California GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher has easily won re-election in his coastal Orange County seat for decades, and Democrats haven’t seriously targeted him since he beat Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook 53-43 in 2008. However, while Rohrabacher won 58-42 last year, his well-educated 48th Congressional District rebelled against Trump, shifting from 55-43 Romney to 48-46 Clinton. This area remains very red downballot, but the huge swing gives Team Blue some hope that they can take down Rohrabacher in a good year. However, Trump’s close loss here doesn’t seem to have Rohrabacher remotely concerned. Rohrabacher remains an ardent Trump ally, and he was the only Orange County Republican House member to defend Attorney General Jeff Sessions for covertly meeting with the Russian ambassador.
Rohrabacher, who reportedly was considered as a Trump secretary of state, has also demonstrated some very odd behavior on foreign policy. Rohrabacher remains one of the very few Republicans not named Donald Trump to vigorously defend Vladimir Putin, at least in public. Rohrabacher has also met with French far-right extremist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, gone on Albanian television and declared that “Macedonia is not a state” and should be split up and given to other countries, and gotten involved with his close friend and disgraced ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff in a strange plan ostensibly to help the Republic of Congo defeat the terrorist group the Boko Haram.
It’s still going to take a lot of luck for Democrats to beat Rohrabacher in a seat this ancestrally red, but local apathy to Trump and the congressman’s own rhetoric may give them an opening. A few days ago, real estate company owner Harley Rouda announced that he would run here as a Democrat. The Los Angeles Times’ Christine Mai-Duc says that Rouda is wealthy, though it’s unclear how much of his own money he can or will spend, or if he has the connections to raise the sums he’d need to advertise in the expensive Los Angeles media market. Another Democrat, real estate broker Boyd Roberts, is also in. However, Roberts took dead last in a 2012 school board race and launched an aborted campaign against GOP Rep. Ken Calvert in the safely red 42nd District, so he doesn’t seem too serious.
Rohrabacher himself doesn’t begin the 2018 race with a huge financial head start. Rohrabacher had just $238,000 on-hand at the end of last year, and the congressman isn’t anywhere near wealthy enough to self-fund. Last year, Rohrabacher also indicated that he was planning to leave Congress very soon, but he said in December that he’d “probably” run again. It’s almost always more difficult to beat an incumbent than to win an open seat, but Rohrabacher may be tone-deaf enough that Democrats may hope he seeks re-election.
