If there was good news for the local Republican Party coming out of the just-concluded presidential election, it is that the Hawaii GOP got 67,755 more presidential votes in 2020 than in 2016.
“Our coalition did bring 60,000 more voters into the race,” said Shirlene Ostrov, Hawaii GOP chairwoman, in a Facebook interview with Edwin Boyette, the GOP’s vice chairman for communications.
President Donald Trump decisively lost Hawaii, as former Vice President Joe Biden won the state with more than 63% of the vote.
“We support our president. For Hawaii, it was not that close of a race; we are going to build the party,” Ostrov said.
The real local disaster was found a way down the ballot in the state legislative races.
At this point, the Hawaii GOP is not so much in a
reconstruction phase as
engaged in a search for
survivors in the rubble of the results from those election contests.
The party is now back at its all-time low point, with just five members: four in the House and one in the Senate. From 2017 to 2018, there were five in the House and no one in the Senate representing the GOP. The party now has one senator, Kurt Fevella, and four representatives.
Rep. Gene Ward has served as a Republican in the state House since 1990. In his view, the two political parties have flipped. Hawaii’s wealthy and those in control of Hawaii business and financial interests are no longer represented by the Republicans, but now by Democrats.
“We are emerging as a coalition of multi-ethnic working-class individuals whereas the money class and rich are solidly with the Democrats more than the stereotypical Republicans had been in the past,” Ward said in an interview last week.
In the years surrounding the ascension of Republican Linda Lingle to the governorship, Republicans were doing well. They went from a high of 22 in the 76-member Legislature, to a solid block of 15 to 10 in the House, and five in the Senate.
Lingle was never able to spread her own vote popularity to fellow Republicans, and the party now is of little political importance.
Ward sees local Republicans, if not as leaders or policy setters, at least as a corrective prescription.
“Eventually the pendulum will swing back, and a solid set of checks and balances will be in place in Hawaii.
We have an important voice as the loyal opposition,” Ward said.
If Trump had won reelection, there would at least be an argument that he could give some political favors to local Republicans. For instance, it was George H.W. Bush who appointed former U.S. Rep. Pat Saiki as administrator of the Small Business Administration.
With Trump soon to be out of office, Hawaii’s GOP has none of that — no president, nearly no votes at the Legislature and little chance of preventing Hawaii from becoming a truly one-party state.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
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