How Reagan’s California turned blue — and how GOP can take it back

California’s transformation — from a red state in the early 20th century, to a purple one after World War II, to deep blue in the 21st century — has had enormous consequences for American politics.

Home to nearly one out of eight Americans, California’s 54 electoral votes provide one-fifth of the total needed to win the presidency.

But the emergence of blue California is also fascinating historically, given the state’s legacy as the birthplace of Reagan Republicanism.

Ronald Reagan abandoned show business for politics in 1966, when he won 57.6% of the state’s vote in his first political campaign, defeating Democratic Gov. Pat Brown, who was seeking re-election to a third term.

In that era, California was somewhat more Republican than the rest of America, at least when it came to voting for presidents.

Richard Nixon had carried his native state against John Kennedy in 1960 and would go on to win it again in his successful campaigns of 1968 and 1972.

Even in 1976, with no Californians on the ballot for president or vice president, Gerald Ford won in California, despite losing the national election to Jimmy Carter.

All told, in the 10 presidential elections from 1952 through 1988, Republican nominees secured California’s electoral votes nine times, Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide against Barry Goldwater being the sole exception.

Beginning with Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992, the Democratic nominee has won California in the eight most recent elections. Democratic dominance is even more pronounced in down-ballot races.

No Republican has won election to the Senate from California since 1988.

After the 1966 elections, California’s delegation to the House of Representatives consisted of 14 Republicans and 24 Democrats.

The 2022 midterm elections produced a House delegation of 12 Republicans and 40 Democrats.

Since 2006, every election for statewide office — governor, attorney general, treasurer and so forth — has seen a Democratic victor.

Except for a few months in 1995 and 1996, when Republicans held a slight majority in one chamber, Democrats have controlled both houses of the state legislature since 1970.

Democrats presently account for three-quarters of the members in both the state senate and the state assembly.

Unable to enact, prevent, postpone or investigate anything done by the Democratic power structure, Republican legislators go to Sacramento mostly to hear one another’s speeches.

We can begin to make sense of California’s political shift by consulting “A Guide to Reagan Country: The Political Culture of Southern California,” a Commentary magazine essay published in May 1967, six months after Reagan had been elected governor.

The author, political scientist James Q. Wilson (1931–2012), made it clear that he was writing an analysis rather than an endorsement.

Nonetheless, as Tom Wolfe later observed, “Wilson was the first writer to sense the power of Reagan’s constituency as it spread out of California and up through the West, completely changing our politics.”

In “Reagan Country,” Wilson argued that “The important thing to know about Southern California is that the people who live there, who grew up there, love it” and do so in “the realization that they have found the right mode of life.” (Southern California, Wilson’s home, was also Reagan’s base. Los Angeles County, Orange County to its south and San Diego County to its south accounted for 64% of the 994,000-vote margin that Reagan amassed, statewide, in defeating Brown.)

The Southern Californian mode of life emphasized the suburban over the urban, the individual over the communal.

“People had no identities except their personal identities,” Wilson wrote. “I never heard the phrase ‘ethnic group’ until I was in graduate school.”

Its residents preferred houses to apartments, and private automobiles to mass transit. Long before there was a Reagan candidacy, Wilson wrote, there was “a ‘Reagan point of view’ in the Southern California electorate,” one “powerfully shaped by the kinds of people who went to California and the conditions of life there.”

This individualism had both a moral and a material basis. In the mid-twentieth century, large numbers of Southern Californians were the sons and daughters of migrants from “the Midwest, the border states, and the ‘near South.’ ” Wilson added, “Almost none came from Europe.”

The Southern Californians whom Wilson discusses came to adulthood shaped by a “fundamentalist Protestant individualism” that constantly emphasized “the obligation of the individual to find and enter into a right relationship with God, with no sacraments, rituals, covenants, or grace to make it easy.”

The material basis for the California worldview was the extraordinary post–World War II economic boom, which transformed all aspects of American society but lifted Californians’ standard of living faster and higher than everyone else’s.

The Cold War, in particular, turbocharged California’s economy. Veteran California journalist Dan Walters pointed out last year that in 1960, defense spending in California, much of it on Southern California’s robust aerospace industry, totaled $5 billion, several times more than the state government spent on all its functions.

“Reagan Country” explained that Southern Californians living through this expansion were more concerned “about the growth in the size of the economic pie” than about “preserving the size of their present slice.”

Accordingly, “The purpose of government was to facilitate this growth—open up new land, bring in water, make credit easy, keep the defense plants rolling.”

A concern for “property, propriety, individual responsibility, economic growth and limited government” were key elements of Southern California’s “general political culture,” Wilson wrote in 1967.

He expanded on the idea 20 years later. Californians, he said in an interview, “regard it as faintly offensive if they are described as exemplifiers of middle-class values, because they take those values for granted. Of course one is polite and maintains one’s property and washes one’s car, because you’re maintaining a shared sense of standards.

“Of course crime is a problem and the courts should be severe. In the East these are all controversial statements. You have to act embarrassed if you don’t own a dirty, used Volvo.”

So, what changed? How did California’s Republican Party go from being dominant to competitive to irrelevant?

Any explanation must begin with the simple truth that the kinds of people inhabiting California, and the conditions of life there, are very different in 2023 from what they were in 1966.

Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 after Ted Kennedy asserted on the Senate floor that the new law would not upset “the ethnic mix of this country.”

This turned out to be incorrect, profoundly so in California.

In 1970, 76% of California residents were white, a proportion that fell below 50% by 2000 and stood at 35% in 2020. The black proportion of the population also declined, from 8% in 1970 to 5% in 2020.

Standing against these losses were big gains among Asians (from 3% in 1970 to 15% in 2020) and Hispanics (13% in 1970, 39% in 2020).

Going into the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center reported, the only states where white residents accounted for fewer than 50% of registered voters were Hawaii, New Mexico and California.

Yet while California’s electorate has a different demographic profile from those in other states, its subgroups do not vote very differently from the way they do elsewhere.

In 2020, according to the exit poll shared by major media outlets, Joe Biden received 75% of the Hispanic vote in California and 76% in New York. White voters also voted almost identically: 51% for Biden in California, 50% in New York.

The biggest difference between the two big, blue states—Biden won 63.5% in California and 60.9% in New York — is that New York’s electorate was somewhat whiter than California’s, at 60% compared with 49%, and California’s was nearly twice as Latino as New York’s, at 31% to 16%.

The Republican Party has been far stronger in the other two mega-states, Texas and Florida, and that it has done better with Hispanic voters in both than it has in California and New York.

In 2020, Donald Trump won 41% of the Latino vote in Texas, where Hispanic voters accounted for 23% of the electorate, and 46% in Florida, where they were 19% of all voters.

Trump ended up with 52.1% of the overall vote in Texas, 51.2% in Florida, and 46.7% nationwide.

It is unlikely, then, that shifts in the size or preferences of ethnic voting blocs account for much of California’s political transformation. A more complete and persuasive explanation for the disappearance of Reagan Country begins with the impact on California of Ronald Reagan’s greatest achievement in public life: laying the groundwork for peaceful victory in the Cold War.

As Dan Walters explained in 2008, Republican competitiveness in California had depended on fighting Democrats to a draw in the Los Angeles metro region, and then winning enough votes in the agricultural inland to offset Democrats’ advantage in Northern California, especially the San Francisco area.

Aerospace and other civilian defense workers, even ones who belonged to labor unions, were crucial to this strategy. But the end of the Cold War saw Pentagon spending decline from 5.7% of GDP in 1985 to 2.7% in 1999.

These cuts “not only sparked California’s worst recession in a half-century,” Walters wrote, but also “generated a massive social change as an estimated 1.5 million people, many of them defense workers and their families, fled from the state.”

No longer competitive in Southern California, the GOP has lost the ability to contest the state overall.

Joe Biden won 71% of the vote in Los Angeles County in 2020, 60.2% in San Diego County and 53.5% in Orange County. The three, together, cast 7,389,000 votes, more than 46 of the 50 states.

The most populous California county that Trump carried was Kern, whose biggest city is Bakersfield. Kern accounted for 305,000 votes, fewer than the District of Columbia.

It’s no coincidence that the California GOP’s position was tenable at the beginning of the 1990s and had become impossible by the decade’s end.

Not only did Hispanic (and Asian) voters start becoming more numerous and, perhaps, more Democratic, but growing numbers of Republican voters started to become ex-Californians.

After growing faster than the rest of the country since joining the Union in 1849, California’s population has declined slightly as a proportion of the national total since 1990.

Its congressional delegation stayed the same size after the 2010 Census as it had been after 2000. After 2020, California lost one of its seats in the House of Representatives. Neither event had occurred before.

California has become, for the first time in its history, a net exporter of Americans because its government is no longer willing or able to satisfy the demands that made its citizens Reagan voters in 1966: keep the military-industrial complex humming, open up land, bring in water and facilitate growth.

A new commitment to environmentalism and participatory democracy that marked the tenure of Governor Jerry Brown in the 1970s has left California with a government that elaborately weighs the effects of new initiatives, public and private, and gives interest groups and activists opportunities to delay or scuttle any project or development plan to which they object.

What government has become bad at, though, is one of its core functions: making and implementing policy decisions.

If anyone ever builds a Hapless Hall of Fame, an entire wing will be devoted to California’s high-speed rail project.

The state’s voters authorized a $33 billion bond issue in 2008 after being promised that a system to be completed by 2020 would transport passengers between downtown Los Angeles and downtown San Francisco in under three hours,.

The most recent estimate for the project’s final cost is $113 billion. At the current rate of progress, it will not be completed in the 21st century.

Even a competent government, though, could not alter the fact that the state may be approaching its carrying capacity.

If California responds by growing up instead of out — building apartments instead of single-family homes, relying on mass transit instead of autos — its metro areas, especially Los Angeles, will become more like New York or Hong Kong, but even less like Reagan Country.

The people who loved that California in the belief that they had found the right mode of life will either put up with a different mode of life or find a different place to live.

California’s moral order, as discerned by Wilson in 1967, proved to be as fragile as the material circumstances that launched Ronald Reagan’s political career.

The Reagan Country moral code was based on deferred gratification: self-discipline and self-denial for the sake of greater future rewards.

The 1960s made clear, most emphatically in California, that deferred gratification could not stand prosperity.

The Golden State’s version of the Affluent Society led to a new consensus: the logic of life in America’s wealthiest, sunniest, most beautiful state dictated that it was time to stop deferring and start gratifying.

The community code that Wilson identified, with its emphasis on property, propriety, responsibility and a shared set of standards, came under attack for being hypocritical and repressive.

The California of the Reagan years was in the vanguard of social trends that repudiated middle-class morality: the sexual revolution, drug culture and a student protest movement.

The most appalling manifestations of the transvaluation of values all came from California: Haight-Ashbury, Jonestown, the Black Panthers, the Manson Family and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

According to Lou Cannon, his discerning biographer, Ronald Reagan applied to politics the lesson that he had learned in show business: it’s important to know when to leave the stage.

Eligible to run for a third gubernatorial term in 1974, Reagan declined.

Many factors entered into that decision, of course, but it is plausible that a sixth sense about public opinion, carried over from a Hollywood career, warned Reagan that his message would play better outside California than in it.

It’s true that Reagan went on to carry California against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and against Walter Mondale in 1984.

He did, however, win 93 out of a possible 100 states across those two elections. In the 1984 landslide, California was only his 37th best state.

At the moment of its greatest victory, then, Reaganism’s birthplace had begun to turn away from it.

The sensibilities that Reagan expressed in 1966 and James Q. Wilson explained in 1967 have little purchase on California’s public life half a century later.

Will they ever again?

The biggest reason to doubt a second act for Reaganism in California is mobility: as conservative voters leave, the state turns even bluer, inducing still more registered Republicans to vote with their U-Hauls.

The biggest reason to think that Reaganism might be part of the future here is unpredictability: nobody saw Reaganism coming in 1966, either.

If California voters draw the Occam’s razor connection between Democratic hegemony, government dysfunction and a declining quality of life, Reaganism 2.0 may not only arrive, but it might show up sooner than anyone thinks possible.

From City Journal.