Deep-blue California’s rightward slide, explained

What’s happening in California? The deepest of blue states may have overwhelmingly voted for Kamala Harris, but it has also shifted right. Although the count hasn’t finished in California yet, with 87 percent of the vote tallied, President-elect Donald Trump is currently out-performing his 2020 vote share, and it looks like three California counties have shifted toward Trump by at least 7 points, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which is doing precinct-level reporting. Californians overwhelmingly passed a referendum to increase criminal sentences, rejected ballot measures banning forced prison labor and expanding rent control, and voted out a high-profile progressive prosecutor in Los Angeles County.

California is having “a deep identity crisis,” Politico reporter Melanie Mason, who covers California politics, told Vox. Inflation, among a number of other issues, has hit the state particularly hard, and voter frustration is high, she said.

“California is a deep blue state, dominated by Democrats, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s all Democratic Socialists of America all the time,” Mason said. “There’s shades of blue, and it seems like now maybe some shades of purple and even some red.”

Mason spoke to Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram to try to decode the shift roiling California’s politics. A partial transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows. Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts.

What was the draw of Donald Trump in California? Was it the same story we’re seeing across the rest of the country, as in immigration and the economy?

I think we have to put the economy at number one. Inflation was a problem all across the country, [but] because California is already a high-cost state, when prices went up even further, people really felt the squeeze. Gas prices in California are typically much higher than our neighboring states. And so when it goes up for everybody, we feel it really acutely. Inflation makes voters really angry, and that includes a lot of Californians. The immigration issue obviously was a huge pitch for Trump. Immigration politics in California are a little different than they are in neighboring states like Arizona or in other border states like Texas.

And this wasn’t just manifesting in terms of Trump in California, because there are a bunch of statewide ballot measures where people also seem to lurch a little rightward, right?

Right. The marquee ballot measure that we had in the state was called Proposition 36. And this had to do with crime; it was increasing penalties for certain thefts and certain drug crimes. It was passing with a gigantic margin; this is not a squeaker by any stretch. In all parts of the state — not just the redder parts but in deep blue places like San Francisco and Los Angeles — voters were really signaling that there was a frustration, a sense that public safety was at the top of their minds, and they weren’t happy with how the ruling Democrats have handled it. What’s notable is that this was a ballot initiative that Governor Gavin Newsom opposed, that Democrats in the legislature had tried to get off the ballot. So the fact that you saw all of these voters embrace it to the extent that they did, I think shows this real gap between where the politicians are and where the voters are.

Was it just Prop 36, or was the issue of criminal justice manifesting in other ways?

In my hometown of Los Angeles, there is a very well-known progressive prosecutor named George Gascón, who was elected in 2020, swept in by the wave that was set off by George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. And he lost reelection, again quite decisively, and his opponent ran on this platform that said, George Gascón’s policies have been too liberal, it’s been too lawless, issues like eliminating cash bail and not prosecuting certain misdemeanors, which Gascón instituted as soon as he got into office.

His opponent, Nathan Hochman, ran on rolling back some of those measures. What is interesting is that it’s not that Hochman was saying we need to reject criminal justice reform writ large; he wasn’t going all the way back to the “lock him up” rhetoric of the 1990s. But if you were looking at the ads, it was a lot of scare tactics that felt very familiar to the politics of the 1990s. You had another progressive prosecutor, up in the Bay Area, in Alameda County, Pamela Price, be recalled. Each of these individuals, you could say that there’s certain circumstances, but if you combine both with these district attorney elections and this ballot measure, it starts to build a narrative, which is that Californians were not happy with the direction that they were seeing on public safety.

But this wasn’t just public safety, right? Because Californians voted against raising the minimum wage, against rent control, and against abolishing forced labor in prisons. Am I reading all this right?

Yeah. The last one about abolishing forced slavery and prison labor was the most interesting. A lot of us thought, wow, if there’s really sort of this unsympathetic movement toward prisoners, what does that say? It is also notable that a similar ballot measure actually passed in neighboring Nevada. There was a lot of money that was spent against the rent control measure, for example, including ads that featured Governor Newsom very prominently as a “no” on that ballot measure on minimum wage.

I don’t want to over-index on trying to say that all these ballot measures have fallen and therefore progressive politics is dead in California. But I do think that when we take a step back, and combine that with the fact that there clearly was a red shift when it came to the top of the ticket, there is clearly a pendulum swing. And it’s notable that it’s happening in a state like California, which is run by Democrats.

Let’s talk about the Democrat running the state, Governor Gavin Newsom. You mentioned a couple of times he opposed Prop 36. He opposed this rent control measure. He was kind of tacking back to the middle leading up to the election. Was that because he was just worried about the optics of California, because Kamala Harris is from California, or has he been chastened by the recall effort?

Governor Newsom’s an interesting figure because in some ways he is very much the quintessential progressive Democrat, and there are ways that he really embraces that. He is also a San Francisco Democrat, but in the mold of San Francisco Democrats, he’s kind of centrist. Everything is on a spectrum. There are people far to the left of Newsom, and that has been the case in California for some time. But I do think that he has a pretty good political antenna, and he was realizing that there is a little bit more desire for tacking to the center from both Californians. And if he has larger ambitions, he has to shed the “crazy Californian” label, and be able to show that he can govern in the middle.

His predecessor, Governor Jerry Brown, had this axiom that he used a lot, which is: Governing is like paddling a canoe — you head a little to the left, a little to the right. And Gavin Newsom does not like to be compared to Jerry Brown, but I do think that we are seeing him in that mold. He certainly is positioning himself to be the face of the resistance now that Trump has been reelected, but he also wants to find opportunities to show to his base that we need to rein it in here a little bit.

Let’s talk about his larger ambitions, because, of course, Gavin Newsom came out of the womb with larger ambitions. How does he look right now to Californians? You mentioned that multiple ballot initiatives of his went the other way.

He opposed Proposition 36, this tougher-on-crime initiative, and the voters embraced it heartily. I do think it’s worth noting that on the campaign trail, in these key congressional districts in California, where there were millions of dollars being spent to try and win control of the House, he was pretty scarce. He showed up in the last weekend in a few key districts; he raised money online for these candidates, but it’s not like these candidates were hugging him particularly tightly. And I think that that tells you that in some of these purple districts, he’s not particularly popular right now. His approval ratings are not great. And so Democrats were not climbing all over themselves to try and get close to Governor Newsom.

Now, that could change. I think these next two years are going to be crucial when we talk about what his larger ambitions are. Is he going to try to position himself as the foremost Trump antagonist while Trump is in the White House? Is he going to try to think about his own legacy as California governor if that’s the thing he’s going to want to potentially run on as a presidential candidate? In which case there’s a lot of work to be done in California on some pretty big issues — things like the homelessness crisis, the affordability crisis. And if he’s seen at all as being distracted by national politics and not doing enough to tend to the concerns at home, that could be damaging for him. So he has a pretty impossible balancing act ahead of him. But, you know, he is a talented politician, so I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand, but just to lay down a marker that this is not going to be easy for him.

Newsom is already saying he wants to shore up California’s policies and protect their policies against Donald Trump. Do we have any idea how he plans on doing that?

He has already called for a special legislative session for next month. And what he wants lawmakers to address is more funding for the state attorney general’s office to fund California’s legal battle against the Trump administration. California really took the lead in Trump 1.0 in launching dozens of lawsuits against the administration. They are absolutely going to be following suit again. He also has been Trump-proofing policies that could be under threat from a hostile presidential administration, like our climate change policies in California, which are far more aggressive when it comes to trying to reduce emissions than what we’re seeing nationally. Those breadcrumbs have actually already been laid down, and I think it’s only going to increase as we get closer to Trump making it very clear what the shape of his administration is going to look like.

And do we think this state that just lurched 12 points toward Donald Trump will follow Gavin Newsom in that effort?

I think that’s the biggest question. On election night I was in Los Angeles with the California Democratic watch party — it was not a particularly happy crowd. And I talked to a lot of prominent Democrats with this question: What does resistance look like? When I asked Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor of Los Angeles, he said, “I think the resistance looks like reducing our poverty rate. I think the resistance looks like improving our public schools.” Betty Yee, who is another Democrat who’s running for governor, said, “We’re going to have to fend off a hostile federal government, but we cannot take our eye off the ball dealing with the economic issues that drove people to Trump in the first place.”

To me, that’s a huge signal that Resistance 2.0 might be slightly different than Resistance 1.0, because there was maybe a sense, even among Democratic legislators who really embraced being Trump antagonists the first time around, that they neglected some of the internal issues that are so important to California. I think that that actually has come back to bite them in this voter discontent that you’re seeing now.