California state profile 2018
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The Almanac of American Politics The complete 2018 edition of the Almanac is available here. Ballotpedia readers can receive a 10% discount on the Almanac by entering the code ballot18 at checkout. |
| This article is reprinted here with the permission of the 2018 edition of the Almanac of American Politics and is up to date as of September 1, 2017. All text is reproduced verbatim, though links and visuals have been added by Ballotpedia staff.
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Both sides of America's political divide have taken the opportunity to emphasize how different California is from the rest of the country. After the 2016 presidential election, supporters of Donald Trump complained that were it not for Hillary Clinton's margin of victory in California, Trump would have won the popular vote. For their part, California's Democratic politicians have taken a leading role in opposing Trump's vision for America; some Californians are even flirting with seceding from the union, though "Calexit" faces constitutional obstacles that make it highly improbable. Despite such antagonism, California and the United States need each other, even if it no longer seems like it.
Americans have long thought of California as the Golden State -- a distant and dreamy land initially, then as a shaper of culture and as a promised land for millions of Americans and immigrants for many decades. America's most populous state remains in many ways a great success story. But in other ways, it has failed to fulfill its promise. It is the birthplace of much of the world's most advanced technology, yet it has plenty of poor neighborhoods. Among the states, California has attracted the largest number of immigrants from Mexico, Latin America and Asia, but has also seen a sizable exodus of citizens to other states. With one out of eight people in the United States, California is a demographic giant, which means that both its achievements and problems are the nation's. California's population is 39.3 million, far ahead of second-place Texas at 27.9 million and up more than 5 percent since the 2010 census. Metro Los Angeles has 13 million people, second only to metro New York City's 20 million. San Diego and Orange counties, with more than 3 million people each, are the nation's fifth and sixth most populous counties. The state is only 38 percent white – two percentage points lower than in 2010, and the third lowest of any state. Hispanics account for about 39 percent, making California second only to New Mexico. Asians account for 15 percent of the state's population, ranking it second only to Hawaii. By contrast, California's percentage of African Americans – a bit under 7 percent – is modest. The percentage of African Americans in Texas is almost twice as high as in California; it's almost three times as high in Florida and almost five times as high in Maryland. In California, 27 percent of residents are foreign born.
Change has been a constant in California's history, and it owes its preeminence not only to its natural advantages, including its vast geographic area and pleasant climate, but also to human ingenuity. California's economy has been transformed by one group of newcomers after another, and its politics are periodically transformed with the suddenness of an earthquake. In 1848, when California passed from Mexico to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it was sparsely populated, inhabited by a few thousand Indians and Mexicans and by a few hundred U.S. soldiers and men on the make. Then in 1848, gold was found at Sutter's Mill, and the world rushed in. Within months, San Francisco became one of America's 25 largest cities. The big money in the Gold Rush was made not by the miners but by the grocers and dry-goods merchants and transportation entrepreneurs who provisioned them, such as the Big Four - Crocker, Hopkins, Huntington and Stanford - who built the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads. Many of the laborers were Chinese, and California whites, angry at low-wage competition and fearful of a wave of Asian immigrants, were the impetus behind the bluntly named Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended legal Chinese immigration and was not fully repealed until 1965.
The railroads sold off vast chunks of the Central Valley to large farming operations and enticed settlers with low fares to newly created suburbs in the Los Angeles Basin. Engineers built giant aqueducts that stretched hundreds of miles, from Yosemite to San Francisco and from the Owens River to Los Angeles, bringing water essential to the cities' growth. Early 20th century California was affluent and cultured, containing abundant museums, libraries and universities such as Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley. It was America's window on the Pacific, alert to developments in China and Japan, Hawaii and the Philippines, and it was eager to extend America's economic reach and military strength -- yet as author Carey McWilliams wrote, California was an "island" separated from the rest of the country. That began to change in World War II, when it became one of the great defense industry states, building ships and airplanes by the thousands. Millions of Americans came and millions stayed. The population rose from 7 million in 1940 to 17 million in 1963, when California passed New York as the nation's most populous state.
The heads of the big units of government and business planned California's future - leaders such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and industrial mogul Henry J. Kaiser, who constructed vast shipyards and steel and aluminum factories. Republican Gov. Earl Warren husbanded tax monies after the war to build schools and the freeways that did as much as Detroit's auto factories – if not more -- to cement the automobile's place in American culture. Educators Robert Sproul and Clark Kerr transformed the University of California into what Kerr called "the multiversity," and Democratic Gov. Pat Brown added to the vast system of canals and aqueducts that brought water from the wet north to the dry south. But the real engine of growth was the little people who took advantage of this infrastructure and built a humming economy. When California's defense plants closed down after World War II, government and civic leaders imagined that hundreds of thousands would head back east. But in those days before universal air conditioning and thermal winter clothing, people had experienced a climate in which it was comfortable to be outdoors all year. They wanted to stay, and so, as urbanologist Jane Jacobs pointed out, they created one-eighth of all the new jobs in the nation in the late 1940s in metro Los Angeles. This growth, multiplied thousands of times over, helped make California a mega-state. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County became what New York City was 100 years before: the great entry point in the United States, with some of the largest concentrations of Mexicans, Iranians, Samoans, Filipinos, Salvadorans, Armenians, Guatemalans, Koreans and Thais outside their native lands. The farmlands of Imperial County are 83 percent Hispanic. San Francisco County is 35 percent Asian and Santa Clara County in Silicon Valley is 36 percent Asian.
The demographic changes transformed California politically. Before the war, it was a Republican state with progressive leanings. Most of the struggles for political power took place within the Republican Party. The in-rush of the GI generation, with its allegiance to the New Deal, and the building of auto and steel factories with unionized workforces, transformed California into a two-party state. These new migrants were middle- and working-class -- family men and women enjoying a life in suburbs in the lovely California climate. Warren's progressive Republicans remained dominant through the mid-1950s, but with Brown's election as governor in 1958, a group of talented liberal Democrats took over. Things turned sour in the mid-1960s, when student rebellions at Berkeley and the Watts riots upset the New Deal order. Californians responded by calling in a disillusioned New Dealer espousing the conformist cultural conservatism of the GI generation -- Ronald Reagan. Then, in 1974, California elected Pat Brown's son Jerry as governor and for a time was entranced by his fresh vision of baby boomer liberalism. California's laid-back lifestyle became a magnet for highly educated boomers, lawyers, scientists, techies and show-biz types. But it took time for them to become the dominant force in state politics. California voted Republican in every presidential election from 1968 to 1988, and Brown's administration was not wholly successful on policy, partly because he always seemed to have one eye on the presidency. In 1978, voters froze property taxes by passing Proposition 13 and ousted three of his state Supreme Court justices in 1986, after Brown had left office. Republicans followed Brown in the governorship: George Deukmejian, elected in 1982 and 1986, and Pete Wilson, elected in 1990 and 1994.
As Reagan was occupying the White House, California's defense industry boomed, and Silicon Valley began to flower south of San Francisco. Immigration continued in vast numbers, with newcomers living in the stucco bungalows and garden apartments that white, blue-collar workers left behind in neighborhoods like those south and east of downtown Los Angeles. Large swaths of the San Fernando Valley and Santa Ana in Orange County became predominantly Latino. Public policy was increasingly set by the Democratic legislature, led from 1980 to 1995 by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. In the 1990s, disaster struck in several forms. Defense industry cutbacks hit the Los Angeles area hard, corporate mergers and relocations caused additional upheaval, and television screens were filled with seemingly apocalyptic news - floods, wildfires, earthquakes, riots and sensational trials. The state government responded competently to the natural disasters, but less well to those that were man-made. Lou Cannon's Official Negligence, the definitive story of the Rodney King case, is a story of public-sector incompetence as dismaying as that spotlighted for the nation in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
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Since the recession of the early 1990s, California has seen an outflow of people -- mostly white and middle-class-to-affluent – that to a large degree has offset the flow of people from other countries. In the meantime, from the late 1990s to the housing bust of 2007, federal policies encouraging mortgages for borrowers of more modest means produced a housing and construction boom in the Inland Empire - the sprawling San Bernardino and Riverside Counties east of Los Angeles - and in the Central Valley. Latinos moved out from central Los Angeles County and bought new houses with little or no down payment and hopes of windfall profits from what everyone assumed would be endlessly rising house prices. But the market crashed in 2007, and the Inland Empire and Central Valley had some of the nation's highest foreclosure rates. For the next five years, California also had one of the nation's highest unemployment rates, exceeded only by much smaller states such as Nevada or Rhode Island. Between 2010 and 2016, the state's population grew by 5.4 percent – but that represented a slowdown from the heady years of the 20th century. Part of the reason: the state's birthrate, which in 2015-2016 sank to its lowest level since the Great Depression. International migration, especially from Mexico, also declined. For the first time, the 2010 reapportionment did not add any seats to California's House delegation, and it's not on pace to add any in 2020, either.
In the decades after World War II, California was a key target in presidential elections. In Reagan's time, it went Republican in presidential elections while usually tilting Democratic in congressional and state contests. But starting in the early 1990s, it has become one of the bedrock Democratic states. The shift occurred slowly: While Bill Clinton carried California 46%-33% in 1992 and proceeded to lavish attention on the state, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson won reelection in 1994 by a 14-point margin while supporting Proposition 187, which barred state aid to illegal immigrants. But ever since, California's increasing Latino voter share has given Democrats enormous margins.
Two other voting blocs have helped make California solidly Democratic. One group consists of affluent, highly educated whites living in lush corners of the big metropolitan areas, many with ties to the state's two resilient economic and cultural behemoths - Silicon Valley and Hollywood. They tend to be liberal on cultural issues such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage, more moderate on fiscal issues, and hostile to the religious conservatives who hold sway within the national Republican Party. These voters have been similarly repelled by the increasingly conservative edge of the state's vestigial GOP. In the Reagan years, affluent neighborhoods, except for the heavily Jewish west side of Los Angeles, usually cast large Republican majorities; since then, they have voted increasingly Democratic. This has helped Democrats maintain large majorities in California's House delegation and in both houses of the state legislature since 1996. The second group now bolstering Democratic fortunes is Asian Americans. In 1992, they favored George H.W. Bush over Clinton, but by the 2016 election, they backed Hillary Clinton over Trump, 70%-17%. Asian voters have become an important factor in the lopsided margins by which Democrats carry the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County.
California's two governors from 1998 to 2010 -- Democrat Gray Davis and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger -- tried to exert some discipline over the state's finances, with limited success. The power of the public employee unions has continued upward pressure on government spending, especially when California's progressive tax structure brings in gushers of revenue in prosperous years. When revenues plummet, as they did after the tech boom ended in 2000 or when the housing market crashed in 2007, the pressure is then to increase taxes. Davis was unable to hold spending down and was blamed for electricity blackouts. He was recalled, 55%-45%, and on the replacement ballot, Schwarzenegger finished first with 49 percent. In office, the ex-bodybuilder/actor sought a conservative shift via ballot measures, but voters rebuffed him, and his job rating flagged. He turned things around by backing liberal measures like carbon emissions reduction legislation and bonds for a high-speed rail line, and it was enough to easily win him reelection in 2006.
California's economy was slowing even before the housing market crashed in 2007. But the Great Recession made things far worse. One-third of California homeowners owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth; the proportion hit 60 percent in parts of the Inland Empire. Corporate executive complained that high taxes, stringent regulations, complex land-use controls and high litigation risks hampered the economic recovery. Public employee unions' success in negotiating large pension benefits led to some municipal bankruptcies, such as Vallejo in 2008 and Stockton and San Bernardino in 2012. Seemingly adrift, California voters turned to a familiar face - Jerry Brown. In 2010, he defeated former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman for the governorship, 54%-41%, despite her spending $141.5 million of her own money. Once mocked as the flaky "Governor Moonbeam," Brown gained ground-level experience as a two-term mayor of troubled Oakland and matured into a moderate technocrat who knew the inside game; crucially, he was at last undistracted by presidential ambitions. Task No. 1 was fixing the state's fiscal outlook; Brown made great strides, ultimately squeezing out an annual surplus that, while modest, would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. While the nation's overall economic comeback helped, Brown also played a role by successfully urging passage of a 2012 ballot measure that temporarily hiked sales taxes and income taxes on higher-earners.
By the middle of the decade, California had the sixth-largest economy on the planet – bigger than France and Brazil. To be sure, poverty persisted – one of every five Californians is at or below the poverty line when adjusted for the cost of living. And the main reason for the high cost of living is the high cost of housing. The real estate firm PropertyShark.com determined that 70 of the priciest 100 zip codes for housing are in California, including No. 2, Atherton in Silicon Valley. California needs about 3.5 million new homes - three times its current pace of construction -- to keep up with population growth and keep housing costs down, according to McKinsey Global Institute. In its coastal environs, California has an increasingly two-tiered society, with not much of a middle class in between; San Francisco ranks as the second-most unequal metro area in the nation and saw the fastest growth in inequality in recent years, according to the Brookings Institution.
Once upon a time, people used to analyze California politics by distinguishing between Northern California and Southern California. Northern California - the Central Valley and the North Coast as well as the San Francisco Bay Area - tended to vote Democratic. Southern California - Los Angeles County as well as the smaller suburban and desert counties - tended to vote for Republicans. Today, the geographic divisions run the other way. The dichotomy is now between coastal California - all the counties that touch the ocean or San Francisco Bay - and interior California. Politically, coastal California votes Democratic and furthers liberal policies; California was ahead of the curve on same-sex marriage (and on electoral reform, including voter-backed experiments in non-partisan redistricting and top-two-finisher primaries), and in 2016 it made marijuana legal. In California's interior, the income gap is not nearly as wide, and the cost of living is lower, but private-sector job creation was not stellar before 2007 and has been dismal since. If interior California were a separate state, it would be competitive in presidential elections and would have 19 electoral votes. But coastal California, more than twice as populous as interior California, is dominant politically. For the most part, since Prop 187, the state is out of reach for Republicans. Even in the 2014 wave year for Republicans, California's GOP candidates for statewide office secured between 41 and 47 percent of the vote, and the Democrats who coasted to victory included not just Brown but several younger politicians with bigger ambitions - Attorney General Kamala Harris, who succeeded Barbara Boxer in the Senate in 2016, and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is poised to run for governor in 2018.
In the 2016 election, California voted for Clinton by 30 points, up from Barack Obama’s 23- point margin in 2012. Clinton’s raw vote total was 11 percent higher than Obama’s in 2012, while Trump’s total fell by 7 percent from Mitt Romney’s. Four counties switched from red to blue – Riverside, Fresno, Nevada and, most strikingly, Orange, which hadn’t voted for a Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 but which swung 15 points in the Democratic direction in 2016. Eight other counties stayed blue but increased the Democratic victory margin by double digits between 2012 and 2016. In San Diego, Democrats expanded their winning presidential margin by 11 percentage points; double-digit increases, or close, also came in San Mateo, Marin, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Contra Costa and Napa counties. In each of the seven biggest counties in the state, Clinton improved on Obama’s 2012 raw vote totals, by between 36,000 (San Bernardino) and 247,000 votes (Los Angeles). Trump's raw vote mostly fell in these seven counties, rising modestly only in Riverside and San Bernardino, two counties experiencing weak recoveries. Meanwhile, Brown – backed by a Democratic super majority in both chambers of the legislature, making it one of the nation's few remaining Democratic "trifectas" – spoke out strongly against the newly elected president's policies, articulating support for policies to address climate change and protect illegal immigrants. Such positions should prove popular in a state that voted overwhelmingly against Trump, unless and until he finds a way to leverage federal power to punish the state.
California has 55 electoral votes. Since 1972, it has had substantially more than any other state. That fact gave Republicans a near lock on the presidency in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, from 1992 to 2016, Democrats swept the state, giving them a structural advantage in the Electoral College. The state's vote for Democratic presidential candidates has grown from 46 percent in 1992 to 62 percent in 2016. Democrats are winning where the voters are: In the 10 counties that cast the most ballots in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton captured all 10, including, for the first time since 1936, Orange County, the one-time home of GOP conservatism in California. Clinton received a higher percentage of votes than any presidential candidate since FDR won 67 percent in California in 1936. Clinton won the vote in seven congressional districts represented by Republicans; Donald Trump, who captured only 32 percent of the vote, won no district represented by a Democrat.
For years, California's June primary was a kingmaker. In 1964, the state was the center of national attention when Nelson Rockefeller lost here to Barry Goldwater in the GOP contest. California returned to the limelight in 1968; Robert Kennedy prevailed over Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic contest, but was assassinated by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan on primary night. Four years later, George McGovern edged out Hubert Humphrey in the Democratic primary. The state's delegation was the focus of a pivotal credentials fight at the Democratic National Convention where McGovern prevailed, assuring him the 1972 nomination. But the state lost its marquee status in four of the next five election cycles when both parties' nominations were essentially clinched long before California voted. For the 1996 campaign, California moved its presidential primary from the first week in June to March 26, which was still too late to make a difference. So in 2000 and 2004, California held its primary in the first week of March, and it became one of several states that clinched nominations for George W. Bush in 2000 and for John Kerry in 2004. In 2008, California joined 14 other states holding primaries on Feb. 5, Super Tuesday (eight other states conducted a caucus). Still, the Golden State primary never achieved the status it once held. In order to save public funds, the legislature switched California's presidential primary back to its traditional date in early June, when state and congressional primaries are held.
As the Democratic primary approached the finish line in 2016, both Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders campaigned vigorously in the state. Sanders had camped out in the state and held dozens of events and rallies, hoping that an upset victory might give him enough momentum to keep contesting the Democratic race to the convention in Philadelphia. Clinton, leaving nothing to chance, devoted the final five days before the primary campaigning in the state and dispatched her husband and other surrogates to dozens of events. While Sanders promoted his liberal agenda, Clinton argued that she would be the strongest candidate to take on Trump in the general election. But the primary was a bit anti-climactic: The day before voters went to the polls, the Associated Press and CNN reported that Clinton had wrapped up enough Democratic convention delegates, including super delegates, to claim the nomination. Nonetheless, more than 5 million turned out to give Clinton a 53%-46% victory. She carried all of the major metropolitan areas. Sanders won most of the state's counties above Sacramento. Because Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination in May, California had little importance for Republicans. But eager to remain in the limelight, Trump held rallies around the state and won 75 percent of the primary vote.
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