Lanhee Chen May Invigorate the ‘Slightly Alive’ California GOP

California’s GOP looks moribund. Republicans haven’t won a statewide office since 2006, when Gov.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

was re-elected. Democrats hold supermajorities in the state Legislature and 42 of 53 U.S. House seats. After beating back a recall challenge last fall, Gov.

Gavin Newsom

is cruising to re-election.

Yet Republicans are showing signs of revival, with four Democratic House seats unexpectedly competitive. The state controller’s race will test whether a GOP candidate with a compelling message and background can win statewide.

Lanhee Chen

is making his first bid for elected office, but he’s not new to politics. The 44-year-old was chief policy adviser to

Mitt Romney’s

presidential campaign in 2012 and a health policy adviser to the 2004

George W. Bush

re-election campaign. He is on leave from the Hoover Institution and Stanford University to run for controller.

State controller may seem an odd choice for a campaign debut, but it’s the only statewide office that doesn’t have an incumbent running. The job also carries considerable clout. The controller can audit government agencies and sits on some 70 state boards or commissions, including the state pension funds, Franchise Tax Board, Coastal Commission and Lands Commission. The final two regulate energy development in the state.

The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Mr. Chen grew up in Rowland Heights, an unincorporated area east of Los Angeles that is 65% Asian. He has lived the California dream of many Asian immigrants. After graduating from a public high school, Mr. Chen earned a bachelor’s degree, law degree and doctorate from Harvard. He now holds two appointments at Stanford.

One of his campaign themes is that the California that allowed him to succeed is vanishing. Public schools and the quality of life have deteriorated as the cost of living soars. Two years ago, Democrats including his opponent,

Malia Cohen,

championed a referendum to foreclose higher-education opportunities for Asians by repealing the state’s ban on affirmative action. After that failed, they successfully lobbied the University of California to exclude SAT and ACT scores from its admissions criteria.

Since launching his campaign in July 2021, Mr. Chen has met with local chambers of commerce and community groups across the state. On a recent afternoon, he dropped by a get-out-the-vote event at a campaign office of Rep.

Young Kim,

a Korean immigrant who faces a competitive re-election in a newly redrawn district that spans Orange County’s wealthy and working-class enclaves.

Most of the Republican campaign volunteers are Hispanic or Asian, including a phalanx of high-school students. Maybe the state’s changing demographics don’t doom Republicans to obsolescence. A Hispanic woman says she grew excited about Mr. Chen’s campaign after her 17-year-old son took her to one of his events. One reason may be that Mr. Chen doesn’t sound like a typical conservative in California who bemoans the state’s high taxes and paternalistic government. Instead he assails Democrats’ wasteful spending and mismanagement, a line of attack more likely to resonate with independent voters.

“Twenty billion dollars is the amount the state has spent on homelessness over the last three years, and the problem has gotten worse,” he says. “It’s unbelievable how much waste we’re seeing in the state, and the state controller is the person who can give us accountability for where all that money is going. It’s a job that requires someone who is independent.”

“We need more balance in the state,” Mr. Chen says. Even the liberal editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times and San Jose’s Mercury News seem to agree and endorsed him. It helps that he isn’t a conservative culture warrior. Although Mr. Chen supports abortion rights, Ms. Cohen is attacking him for “supporting national Republicans’ antichoice agenda.” That’s a sign she doesn’t have much ammunition.

A former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Ms. Cohen, 44, has styled herself after

Kamala Harris,

who rose amid the Bay Area city’s progressive machine politics. Scuttlebutt in political circles holds that Ms. Cohen hopes to use the controller’s position as a launch pad to run for governor or Senate.

“My campaign is about bringing equity and parity to the decision-making process,” Ms. Cohen, who is African-American, says in a campaign video, adding that it is important to have a woman of color from a working-class background who has experienced financial hardship in the controller’s job. Rather than simply parroting woke ideology, she is trying to convert the political liabilities that Mr. Chen has cited in attack ads into assets.

In those TV ads, Mr. Chen points out that a small business Ms. Cohen ran had its license revoked because it didn’t pay taxes, and her home was foreclosed on more than a decade ago. “Cohen can’t handle her own finances,” the spot warns. “We can’t trust her with ours.”

Ms. Cohen’s personal baggage makes her vulnerable, but she has one huge advantage: California has twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans. Minorities, who often register as independents, tend to vote Democratic because Republicans project a message that doesn’t resonate with them.

But Mr. Chen, along with Ms. Kim and other Republicans running in House swing districts, could recast the GOP as the party in California that represents the interests of the middle class and immigrants. A Chen victory in November would show the party is at least “slightly alive.”

Ms. Finley is a Journal columnist and editorial board member.