?

Well, again, it goes back to what you're talking about.

Senator McSally's argument again is too, saying we're not going to have, you know, I don't want to vote for Washington, D.C.

and Puerto Rico because we'll lose the Senate if that's the case.

That's not your job.

You don't go to Washington, D.C., or you don't go to Sacramento to try to game the system.

You don't, you know, you don't, I don't get elected in my assembly district and then think, well, I'm not going to represent over half of the people in my district because they're from another party.

The president of the United States shouldn't say, well, there's a wildfire there, but I'm not going to fund, put emergency funds there because, you know, it's not my base and they don't vote for me.

I'm only going to fund the states where they vote for me.

That would be, when you're talking about government, that is corruption, right?

I mean, that's using your office, if you will, to campaign.

And that is the thing that just gets me.

I've been asked even, do you support Trump or are you a never Trumper?

And for a long time, I would say, I'm not a never Trumper.

People use that term because it's a president of the United States.

You want to be able to support.

the president of the United States because if the president of the United States is successful, then we're all going to be successful.

And people would say, well, you know, did you vote for Trump?

I'd say, well, no, I didn't.

You know, my problem with the Republican Party wasn't Trump because Trump actually told us who he was.

I think some people believed that he was campaigning one way or that he was going to govern another way.

In fact, I had hoped that that was going to be the case.

But he told us during the campaign who he was going to be.

The problem that I have with the Republican Party is they've enabled this.

They never stood up to him.

Now, there was a few that did.

Speaker Paul Ryan did

a time.

There's a handful of others.

They all ended up leaving, ended up leaving the party, not running for re-election or resigning.

Jeff Flake's a good example.

Bob Corker is another good example, deciding not to run for re-election.

And I looked at that and said, are you not even willing to stand up to fight?

And yeah, I know the polling probably looks bad for you, but for goodness, you know, this is about the country over party or the country over one single person.

person.

The fact that folks weren't willing to step up just seemed to be incredibly difficult for me, which is also back to the point for me

in running.

I wanted to also prove one that I could run like I did, that I didn't have to be a Trump enabler when I ran for assembly.

Although to be fair, it's a statewide office, it's not federal office.

But then at the same time, once I decided to drop my registration and run as an independent, I wanted to prove the point that you don't have to run for elected office within the two-party system.

You can get elected to office as long as you tell your constituents what it is that you believe in.

And if you share their values, they're going to to vote for you.

I hope others will look at my race and say it can be done.

You can win as an independent, and you can be successful.

You know, I just recently done some survey work, and it looks to me like this is going to be a fantastic year for this independent.

We're feeling incredibly confident going into November.

You can step outside of the two norms and you can get elected.

All right.

Chad Mays, Assemblyman, Assembly candidate, also,

former Republican independent.

You have a lot of titles that we can put on you.

Thank you for being here on the ticket.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

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