Other Republicans survived similar near-miss contests. In one of the more telling races, a Republican nearly lost an Assembly contest in the Palmdale area, casting doubt on the party's longtime dominance in the Antelope Valley.
It could get worse, analysts say. Under Proposition 11, a ballot measure that passed last month, the Legislature lost its power to draw district lines. With demographic trends running so strongly against Republicans, the citizens' commission that will take over the job after the next census will probably draw even fewer safe GOP districts.
Allan Hoffenblum, a Republican consultant and publisher of the California Target Book election guide, described the state GOP as "a white man's party." As California has diversified, he said, the party has failed to adapt.
"They have lost the confidence of the overwhelming majority of minority voters, people of color," Hoffenblum said.
Spence, however, sees opportunities to expand the party's reach. Conservatives can take heart, he said, in the strong support of Latinos and African Americans for Proposition 8, the November ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage.
"There's at least one issue we agree on," he said.
Spence, a former Mormon bishop who serves on the West Covina school board and advises the National Right to Life Committee, also sees Republican resistance to tax increases as attractive to many Californians.
But those glimmers of hope don't easily translate into electoral victory.
Fiscal discipline does in fact resonate with voters, said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank. But the party's opposition to same-sex marriage puts off many younger Californians as well as upscale moderates, he said. And the party's hard line on illegal immigration has hurt its standing among Latinos, a group that grew from a 7% share of the electorate in 1992 to 18% last month.
"That's a very important issue to Latino voters," Baldassare said.
Still, it would be a mistake to write off the party's chances of mounting a comeback, particularly in statewide races. The last two Republican governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pete Wilson, demonstrated the success of a formula blending moderation on social issues, especially abortion, and conservatism on fiscal matters.
But both wound up supporting tax increases in difficult economic times, infuriating the conservatives who retain strong influence in nominating the party's candidates in primaries.
"Too many of them, when they get to Washington and Sacramento, they sell us out," Spence said.
The lengthy standoff between more moderate Republicans and the conservatives over which path is more appealing to California voters has only sharpened in the wake of the November defeat. That has left the party not only reeling but unable to coalesce behind a strategy for resurrection.
As bleak as California looks for conservatives, Spence recalled the Republican resurgences that followed Republican defeats in 1964 and 1992.
"It's not hopeless," he said. "I haven't moved to Idaho yet."
And as for Quinn's suggestion that the state's Republicans are beyond hope, Spence begged to differ.
"I don't know about dead," Spence said. "Dead's pretty strong. But the Republican Party has a lot of work to do."
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michael.finnegan@latimes.com
