On Saturday evening, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin learned he’d need to find a new best friend in Congress after the Associates Press projected that Democrat Harley Rouda had unseated 15-term GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. As of Monday afternoon, Rouda’s margin of victory in California’s 48th Congressional District stood at 52-48, or about 8,500 votes, and it will likely get larger as more ballots get counted.
While this coastal Orange County seat, which is the setting for the show “Arrested Development,” swung from 55-43 Romney to 48-46 Clinton, Rohrabacher didn’t seem to have any real idea about how much danger he was in until it was too late. Back in May of 2017, Rohrabacher told the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel that, “A lot of Republican women voted for Hillary. That is not going to translate into anything else next year.” Rohrabacher also predicted that Donald Trump wouldn’t cause him any problems, adding, “Trump is a very boisterous guy, and that was a turnoff for some people, but these are Reagan-type conservatives.” Suffice to say, he was really, really, really wrong.
However, Rohrabacher’s own behavior may be just as much to blame for his defeat as Trump and Orange County’s changing politics. The congressman continued to ardently defend Putin and far-right extremists overseas, and he even went on Albanian television and declared that "Macedonia is not a state" and should be split up and given to other countries. Rohrabacher was also 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 Boko Haram.
Closer to home, Rohrabacher put on his tinfoil cap and argued that it was really Democrats who were behind the violence in Charlottesville last year. In Rohrabacher’s world, a former “Hillary and Bernie supporter” got Civil War re-enactors to gather in the Virginia college town to pretend to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee. The congressman declared the white supremacist procession was actually “a setup for these dumb Civil War re-enactors,” and “it was left-wingers who were manipulating them in order to have this confrontation" and to "put our president on the spot.”
Rohrabacher of course didn’t stop there.
In May, he spoke out in defense of allowing realtors to discriminate against LGBTQ homebuyers, which cost him the endorsement of the powerful National Association of Realtors. Rohrabacher also continued to meet with far-right troll Charles Johnson, who has both minimized the Holocaust and been banned from Twitter for saying he wanted to "take out" a Black Lives Matter leader.
In September, Rohrabacher endorsed a candidate for a local school board post who had a recent history of racism and anti-Semitism, including a YouTube playlist titled "Holocaust hoax?" He also was recorded ridiculing the allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had committed sexual assault in high school.
Rohrabacher may have yet survived all this if he had raised enough money to effectively compete in the very-expensive Los Angeles media market, but that would be out of character for Dana Rohrabacher. Both the congressman and Rouda had to spend plenty of cash to advance through a very competitive June top-two-primary, where Rohrabacher faced a serious challenge from his former ally Scott Baugh and Rouda only narrowly got past another Democrat. However, while Rouda held only a tiny cash-on-hand edge at the end of June, he outraised the incumbent $4.15 million to $652,000 from July 1 to Oct. 17.
While major Democratic and Republican groups each spent over $4 million here during the general election, Rohrabacher’s allies opted for cheaper cable TV ads in the final weeks of the contest while Democrats continued to spend heavily to the end. In the end, while the race was still close, Rohrabacher’s many bad decisions helped bring his 30-year career crashing down.
