When Jessica Millan Patterson took the reins of the California Republican Party in 2019, the media coverage invariably led with the history she made — how she was the first woman, first Latina, first millennial to lead the party.
The reality check usually came in the second paragraph: The longtime political operative and acolyte of Kevin McCarthy was assuming among the most thankless jobs in politics.
The state GOP had just lost half of its congressional delegation in the blue wave of 2018. The party was not only badly lagging Democrats in registered voters, it was outranked by voters registering no party preference. Republicans teetered on the brink of irrelevance in Sacramento and had even slumped in onetime strongholds like San Diego and Orange County.
The vibes, as Patterson described it, were that “California was a lost cause … and we were going to go the way of Hawaii.”
“And do I think that was absolutely possible? Yeah, I think that was absolutely possible.”
Instead, Patterson, during an exit interview with Playbook marking the end of her tenure this week, sounded — as incongruous as it would’ve sounded when she started — triumphant.
To be clear, not too triumphant. Patterson, 45, is not the chest-thumping type. And Republicans are still resoundingly California’s minority party.
Nor was it always smooth sailing for six years. The failed recall against Gov. Gavin Newsom exposed the age-old fractures between the grassroots and establishment wings in the party, squelching the future of its most viable statewide candidate, Kevin Faulconer.
But on balance, Patterson undoubtedly leaves California Republicans in stronger shape than when she took over. Her operation registered nearly 1 million new Republicans, clawing its way back into second place in state party identification behind just Democrats. The GOP flipped back some of the House seats it lost in 2018 and in 2022 was able to deliver the decisive win to make McCarthy, her longtime mentor, speaker of the House (at least for a few months, anyway). And last year, Republicans flipped legislative seats in both houses, the first time they’ve done so during a presidential cycle since 1980.
Patterson, who raised $122 million during her tenure, benefited mightily from her close association with McCarthy. She was widely rumored to potentially be in the running for a top job at the national Republican Party when he was still in office (she told Playbook that working with McCarthy on national politics could’ve been a possibility, but she was firmly against moving to Washington).
“There is no person on the planet that is better at recruiting candidates,” she said. “People knowing that I had his support, they believed me when I came and said, ‘we’re looking for someone to help us make Kevin McCarthy the speaker. They knew I was speaking on behalf of him.’”
Patterson’s approach to the GOP’s main leader, President Donald Trump, was somewhere between a stiff-arm and a bear hug — a tightrope walk made possible since California is hardly a presidential battleground state. Instead, she urged her candidates to keep the focus local, tapping into voter frustrations with the ruling Democrats at home.
Rob Stutzman, a veteran GOP strategist, credits Patterson with being an “outstanding” chair who managed to simultaneously appeal to the country club Republicans of yore and devotees of the new Trumpified version of the party.
“Trump is intent on basically alienating traditional Reagan Republicans,” Stutzman said. “She had the ability to operate a state party that still felt welcoming to those Republicans while at the same time supporting the new direction of the party.”
With Republicans falling to such a nadir, Patterson turned her focus on smaller incremental goals — better candidate recruitment, showing up in inland and ethnically diverse regions the party used to ignore — to chart a path to success.
“We weren’t trying to change the world. We weren’t trying to go in there and say, we’re going to turn California red,” Patterson said. “We have a limited amount of resources, and we’re going to go into places where we believe that there is a pathway to victory, and we’re going to find that pathway. We’re going to find the right candidate, and we’re going to win in these seats.”
In a sense, some of these gains were low-hanging fruit. The party put more emphasis on registration drives — using digital ads to target residents waiting at the DMV, for example, to sway potential Motor Voter registrants — than it had in the past, and lo and behold, the numbers went up.
Republicans had been perilously out-of-step with the state’s diversifying electorate, even though Patterson felt Democratic policies actually were harming the voters they purported to champion. Her favorite example: the plastic bag ban.
“Every single time, we have to walk into a store and buy another damn bag,” she said. “I think it’s the most regressive thing that you could possibly push upon people. I just didn’t feel like the Democrats were speaking to the people that they were claiming to be fighting for. But Republicans weren’t talking to them at all.”
Now, Patterson says the new registered Republicans look more like the voters the party had once ignored — younger, more Latino, more working-class. She noted that they’ve had more success flipping in inland parts of the state instead of the coast. Case in point: The Republicans’ improbable hold on Rep. David Valadao’s Central Valley district, even though on paper it is a blue seat. Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Dave Min pulled out a win in coastal Orange County district that includes wealthy, whiter enclaves such as Newport Beach, despite a slight GOP registration advantage.
She also touted tangible operational changes, such as moving the Trailblazers recruiting program in-house, which let the party build up a bench starting from school boards and water boards, not just legislative seats.
Patterson may be the beneficiary of impeccable timing: She ascended to the post after her party’s 2018 whupping, and she’ll be leaving before the midterms, which could very well be another rough cycle for the incumbent president’s party.
But she denies feeling any relief about being on the sidelines for the 2026 cycle. Instead, she says she feels a tinge of jealousy that the next Republican party chair may be able to accomplish the one thing that has eluded her — and the state GOP in general — for nearly 20 years: electing a Republican to statewide office.
“I do think that California is ready, and we’re seeing it in polls. We’re seeing 47 percent [who] are willing to vote for a Republican,” she said. “I just think we’ve got to find them the right one.”
Patterson didn’t identify which candidate she thinks will end the GOP statewide drought, but she thinks it will likely be the top prize — the governorship — that will flip before any of the other positions, and she suspects it will likely be “someone outside of politics” to pull it off.
“I’m a little bit envious that the next [chair]person could be the person that helps get a statewide elected,” she said. “I will be cheering them on, for sure, but maybe be a little bit envious of what they have the opportunity to do.”
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