Changes Since 1992: California

Following Donald Trump’s victory, the dominant media narrative on the two major parties has quickly gone from “Republicans are nearing extinction” to “Democrats are no longer a national party,” and understandably so. Just about the only thing we heard in all election coverage of the past four years, from the end of the 2012 campaign until last month, was how Republicans were facing demographic ruin. The minority, Democratic coalition was ascendant. The GOP must embrace identity politics or be washed away by ever-growing numbers of liberal Hispanic voters.

Now, of course, the demographic focus is all on how the Democrats have abandoned the white working class. But just as those voters were wrongly ignored during the Obama years, it would be a mistake to think that just because Republicans won this election, changing demographics are no longer an issue for them and vital swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will ultimately trend in their direction. Many states are trending red, as I’ve written about over the past month, but states are also trending blue, far more dramatically than Virginia.

Many people forget that California, the home of both Nancy Pelosi and Ronald Reagan, was once a Republican stronghold. And many of those who remember this fact, don’t realize that the state was still widely competitive for Republicans, even conservative ones, as recently as 2000. The transformation of California from conservative stronghold to battleground state to liberal bastion should be a warning that, just as Democrats ignored the white working class at their peril, Republicans ignore Hispanics and other minorities at theirs.

Although California has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992, it is an interesting fact that before 2008, the nominee consistently won by less than thirteen points—and that margin was falling:

1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012	2016
Clinton +13.4	Clinton +12.9	Gore +11.6	Kerry +10.0	Obama +24.0	Obama +21.0	Clinton +28.8

These were all still convincing victories, to be sure. But the trend in favor of Republicans, post-Obama, is intriguing. And for comparison’s sake, Kerry’s ten-point margin in 2004 is almost identical to Bush’s concurrent 9.8% margin in… Arkansas.

Statewide races paint an even more interesting picture. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have served as California’s two U.S. Senators since 1992 (Feinstein won in a special election that year, and won her first full term in 1994). Both have been would I would term fairly generic liberal Democrats, so one would expect them to regularly win California by fairly wide margins. And indeed, they have generally won reelection handily, but there have also been interesting exceptions.

In 1992, Feinstein won her Senate seat by more than sixteen points, but Boxer won by less than five points. Two years later, when Feinstein was up for election to her first full term, she won by less than two points. And in 1998, Boxer won by ten points.

That year marked the last time either faced a truly competitive reelection fight until 2010, when Boxer won another term (against Republican nominee Carly Fiorina) by just 9.6 points. This year, Boxer retired, and under California’s new “top-two”, all-party primary voting system, two Democrats advanced to the general election—Rep. Loretta Sanchez and state Attorney General Kamala Harris, who won by a twenty-five point margin.

But no electoral analysis of California would be complete without looking at attorney general and gubernatorial elections, and that’s where things really start getting interesting. Several times since 1992, California has seen competitive, high-profile races in which a Republican has either won or come close to winning—most recently in 2010, when Kamala Harris was elected Attorney General by just two-tenths of a point.

California Gubernatorial Elections, 1994-2014:
1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Wilson +14.9	Davis +19.6	Davis +5.0	Schwarzenegger +16.9	Brown +11.4	Brown +18.8

California Attorney General Elections, 1994-2014:
1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Lungren +14.4	Lockyer +9.1	Lockyer +11.0	Brown +18.2	Harris +0.2	Harris +13

Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger also won a special election for governor in 2003, by a margin of 17.1%.

This is where Democratic dominion of California begins to look much less permanent. Schwarzenegger’s candidacy was obviously a special case; there were many voters who would presumably have voted for a generic Democrat over a Republican, but the possibility of having the Terminator as governor was just too good to resist. But some of the other recent Democratic margins are shockingly low (looking at you, Kamala Harris), and every single Democratic victory over the last twenty years has significantly underperformed the margin we’ve come to expect from Democrat presidential candidates in the state. Obviously, a governor who enters office with a five-point margin of victory is just as powerful as one who enters in a landslide. But only one will be looking over his shoulder as reelection looms, and seek to reach out to independents and Republicans accordingly, at the risk of upsetting his own party.

Overall, however, and particularly at the presidential level, California is a warning that in politics, nothing is eternal—and today, Democrats in Arkansas and Republicans in California find themselves in almost identical positions. Neither state is permanently out of reach for the minority party, but they will have to fight for every inch of what they once took for granted. New coalitions will have to be formed, new outreach efforts aggressively pursued, and new strategies tested, because just as the current electoral map began to take shape in 1992, so to could the winner of the 2032 presidential election be decided by actions taken by the California Republican Party in 2017.