Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a newcomer to the California Legislature, wants to retake power from Democrats with his unapologetically brash, Trump-inspired conservatism. So why do so many Republican insiders dislike him?

Ryan Sabalow

CalMatters

Jeremia Kimelman

CalMatters

The Republican Party tried hard last year to keep one of its members, Carl DeMaio, from taking a seat in the California Legislature.

It endorsed his Republican opponent. A trio of prominent Republicans — serving in local, state and federal office — publicly urged local and state prosecutors to investigate him for criminal charges just days before the election. And a political campaign committee employing a prominent Republican consultant’s firm spent $2.1 million to defeat him.

None of it mattered.

DeMaio, a conservative talk-radio host and former San Diego City Councilman, easily beat the Republican Party’s chosen candidate by a double-digit margin.

Now, as he takes a seat representing San Diego in the state Assembly, he’s criticizing the party that tried to take him out.

“There are Californians who are relying on Republicans getting their shit together and actually … (be) a functioning, opposition party,” DeMaio said. “They’re not, they haven’t been, and it’s gotten worse and worse each year. They know how to surrender versus fight.”

DeMaio, 50, has made no shortage of enemies in and out of his party in his two decades as a conservative activist, even as his Reform California organization has grown to be one of the most prolific grassroots Republican fundraising machines in the state.

Now, California’s political watchers expect Sacramento will see a steady dose of his radio persona as a Donald Trump-esque, “own-the-libs” conservative with a heavy dose of self-aggrandized branding mixed in. That includes leaning heavily into a role as a political outsider who’s not afraid to push around the elites, even if they’re on the same team.

“He’s trying to be what Donald Trump would do in California,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego who’s followed DeMaio’s career. “(DeMaio) was not the team player who would, you know, follow party elites and wait his turn.”

In one of his first actions since he was sworn-in last month, DeMaio sent a letter to Congressional Republicans urging them to act on Donald Trump’s threats to impose strict conditions on federal aid for Los Angeles wildfires unless California agreed to GOP demands on water policy, forest management and other regulatory reforms.

Trump and GOP Congressional leaders’ threats to withhold wildfire aid have earned sharp rebukes from Democrats including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Some Republican leaders said the aid should not be conditional, though others have taken the same stance as DeMaio.

In another example of how he has no intention to play nice, DeMaio, the GOP’s first openly gay Assemblymember, likened the Democrats on the Legislature’s influential LGBTQ Caucus to the snippy, petty characters in the 2004 film “Mean Girls.”

“Bitch, I don’t want to sit at your Mean Girl table,” he said. Meanwhile, he’s coauthor of a bill Democrats are almost certain to kill that would block trans females from playing in girls’ sports.

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DeMaio Feuds with Republicans

But DeMaio is just as likely to infuriate his Republican colleagues in and out of the Legislature.

His GOP critics cite his relentless self-promotion, his criticism of his party and his tendency to take credit for victories he played little or no part in to help him fundraise and elevate his political brand. They also allege he breaks or bends campaign finance rules to advance his political ambitions, allegations DeMaio calls “baseless complaints.”

“Carl doesn’t want to play by the same rules that everybody else is,” said David Burton, a longtime conservative activist from the San Diego area.

Acrimony also tends to follow in DeMaio’s wake. During his Assembly race last year, he set off a vicious internal fight among San Diego County Republicans that included allegations he threatened to destroy the political career of a fellow San Diego GOP activist.

As one San Diego journalist covering the intra-party dispute noted, the conflict shouldn’t have surprised anyone since “almost every one of DeMaio’s 20 years in San Diego have featured dramatic fallouts with friends and former allies.”

That happened with Justin Schlaefli, another San Diego GOP activist. Schlaefli was an early supporter of DeMaio, but he said DeMaio publicly turned on him after a disagreement. He said DeMaio’s default setting is to say, “If you cross me on anything, you’re dead to me.”

“But when you say, ‘If you cross me, you’re dead to me,’ you have a long history of people crossing; you have a lot of people who are dead to you,” Schlaefli said. “A movement involves people. It does not involve just one person. And I’m sorry to say Carl DeMaio is no Donald Trump.”

DeMaio says he’s not a divisive person.

“I would say I might be a thorn in the side of the professional politicians and professional consultants when they’re not doing their jobs,” he said. “I’m not going to hold back. I’m not.”

Carl DeMaio’s Rise to Power

DeMaio’s rise to state office stems from tragic beginnings.

In his teens in Orange County, his father left the family and his mother died two weeks later. He went to Jesuit boarding school in Maryland and later attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. After graduating with degrees in international politics and business, he founded two firms that made millions training government agencies and corporations how to be more efficient. He later sold the companies.

DeMaio moved to San Diego in the early 2000s, where he inserted himself into local politics by giving the city of San Diego an award for financial management, only to pivot to being a self-described reformer once the city’s shaky finances became the center of a massive political scandal.

He was elected to the San Diego City Council in 2008 and served the next four years. DeMaio may have later rebranded himself as a no-compromise, Trump-like idealogue, but at the start of his political career, DeMaio “forged surprising alliances with some Democrats who also wanted to shake up government,” said Kousser, the San Diego political scientist.

Along the way, he infuriated public employees, including police and firefighters, for his efforts to cut salaries and other benefits to address the city’s more than $1 billion pension debt, which was draining the city’s annual budget. California’s powerful public employee unions detest DeMaio for it to this day, which is why they took the rare step of backing his Republican opponent, Andrew Hayes, in the 2024 Assembly race.

“Everything was aimed at working people, workers and unions,” said Lorena Gonzalez, the president of the California Labor Federation and a former Democratic Assemblymember from San Diego. “He spent a couple years doing that at a time when our city budget was tough, and he basically pointed the finger at working people and blamed them.”

During DeMaio’s unsuccessful run for San Diego mayor in 2012, a former fellow councilmember and ally called DeMaio a “political sociopath,” and local media criticized him for claiming to blow the whistle on San Diego’s financial crisis, which was already a full-blown public scandal by the time DeMaio rose to prominence.

“In both San Diego and Washington, DeMaio appeared out of nowhere, seized an issue headed for prominence, worked relentlessly, took credit even when it wasn’t quite due and eventually found real success,” according to a Voice of San Diego profile of DeMaio at the time. “It’s never been clear, either in Washington or San Diego, if DeMaio is working on behalf of himself or the ideas he’s promoting.”

DeMaio joined KOGO as a talk radio host after losing his first congressional bid in 2014 (He lost again in 2020). DeMaio was one of the sponsors of the 2017 campaign that successfully recalled Democratic state Sen. Josh Newman from office in response to Newman casting a key vote to raise gas taxes. It was followed by an unsuccessful effort DeMaio led to repeal the state’s gas tax.

DeMaio left the radio to campaign for his Assembly seat but he still found a way to reach listeners. Since early 2023, he’s produced nearly 400 podcast episodes, according to his YouTube channel, which has 128,000 subscribers.

DeMaio’s November 14-point victory over Hayes fit with the theme of DeMaio as an outsider taking on the establishment.

Hayes, who didn’t respond to an interview request, had endorsements from the state and local GOP as well as the region’s Republican Congressman, Darrell Issa, and Sen. Brian Jones, the state Senate’s Republican leader from San Diego. Hayes worked for Jones as his district director.

DeMaio did have one major advantage: A more than $1 million fundraising lead over Hayes, though that was offset by an independent expenditure committee that spent at least $2.1 million opposing DeMaio and supporting Hayes in last year’s race. The California Professional Firefighters’ union sponsored the committee and helped fund it along with other unions and business groups.

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Republicans, Union Allege DeMaio Broke Finance Rules

DeMaio’s Reform California raises so much money, much of it from small-dollar donors, it insulates him from needing to rely on the Republican Party. It’s also a big part of why DeMaio can criticize his fellow Republicans so freely.

Reform California raised at least $5.8 million since 2023, according to campaign finance reports. By comparison, the state Republican Party raised $24 million over the same time period. The top 10 legislators who raised the most money before the last election each only took in between $1.9 and $3.3 million, according to the Digital Democracy database

DeMaio’s critics in the GOP contend that Reform California primarily benefits just one person: Carl DeMaio.

“It’s called Reform California, but it’s really Carl DeMaio Incorporated,” said Republican political consultant Matt Rexroad.

DeMaio called Rexroad “a failed for-profit political consultant,” a reference to Rexroad working for the firefighters’ independent expenditure committee. Otherwise, DeMaio declined to address unspecific allegations from critics who claim he uses Reform California to benefit himself. DeMaio did not list any income from Reform California on his “statement of economic interests” form he filed as a candidate.

During DeMaio’s campaign, the president of the state’s police union filed a complaint with state campaign regulators last year alleging DeMaio violated campaign finance laws.

“Based on publicly available information, it appears that Mr. DeMaio has misused Reform California funds to benefit his Assembly campaign in direct violation of state law,” the complaint says.

A spokesperson for the California Fair Political Practices Commission said the complaint is under review.

Unions weren’t the only ones to ask for an investigation last year. In the days before the November election, Senate minority leader Jones, U.S. Rep. Issa and San Diego County Supervisor Joel Anderson wrote a letter to the California Attorney General and the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office urging a criminal investigation into what they called “willful violation of California election law in (DeMaio’s) campaign for the California State Assembly.”

The AG’s office didn’t respond to CalMatters. A DA’s office spokesperson said the office doesn’t confirm whether an investigation is underway. Issa, Jones and Anderson each declined interview requests via their spokespeople.

DeMaio called the allegations “a rehash of the same false complaints” from “Sacramento swamp politicians” attempting to “stop us from actually fighting tax increases and helping people get elected.”

DeMaio said the November election and other recent victories showed what’s possible for California conservatives. Republicans flipped three Democratic legislative seats, voters rejected a slew of progressive ballot initiatives and they passed Proposition 36, a tough-on-crime initiative that Newsom and progressives opposed.

DeMaio said it shows that Republicans in Sacramento “need to stop having a Stockholm Syndrome mindset of, you know, ‘Boy, these (Democrats) are the masters. These are the people in charge, and we just have to accept the crumbs.’

“I am not accepting crumbs,” DeMaio said. “I want to be an opposition party.”

About the Authors

Ryan Sabalow is a Digital Democracy reporter for CalMatters.

Jeremia is a data journalist who uses code and data to make policy and politicians easier to understand.

About CalMatters

CalMatters is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom committed to explaining California policy and politics.