Within recent memory California was consistently conservative. Its citizens voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988. That’s 9 of 10 elections in a row.
Then the left started to dominate California. Why? VDH is too diplomatic to say “illegal immigrant”–he uses the less accurate term “undocumented immigrant” instead—and focuses on that. Illegal immigration is a problem, true.
But he could have added that it is also in part a result of California becoming flooded with legal immigrants as well. Immigrants total 15 million of the state’s 40 million people, representing over 37 percent of the state’s population, according to figures that are a few years old and are probably an underestimate today. Los Angeles County is only 26 percent White today, according to Census Bureau data.
Survey after survey shows that immigrants are disproportionately big-government liberals. As one overview of the data concluded, “solid and persistent majorities of Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their children share the policy preferences of the modern American Left.” As a result, as University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel has demonstrated, in the nation’s largest counties (which are where immigrants tend to settle), “Republicans have lost 0.58 percentage points in presidential elections for every one percentage-point increase in the size of the local immigrant population.”
This is the answer to what happened to California Republicans. Viva La Raza!
Within recent memory California was consistently conservative. Its citizens voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988. That’s 9 of 10 elections in a row.
Then the left started to dominate California. Why? VDH is too diplomatic to say “illegal immigrant”–he uses the less accurate term “undocumented immigrant” instead—and focuses on that. Illegal immigration is a problem, true.
But he could have added that it is also in part a result of California becoming flooded with legal immigrants as well. Immigrants total 15 million of the state’s 40 million people, representing over 37 percent of the state’s population, according to figures that are a few years old and are probably an underestimate today. Los Angeles County is only 26 percent White today, according to Census Bureau data.
From a 2018 National Review article:
This is the answer to what happened to California Republicans. Viva La Raza!