Why Did California Turn So Progressive?
The paradox: California voters started becoming more progressive after 1969 in order to keep things the same.
From Twitter:
FischerKing
California was a reliable red state in POTUS elections until 1992. Californians elected Pete Wilson governor from 1991-99. During his tenure they passed the ‘Save Our State’ law - aimed at preventing illegals from using public services. California banned affirmative action in 1996. They even banned gay marriage at the height of that debate.
What happened? Mass illegal immigration. But also ‘tech bros’ and ‘private equity’ and ‘venture capital.’ They were mostly rich ‘newcomers.’ They liked the weather and the business climate. But these guys funded the leftwing politicians that have overturned the policies that native Californians voted in. They also fostered radical leftwing cultures in their businesses during the Obama era, and funded his campaigns, in return for favors - like getting little antitrust scrutiny while the DOJ wasted its time breaking up ‘egg cartels.’
A big favor granted Silicon Valley and Hollywood during the first Obama term was near-immunity from the feds (and their aligned media) pestering these California glamor industries over their lack of Diversity. Affirmative action back then was for firemen, not for important workers like screenwriters or coders.
But as soon as Obama was in safely for a second term, the DEI hammer started to come down even on these sources of vast donations to the Obama re-election drive.
They took advantage of a good economic climate that relied on old-fashioned American culture and law and order. They were arrogant and stupid - and didn’t understand that this culture provided the stability that generated a good business climate in the first place. And they upended it - largely unwittingly.
Many of them are now living other places, and have washed their hands of the dysfunction they helped bring on. A lot of them are in Austin, Texas - bitching about the same things they escaped in California. They’re kind of oblivious to their role in all this.
But hopefully people like Spencer Pratt will come in and govern cities like Los Angeles, illegals can be deported, fraud on public services ended - and California can serve as a case study for how things go wrong in this modern world, and also how to put things right. Because CA is really the jewel of the USA, is aspirational for Americans, and should be cleaned up and saved.
Let me offer some deeper historical perspective on California politics.
Indeed, California’s big pile of electoral votes went to the GOP Presidential candidate 9 times out of 10 from 1952 through 1988. But note that Republicans won 7 of those 10 elections nationally, and lost in 1960 (Kennedy vs. Nixon) by a hair.
California was more like a swing state that leaned a bit Republican, especially when Californian superstars were on the Republican national ballot, which they were in 7 of those 10 elections: Nixon five times and Reagan twice.
Really, the only time California stands out as particularly Republican was 1976 when Gerald Ford beat Jimmy Carter 49.4%-47.6%.
I suspect that had a lot to do with the two parties having diverged on Cold War military spending during the waning days of the Vietnam War. Much of the California economy back then was based on aerospace, which was heavily funded by Washington, especially in the 1980s.
For example, the 1980s were a glamorous time in Silicon Valley for computers, with Apple, Intel, and the like. But the biggest employer in SV in the 1980s was Lockheed's assembly line for the Trident nuclear submarine missile.
George Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis in California in 1988 probably had a lot to do with expectations that he’d keep the aerospace spigot open. (I recall my septuagenerian father feeling proud around 1988 that eight years after his retirement from Lockheed in 1980, after working there since the 1930s, that Boeing had called him up to offer what seemed to him like a huge salary to go back to work on military aircraft. But he was enjoying retirement, and didn’t take them up on that.)
The first Bush Administration kept the money flowing to California until the Soviet Union collapsed (after the easy U.S. victory in the Kuwait War demonstrated that those kick-ass weapons built in California at vast expense, like the Stealth Fighter, really had given the USA air supremacy) in August 1991. Then in 1992, however, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney downsized the military-industrial complex, plunging California into a deep recession, and driving a lot of California Republican voters, such as defense engineers, out of the state. (That’s one reason some cheaper inland West states like Idaho went from purple to red — California Republicans moving in.)
By the way, I admire Bush and Cheney for going for the peace dividend for winning the Cold War even though it wrecked the GOP in California. It was good for Americans in general, although not for California Republicans.
Not surprisingly, Bush the Elder then got crushed in California in 1992, losing to Clinton 46.0%-32.6% (with Perot doing well in the state).
The conventional wisdom is instead that California Republicans doomed themselves by Californians voting to restrict welfare spending on illegal immigrants in 1994’s Proposition 187. Thus, it is said, the GOP sank itself in the Clinton-Dole 1996 election by bringing down on its head the rightful racial wrath of Mexican-American voters outraged by the Proposition 187 insult to their beloved illegal co-ethnics.
As you may have noted, this respectable theory sounds an awful lot like that deplorable far right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory we are constantly told to abhor. But, you see, this idea that racist Republicans were replaced in California’s polling places by angry immigrants is regularly put forward by the Good People who want more immigration, not by the Bad People who want less immigration. So therefore it’s not a Great Replacement conspiracy theory at all. It’s just the plain truth. Or at least it ought to be.
But, seriously, Dole lost most states, so there was nothing unexpected at the time about him losing California. (Dole lost less badly in California relative to the national totals than Bush had in 1992.) In reality, California turned blue decisively in 1992 with Cheney’s aerospace budget-cutting, and has been largely blue ever since.
This is not to say that immigration didn’t play a major role in relentlessly pushing the electorate leftward in California over the decades. Instead, I’m just debunking the media myth that Mexican-American citizen voters are hypersensitive against any crackdown on illegal immigrants, the way that Jews and blacks tend to be highly sensitive about treatment of their fellow Jews and blacks, respectively. Jews in the media, of course, also often think in complex triple bankshot terms, such as obsessing over how restrictions on immigration of fanatical Muslims might turn out, far down the road, to be bad for the Jews. (How’s that working out post-October 7, 2023?
Although Trump’s strong showing with Hispanics in 2024 may turn out to be historically anomalous, we have a lot of other evidence since 1996 that Hispanic voters are not as fanatical supporters of illegal immigrants as the liberal media often claim they must be.
But let’s backtrack to the Pivot Year of 1969 to point out another massive development in California politics that can be hard to grasp if you weren’t there at the time.
Paywall here.
