As California goes….? (We hope)
by digby
This piece by Daniel Donner at Daily Kos about the amazing death spiral of the GOP in California is fascinating. An excerpt:
The high point for the California GOP came with the re-election of Pete “I Am Not A Racist” Wilson as governor as he campaigned for the indisputably racist Proposition 187, in 1994, the year of the Angry White Male (oh, hindsight). Prop 187 coincided with a shift in the political preferences of Latinos even more toward Democrats, and an increase in Latino political participation; while causation is difficult to prove, alternate explanations are hard to come by.
Since then, there has been neither a will nor a way for California Republicans to reverse course to any meaningful extent. Addicted to their hateful rhetoric, they have effectively sent themselves into a death spiral as the demographics of the electorate have changed.
Which brings us to this year. In January there will be fewer House Republicans from California than there were in the 1920s, when California only had 11 representatives total.
Orange County, the conservative paradise, has been wiped clean of House Republicans. A brief survey of recent writings about the GOP’s fate in California yields the terms “wipeout,” “irrelevance,” “dead,” “toxic,” “debacle,” “annihilation,” and “devastation.”
That’s a far cry from the sunny conservative optimism of the ‘80s. Let’s rewind the clock a little and take a look at the 1984 presidential election:
Ronald Reagan, a former California governor, easily carried the state with nearly six in ten of all votes cast. Southern California is painted entirely red. Yet even on this map, one county stands out for its conservatism: Orange County, where three of every four voters cast their ballots for Reagan.
On the left, the standard map shows several counties with support nearly as strong. The map on the right, however, where county size is shown proportional to the number of votes cast, shows these other counties have few votes overall. The state is dominated by the bulbous population centers in Southern California, the Bay Area, and Sacramento; of the darkest red counties, only Orange County has a substantial population—the anchor of Reagan’s support.
Fast-forward to 2016, and fortunes have changed severely. Southern California is entirely blue, including, yes, Orange County, which voted Democrat for president for the first time since 1936. Fear not, though, my stouthearted Republican holdouts: Lassen County voted for Trump by nearly as much as Orange County voted for Reagan. Never mind that it’s home to just 31,000 souls.
How did such a thing happen? In short, 1984 was a high point (presidentially speaking) in the total number of votes for the Republican candidate, both in California and in Orange County. This high point was (barely) exceeded in 2004, but the problem for the GOP is that the number of Democratic votes simply has kept growing and growing—and growing.
Donald Trump won fewer votes in California in 2016 than Nixon did in 1972, but Hillary Clinton had 2 1/2 times the number of votes for George McGovern. (During that time, the state’s population climbed from 21 million to 39 million.) In Orange County, Trump managed to earn a handful more votes than Nixon, but Clinton won more than three times the number of votes for George McGovern.
There’s more at the link. The old saying was “as California goes, so goes the nation.” Let’s hope it does in this case. These Republicans are batshit and they simply have to be stopped. They simply are incapable of sobering up until they hit bottom.
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