President Donald Trump and his supporters are right about one thing in this explosive clash between California and the federal government: It is a fight not just over position or even over public safety. It’s about values. And it’s been a long time building.
For Trump, it’s a battle of his choosing, giving him the opportunity to escalate conflict on a signature issue, immigration, in a city and state governed by political adversaries.
For California, it is the logical result of a long and profound transformation — from the days of Republican Party dominance to Democratic Party control — one I’ve watched and chronicled for more than 30 years and that I now see culminating in literal fighting in the streets. Californians are turning out against forces sent here by guardians of a value system that the state has rejected.
It was within the living memory of many Californians that this state was a solid center of the Republican Party. Most of its greatest governors — Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren, Ronald Reagan — were stalwarts of the GOP, and the state’s officeholders were almost universally Republican. Warren was a colossus of the California Republican Party, the first person ever to win three terms as governor and, in 1946 and in an era of cross-filing, the first and only person ever to be nominated for the governorship not just by his own party, the GOP, but also by the Democrats.
A few years later, when Pat Brown was re-elected to his second term, in 1962, he was the first Democrat ever to win the governorship twice.
That changed. Today’s California is as staunchly Democratic as yesterday’s was Republican, a flip in orientation that helps to explain the resolve of Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in the current showdown with Washington.
No statewide officeholder in California is a Republican. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the last Republican to hold the governorship, and he was an anomaly — a celebrity elected in a recall and one who governed as a centrist. No Republican has served as mayor of Los Angeles since 2001, when the moderate Richard Riordan left the stage, only to be wiped out in his campaign for governor. So far has the spectrum swung that in 2022, when Bass ran for mayor, her opponent, a developer named Rick Caruso, registered as a Democrat just in time for the campaign, realizing that the city would not, under any imaginable circumstance, elect another Republican to lead it. The county’s current district attorney made the same calculation in time for last year’s race.
Many forces have propelled that shift, of course, but chief among them are the parties’ divergent approaches to the environment and immigration and the shifting demographics of California, which, like so many things emanating from this state, are just now beginning to wash over the rest of the country as well.
The environment is the easiest of those three developments to track. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, both parties could boast of environmental successes. Democrats were more closely associated with efforts to clean air and water, but it was California’s Richard Nixon who founded the Environmental Protection Agency. And though Lyndon Johnson signed the first Clean Air Act, Nixon extended and improved it.
In California, reverence for the coastline, redwoods and interior forests was a bipartisan commitment in those years. But as Republicans increasingly came to represent business over stewardship and corporations over consumers, Californians who identified with environmental concerns gravitated to the Democratic Party. By 2020, Trump and other Republicans were calling climate change a hoax, and California rejected them. In that race, 78 percent of all Californians said the environment mattered greatly to them in selecting a president; 91 percent of Democrats ranked the environment as key to their support, and so did 58 percent of Republicans. Joe Biden beat Trump here by almost 30 points.
Meanwhile, the state’s demographics were changing. Once a part of Mexico, California has always been closely connected to its southern neighbor, with whom it shares ties of culture, trade and family. The percentage of the state whose residents are of Mexican or Latino origin has steadily grown since the 1950s, to the point that Latinos are now the state’s largest ethnic group, having surpassed whites.
In theory, that could cut both ways politically, and there was a time when Latino loyalties in California were divided between Democrats and Republicans. That ended in 1994, when a ballot initiative known as Prop. 187 sought to deny state benefits — vaccines, education, social services — to those who were in the state illegally. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, endorsed Prop. 187, helping secure his re-election but driving Latinos en masse away from his party.
Although California voters approved Prop. 187, it turned out to be the high-water mark for anti-immigration enthusiasm in the state. In its aftermath, most of the measure was thrown out by the courts, and an invigorated electorate turned to candidates friendly to immigrants, no matter how they arrived in the state.
But the Prop. 187 debate was three decades ago, and memories fade. Latinos in California and elsewhere favored Kamala Harris in 2024, but Trump outperformed expectations among Latino voters, perhaps signaling a softening of old antipathies.
If so, the events of this week may rekindle recollections. As an old saw of California politics goes, it’s hard to debate issues when you’re busy deporting someone’s grandmother.
