Late on April 8, Carl DeMaio was leading a trio of negotiators at the San Diego County Republican Party headquarters. He had just failed to get his own state Assembly candidacy approved, even though the party’s central committee had already endorsed his opponent, a turn of events that had put his ally, then-party chair Paula Witzel, in danger of losing her job.
One of his negotiators was Corey Gustafson.
Mr. Gustafson is now the party chairman and is overseeing dramatic enforcement actions against Mr. DeMaio that could pit the party against him in ways that would have been shocking a few years ago.
Or maybe it was expected. Nearly all of DeMaio’s two decades in San Diego have been marked by dramatic clashes with friends and former allies. But his ability to galvanize conservative voters and his policies as a former San Diego City Councilman, talk show host and failed candidate for mayor and Congress have helped him maintain an influential position within the Republican Party. But this week, many of his few remaining allies on the central committee turned their backs on him after a long-running feud with a police officer devolved into a series of increasingly vicious conversations.
It all had to do with the agreement Gustafson helped negotiate for DeMaio that night, an agreement that Gustafson says DeMaio broke. Gustafson’s decision could spark a flood of support for DeMaio’s opponent in the race to represent Sacramento’s 75th Assembly District. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have already poured into supporting Andrew Hayes, who is running for the seat, and now the local party may be willing to give even more.
Background: A few weeks before April 8, Witzel tried to tell the CPC Central Committee that he had endorsed Hayes for California’s 75th Congressional District only for the primary election. However, after DeMaio entered the race and out-voted Hayes in the primary election, Witzel asked the CPC Executive Committee to shift the endorsement to DeMaio.
The move is not merely symbolic. Political parties are allowed to spend as much as they like on communicating with voters who are registered to vote and who have chosen them as their party of choice. Candidates can direct donors to their parties, and parties can send mailings and other communications to registered voters. Candidates and parties can coordinate spending, and candidates can focus resources on independents and members of other parties. And Republicans, for example, can refer to party-backed candidates as part of a family of party-backed candidates when sending information to registered Republican voters.
Whissell had hoped those benefits would go to DeMaio, not Hayes, in the increasingly fierce battle for the seat being vacated by Republican Rep. Marie Waldron.
Republicans in the county complained of wrongdoing. Rep. Darrell Issa filed an ethics complaint, accusing Witzel of working against party-endorsed candidates, a huge taboo. Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey said it went against party rules and longstanding traditions. Hayes had the support of two-thirds of the Republican Central Committee, a support he had secured throughout the primaries and runoffs. Former San Diego City Councilman Scott Sherman helped block the move on the party’s executive committee.
But then the fight reached a new stage when Whitsell removed Sherman from the Executive Committee: after all, she had no votes, and, to make matters worse, many members of the Central Committee wanted her gone as well.
Negotiations were therefore held on April 8. The committee was keen to reach a settlement with DeMaio, but maintained its support for Hayes.
The two sides reached an agreement: Hayes will remain endorsed but will not be able to use money from the party’s victory fund, he will not appear in Republican voter guide mailers or door hangers, and the party will no longer mention the 75th Assembly District on its website.
In other words, he got no real benefit from the party’s support, but you won’t see headlines about him losing it, and DeMaio won’t be bragging about him gaining it.
In exchange, Mr. DeMaio agreed to end his campaign efforts and not recruit or endorse candidates not supported by the party. Mr. Wissell immediately resigned, and Mr. Gustafson, who had been negotiating on Mr. DeMaio’s behalf, agreed to become committee chair.
Mr. Gustafson signed a document outlining all the terms, as did five other members of the team negotiating for Mr. DeMaio, including Mr. Witzel and former chairman Tony Krvarik, who contacted Mr. DeMaio by phone and verbally agreed to the terms.
That agreement lasted until this week, until 6 p.m. on September 12th to be exact, at which point many prominent local Republicans were waiting to see what would happen, as this post from Amy Reichert, who is running for vice chair of the central committee, shows.
“Someone recently tried to blackmail and buy me. If you are Lorena Gonzalez in the garb of a Republican conman, I will unleash the dogs of war against you. Until 6pm,” she wrote.
She was referring to Mr. DeMaio. In fact, it wasn’t her deadline, but he missed the deadline nonetheless.
What happened: DeMaio has had a long feud with police officers, dating back to his time on the San Diego City Council. The city’s pension crisis was approaching its 20th year of relentless bad news and, even worse, huge costs to the struggling city government. DeMaio and former Mayor Jerry Sanders each pushed bills in different ways to eliminate pension benefits for future employees. But Sanders and Republican City Councilman Kevin Faulconer wanted to exclude future firefighters and police officers from the bill.
DeMaio didn’t, and they eventually agreed to a compromise: firefighters wouldn’t have guaranteed future pensions, but police officers would.
But the officers have never forgotten. Over the years, they have felt other slights by DeMaio (being distracted by his cellphone at an officer’s funeral, not supporting death benefits, etc.). Brian Marvel, who ran the police officers’ association at the time, now runs the Police Officers Research Association of California (PORAC).
In late August, Marvel and PORAC filed a complaint against DeMaio and his political action committee, Reform California, with the state’s ethics watchdog, the Fair Political Practices Commission.
“Based on publicly available information, it appears that Mr. DeMaio misused Reform California funds to benefit his state legislative campaign in direct violation of California law,” the complaint reads.
We’ve written about Reform California repeatedly: Republicans complained in 2021 that the group was a “pro-Karl organization,” and this year our Tigist Lane wrote about how frequently DeMaio collected signatures and donations for proposals that didn’t become ballot proposals.
Police went further, alleging that people were sending donations to Reform California for specific purposes, and that he was laundering the money to support his state legislative campaign.
“Here, it appears that Mr. DeMaio and Reform California blurred the lines between their respective organizations’ resources, leading to an illegal contribution from Reform California to Mr. DeMaio’s state legislative campaign,” PORAC’s complaint states.
DeMaio did not respond to my messages seeking comment.
But we do know that he was unhappy with the PORAC complaints, and he took his frustrations out to Jared Wilson, the current president of the San Diego Police Officers Association, who is running against Tony Blaine for a seat on Poway City Council.
The Republican Party endorsed Wilson, and according to the agreement between the GOP and DeMaio, Wilson was not allowed to endorse any candidate other than the party’s nominee. Wilson could have stayed out of the race, but he couldn’t endorse an opponent of the Republican nominee. And that’s exactly what Wilson did.
Mr. Gustafson published an unusual op-ed on the party’s news site in which he criticized Mr. DeMaio and the Reform California Party for supporting Mr. Blaine over Mr. Wilson.
“These actions are counterproductive to the conservative movement in San Diego County. Republicans uniting behind one candidate have a better chance of beating a single Democrat than two Republicans splitting the vote. We must unite behind one candidate rather than give the Democrats the win and lose this seat,” he wrote.
De Maio hit back in an open letter to Central Committee members, blasting his former ally, Gustafsson.
“Over the past few months, the SDGOP has made a series of embarrassing mistakes, including failing to recruit candidates and abandoning seats, repeatedly announcing false information, and sending three duplicate mailings to donors, raising suspicions of wasteful spending,” DeMaio wrote.
Gustafson called on DeMaio to withdraw his support for Tony Blaine by 6 p.m. Thursday night and choose between supporting Wilson in the Poway City Council election or remaining neutral.
DeMaio called Amy Reichert, who was running with Gustafson for vice chair, and asked her to withdraw her support for Gustafson. Reichert refused.
“Karl called me and pressured me to give up my support as Chair of the San Diego Republican Party in order to defeat Corey. DeMaio went even further, asking that I remove my name from the list of candidates for Vice Chair, apparently trying to pressure Corey through me. When I refused to back down on Corey, Karl personally threatened me. His words were chilling: ‘If you do not remove Corey from his position as Chair, I will not support you in any leadership role in the San Diego Republican Party. Furthermore, if in two years you ever want to run for anything, I will not endorse or support you and I will make sure you never run for public office,'” she wrote in what has now become her own open letter.
She said an influential person then called her and said he would support her for the speakership if she reconciled with DeMaio.
She refused.
“I want to be clear that this is a matter of principle for me. I will never be bullied, intimidated or bought off, and I will not tolerate this type of behavior within my party. It is clear that Carl DeMaio is seeking to use the Reform California Playbook as a weapon against good Republicans out of selfish and malicious intent,” she wrote.
I found that person: Michael Schwartz, political director for the Gun Owners of San Diego County, who told me that it was true he had called Reichert and encouraged him to run for speaker, but that it had nothing to do with DeMaio.
He said it was a “strange coincidence” that he called her in the middle of everything going on and encouraged her to run, but he acknowledged he wasn’t impressed with the way the central committee was being run.
“If fighting Carl and the Reformists is the direction of the new leadership of the Republican Central Committee, I will refuse to cooperate at every turn,” Schwartz said. “Carl DeMaio has done so much for my organization, and for the Republican Party and the Central Committee. When we disagree on a candidate, in these situations we need to work on the 99.9 percent of things we agree on.”
Another fact: By Friday, Gustafson had declared the agreement between DeMaio and the party and Hayes campaign to be invalid. The party can and will now support Hayes with all of its resources. Hayes is the epitome of a good public servant, Gustafson wrote to the central committee on Friday.
“In contrast, my opponent has decided to put his own interests and political ambitions above those of the party. DeMaio has broken his promises; he supported the opposite candidate to the Republican candidate we officially endorse and helped Democrats win seats that should have been Republicans; he has threatened and lied to current and future Republican Central Committee members; enough is enough,” Gustafson wrote.
By Thursday, unrelated to the unrest, $350,000 had flowed into a firefighters’ political action committee opposing DeMaio, including a random $50,000 donation from DoorDash.
Now thousands more could stream through the Republican Party.
If you have feedback or ideas for political reporting, please send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandieg.org.
