Why Is California a Blue State?
Friday: For over 25 years, the state has been a Democratic stronghold. But it wasn’t always that way.
Good morning.
While the country anxiously awaits the results from a handful of states that will determine the outcome of the presidential election, it has been known since Tuesday evening that California’s 55 electoral votes would go to Joe Biden.
[Follow the latest election updates from across the country here.]
It might come as a surprise then, that California was once considered a red state until the 1990s. From 1952 to 1988, the state gave rise to Republicans like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. During that period, only one Democratic candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson, took the state.
This all changed in 1994, when the backlash against the passing of Proposition 187, which prohibited undocumented immigrants from accessing public services, activated a generation of Latino voters. After the proposition passed, thousands of people marched through downtown Los Angeles protesting the measure. All over the state, students organized grass-roots movements and walked out of classrooms. In 1997, Proposition 187 was ruled unconstitutional and never adopted into law.
“California Republicans embarked on an anti-immigration agenda that alienated Latino voters and drove them into the open arms of the Democratic Party,” the public opinion group Latino Decisions said in a report, calling it the “Prop 187 Effect.”
“We are a blue state because we’ve had a growing share of Latinos and Asian-Americans since the mid ’90s and after Proposition 187 they became more Democratic,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California.
And the state is only getting bluer, with the number of Democrats increasing this year to 46 percent compared with 45 percent in 2016.
Likely voters are still disproportionately white. While Latinos make up 35 percent of the state’s population they make up just 21 percent of likely voters. But that makes them the second largest group of voters in the state by a large margin.
“In terms of sheer numbers, it’s Latinos,” Ms. Romero said. “California is a lock on the electoral map for Democrats and for Biden. A big part of that story is the growth of historically underrepresented populations and the growth of Latinos in particular in California.”
While Ms. Romero says it’s too early to analyze this year’s voter turnout rates, she thinks there will be an even more representative electorate this year. “In 2016, we saw the highest share of the electorate for Latinos that we’ve ever seen,” she said. “And I think we’ll see that again in 2020.”
— NYT: Top Stories
