Democrats Losing Their Hold on California and California Losing Its Hold on America

But it does suggest gains for Republicans in congressional and state legislative districts, and it does lend credence to polling data, reviewed last month in this space, showing Trump and Republican gains among Hispanic and Asian voters.

This year, Republicans won majorities in 13 districts to Democrats' 39, a vast improvement on the 46-7 Democratic margin in 2018 when, in reaction against Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won back the House majority and the speaker's chair.

Republican incumbents in three heavily Hispanic and Asian seats who were elected with 51% in 2022 got between 55% and 56% of primary votes this year. And Republicans won between 43% and 49% of primary votes in nine other districts, seven of them heavily Hispanic. Most of those seats aren't seriously contested this year, but most may be in years to come.

As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini argues in his book "Party of the People," non-college-educated Hispanic people, Asian people, and Black people with conservative views are voting increasingly Republican, like non-college-educated white people.

California has seen something like this before. Over the last three generations, the state has been populated by two brief but enormous surges of migration of (to oversimplify) Midwesterners from 1946 to 1973 and Mexicans from 1982 to 2007. The Midwesterners provided majorities first for Pat Brown liberals and, after riots in Berkeley and Watts, for Ronald Reagan conservatives. Midwestern migrants enabled Republicans to hold the governorship in six of eight elections from 1966 to 1994.

Mexican voters entered the voting ranks more slowly. But in this century, they, together with liberal white college graduates in the San Francisco Bay Area and Westside of Los Angeles, have made once-marginal California solidly Democratic. Just as settled-in Midwesterners soured on liberals' 1960s policies, so settled-in Mexicans seem to be souring on this generation's liberal excesses.

Gentry liberals' high turnout will probably keep California Democratic, but Republican trending in lower-turnout Mexican areas will reduce their ranks in Congress well below Pelosi highs.

Meanwhile, California has been losing population, down 538,000 between 2020 and 2023, even as it lost one U.S. House seat in the reapportionment following the 2020 census. Migration from Mexico halted during the 2007-2008 housing crunch, and today's illegal immigrants are surging toward Texas, not California.

California bitterly clings to much of the high-tech and entertainment industries, but it seems to be losing its hold, in the days of Reagan, on the imaginations of most immigrants and Americans alike.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.