California's Hidden Conservatism
Has the Golden State hit "peak blue?"
Topline Takeaways
Joe Biden’s performance was the strongest of any presidential candidate in California since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.
Despite the state’s liberal stereotype, many conservative voters live in the state’s rural areas and many of the state’s more conservative policies outlast opposition.
Evidence is emerging showing that some of California’s urban areas have hit “peak blue” and are producing small shifts toward supporting Republicans.
It’s no surprise that Joe Biden won California with the highest vote total for any candidate in the state’s history. California has supported Democratic candidates in every presidential election since 1992, with the margin growing in every election cycle. Joe Biden’s campaign also led to the largest margin of victory for any presidential candidate in the state since FDR’s second election in 1936. California’s tilt toward Democrats is largely due to the divergent nature of the state’s politics and the trajectory of the Republican party. Many voters in major cities like San Francisco and Oakland are deeply progressive and fall so far left on the political spectrum that they’re reluctant to vote for moderate Democrats. Meanwhile, the Republican party has shifted toward conservatives, often with an explicit focus of defining themselves against the liberal politics of California.
“…In the face of all this Republican history and Republican reality, Trump’s Republicans look in the California mirror and somehow see the enemy. And so they make war against all of our Republican-ness — our direct democracy, our commitment to environment and health, our technological supremacy, our love of immigration and free trade, our tradition of independent governance and regulation.”
- Joe Mathews, a journalist and editor for the Zocalo Public Square
Joe Matthews presents a fascinating point that helps recast California’s liberal stereotype. While California is home to a substantial liberal voting base, the state also holds a raft of conservative policies and qualities that voters vehemently defend.
Proposition 13 is an infamous initiative in California, originally passed in 1978, that restricts property tax increases across the state. Despite the initiative’s economic conservatism, it’s been surprisingly resilient against attempts to amend or dismantle it. Many ballot initiatives have been crafted in recent years to fight Prop 13 and nearly all have failed to garner a majority of voters’ support.
More recently there was Proposition 22, a 2020 ballot initiative that exempts ride-sharing companies from providing basic employee benefits to drivers like employer-provided healthcare, unemployment insurance and bargaining rights, which passed with close to 60% of the vote statewide.
The state also has a fierce commitment to local governance that tends to cause friction when cities and counties need to work together to accomplish major projects. For example, the San Francisco Bay Area has 27 different transit companies, all of which are led by local and/or county governments that have different priorities. Bringing them all under a single fare-card system took over a decade of legislating and cooperation. This is because the Bay Area has a total of nine county governments and over 100 different city governments that operate independently. Enacting regional legislation requires immense cooperation and coordination across several levels of government, making radical or divisive policies difficult to implement without widespread buy-in.
-Jake Avidon, TransLink senior program coordinator for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission
The agricultural Central Valley is California’s primary “swing region” as its economy relies heavily on agriculture and is less urbanized than many other parts of the state. Most of these counties broke for Joe Biden in 2020, but Trump managed to capture the “border” counties that hold pieces of the valley and much of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east.
Instead, Trump’s base of support falls primarily in the ‘far-north’ counties of California. (This isn’t “NorCal,” some locals call the area "the Northstate”) Counties in this region are sparsely populated (holding barely 4% of the state’s voters) and primarily rely on a mix of agriculture, mining and logging industries.
These counties share more in common with rural counties in neighboring states than other counties in California due to the same rural-urban tensions experienced in nearby states like Oregon and Washington. As such, these rural counties have engaged in similar statehood campaigns to increase their representation in government. The first significant push for counties to secede from California came in 1941, when a mayor in Oregon called for a coalition of counties along the Oregon-California border to form a new state named “Jefferson.” This first push was short-lived as the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942 led organizers to abandon their cause and focus on the war. The effort was revisited in 1992 when California State Assemblyman Stan Statham placed an advisory vote on secession in 31 counties, all of which voted in favor. The effort died a second death when the bill failed to receive committee approval in the state legislature.
The biggest push for Jefferson’s statehood came in the early 2010s. On September 3, 2013 the County Board of Supervisors for Siskiyou county voted 4-to-1 to secede from California and form the proposed state of Jefferson. This was the first of a long chain reaction of votes by neighboring counties to join Siskiyou in secession. By January of 2016, a total of 21 counties, representing 1.7 million voters, submitted a declaration to the State of California to leave the state and form the new state of Jefferson. Since then, the movement as stalled as the decision now shifts to both the California state legislature and the US Congress as both governing bodies would have to approve the declaration of secession and the establishment of a new state.
Today, the idea of Jefferson lives on through the branding of Jefferson Public Radio. The station was first established in Ashland, Oregon as a college radio station and readily expanded its footprint in the 1980s by building broadcast relay stations along the California-Oregon border. In 1989, the radio network rebranded itself to Jefferson Public Radio as at that point its coverage was coextensive with the proposed state of Jefferson. The organization now has 10 different radio affiliates across the region and is an official NPR member organization.
Forecasting the Future: As the national Republican party continues to shift toward the right, much of California responds by shifting left. The 2020 Biden-Trump match-up shifted over 25 counties toward the Democratic party by 2 points or more, with several rural counties shifting by more than 5 points. What’s most surprising though is that many of California’s urban counties shifted to the right between 2016 and 2020, signalling that Democrats may have hit a ceiling in some of their deepest-blue counties. Drilling down into Los Angeles county provides a helpful look at local cities and towns that are experiencing this shift (thanks to city-level voting data provided by the state.) Cities including Long Beach, Pasadena, Palmdale and Burbank showed minor shifts toward Trump between 2016 and 2020. Some cities like Glendale, Pomona and Inglewood shifted by as much as 5% toward the Republican candidate. While it’s tough to know what directly impacted this shift on the local level, it should stand as a red flag for Democrats that their success in California is not preordained. Whether it be voters growing tired of the Democratic governance (as seen in the recent recall effort) or higher turnout leading to the activation of more Republican voters, Democrats should be on high-alert to prevent further shifts from happening.