GOP race shifts California's political fault lines

[...] the prospect of Donald Trump clinching the nomination in the Golden State has scrambled the party's political fault lines in advance of its pivotal June primary, forging unexpected alliances that blur those longstanding divisions.

Tea party favorite Ted Cruz was endorsed Saturday by former Gov. Pete Wilson, a centrist governor who raised taxes and feuded regularly with conservatives.

The state's Republican presidential primaries are usually low-profile affairs, occurring after the nomination has been clinched.

"Do the Republicans actually think they can win an election scaring every Hispanic in this country to death?" the other remaining GOP presidential candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, asked during a news conference Friday in Burlingame.

"If you're a Republican in California, you have a Democratic president you don't like, Hillary Clinton is likely to be the Democratic nominee, you have a Democratic governor," said Matt Rexroad, a GOP consultant.

"The traditional moderate-conservative divide has been redefined by an establishment-anti-establishment divide," he said.

Since both Trump and Cruz are outsiders, "people are saying, 'I have to choose,'" Schroeder added.

Trump's campaign hopes his dominance of the airwaves will let him run the table in a state where ground-level campaigning is often eclipsed by television ads and the media.