California's 2024 primary election is less than a year away, yet no prominent Republican has announced plans to seek California's open U.S. Senate seat — another sign of the decline of a onetime GOP powerhouse that produced two presidents and four governors in the span of just over a half-century.
As one of California's most highly prized political posts, the Senate seat is being vacated by retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein, first elected to the office in 1992. Even before Feinstein announced she would not seek another term, some of the state's most well-known Democrats were lining up to vie for the seat.
The same cannot be said of GOP hopefuls — a sign that "the Republican Party barely exists at the state level," said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College who was a decades-long Republican until Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.
