California, the state of new starts, holds immense political power

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The struggle for the American presidential nominations reaches its final major test in California, a state that has long represented change and renewal even as it has been a laboratory of conservatism, a place of boundless growth that now confronts the challenges of limits, the setting for the fun and fantasy of Hollywood as well as the hard and harsh realities of commerce.

In recent days, the two presumptive presidential nominees, the Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Republican Donald J. Trump, have campaigned across the state and used its remarkable natural beauty, its diverse and sometimes gritty cities, and its 11 media markets to shape their images, to curry favour among voters and to broadcast attacks against each other and, in the case of Ms. Clinton, to try to marginalize Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who harbours hopes for a victory there that might keep his fading nomination prospects alive.

The two Democrats are in a virtual tie, with Ms. Clinton telling supporters in Riverside that "we want to finish strong," and with Mr. Sanders, who criticized the wages paid to Disneyland workers, arguing, "If we win California, we are going to go marching into the Democratic convention with a lot of momentum."

Probably true, but also probably momentum without meaning. Ms. Clinton almost certainly will have enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot; a loss in California would be a loss of face – embarrassing, to be sure, but more an irritant than an impediment to her goal. But for Mr. Sanders, the victory he promises would raise his profile even more at the Philadelphia Democratic convention and reinforce his conviction that his effort was more a movement than a campaign – and that that movement, having been validated in the Golden State, has earned him a place at the highest counsels of the party and earned him influence and legitimacy at the party's platform hearings.

That's because California has enormous power in American politics. If it were a separate country, its economy would rank eighth in the world, about a third bigger than that of Canada. It has more than 68,000 restaurants. Tourists spend more than $122-billion a year there. It produces a third of the United States's vegetables, two-thirds of its fruits and nuts – and accounts for more than half of the nation's motion-picture production employment. Its almond industry alone generates 100,000 jobs. And its population is about 8-per-cent larger than Canada's.

Yet, for all its distinctive characteristics, California may stand out most of all for its unusual political culture. It produced the first nominee of the young Republican Party in the middle of the 19th century (the frontiersman John C. Frémont, who ran in 1856) and then three Republican presidents in the 20th century: Herbert Hoover (in the White House 1929-1933), Richard M. Nixon (1969-1973) and Ronald Reagan (1981-1989).

Still, the breezes of change that course through California underline how ephemeral the effects of these political giants have been.

Mr. Hoover, a graduate of the pioneer first class at Stanford and blamed, perhaps unfairly, for the Great Depression, is remembered mostly at the campus of his alma mater, where a tower holding the conservative Hoover Institute soars above the university's Spanish-style sandstone structures. Mr. Nixon, who won a signature Senate race in 1950 that established him as a bruising Cold Warrior, is remembered primarily among the lemon trees of Whittier, where his boyhood home and presidential library sit. And Mr. Reagan, while celebrated nationwide as the founding father of the new conservatism, is hardly a factor in contemporary California.

"National Republicans have a nostalgia for Reagan," says Lou Cannon, who has written a series of biographies of the 40th president and a volume on his gubernatorial years of 1967-1975. "But here in California he is a distant figure."

Indeed, the most enduring political figure in the Golden State may be one of Mr. Reagan's Republican successors, Pete Wilson, who as governor backed a controversial immigration plan, the 1994 ballot initiative known as Proposition 187, that banned undocumented immigrants from access to health and education facilities and programs. Though the measure was overturned in court, it rankles Hispanic voters even today and accounts in large measure for the Democrats' domination of the state, which the Republicans have lost in the last six presidential contests.

But it also underscores a vital part of the California character, the vast diversity of its citizens – a legacy of geography (the border with Mexico that has provided a gateway for immigrants, legal and illegal, and the 1,352-kilometre coastline that is a gateway to Asia) and history (the 1849 Gold Rush that attracted thousands of Easterners, the construction of the transcontinental railroad that brought Chinese workers to the state, and the Second World War-era military construction boom and the recent high-tech revolution that brought tens of thousands of ambitious engineers and programmers to California).

It is, above all, the state of new starts. It was where Jack London returned after being jailed in Buffalo, where the Dust Bowl Okies moved after fleeing Oklahoma, where the United Nations began in 1945 after the rancour of the Second World War.

The current governor, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., has had his own repeated fresh starts – first as a Jesuit novitiate, then as a law clerk in the state Supreme Court and, years after his two terms as governor, he became the mayor of Oakland and then, beginning in 2011, won two more terms as governor. In that time, and during two presidential campaigns, he has transformed from the starry-eyed, 37-year-old "Governor Moonbeam" of 1975 to the steely-eyed, 78-year-old governor determined to build a high-speed rail system in 2016.

But there is also no such thing as a typical Californian. The state has English learning programs for 1.4 million children, who speak 60 different languages at home. The state includes staid bankers, migrant farm workers, surfers at Malibu and ski bums at Tahoe, writers typing away at a screenplay and actors hoping they might be discovered.

Not long ago, the law school at the University of Southern California noticed that its students told school officials they were attracted to the Los Angeles area because of its sunny and mild climate and that they did not expect to practise law there – but decided to settle in the area anyway.

"It speaks to the quality of life here," Robert M. Saltzman, retired associate dean of the law school, says. "But it also speaks to the new start plus the openness and sense of welcome to people from all over, and to people who are different. There's no such thing as an outsider in California."

The state is also a fountain of contradictions – the biggest one being California's laid-back image and its hard-charging high-tech industry. Silicon Valley, for example, has a surface gentility but is a remorseless centre of competitiveness. Underneath the foosball of the millennial workplaces and the food of the trend-setting, wallet-busting restaurants, lies a competitive culture.

"How can you be laid-back when you are working 70 hours a week?" asks Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Stanford Graduate School of Business professor who wrote the popular book Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't.

Fewer than half of today's Californians identify with a specific religion, but the state's mad growth – at a rate three times faster than the rest of the country in the 1930s and 1940s, growing by 53.3 per cent between 1940 and 1950 – and huge wealth produced a spiritual vacuum that over the years has been filled by evangelists such as Aimee Semple McPherson and Robert H. Schuller, both of whom had radio shows.

"This is the capital of narcissism," says Christopher Edley Jr., who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and operates a non-profit to promote social mobility. "They do it better here than anywhere else."

Nearly three-quarters of a century ago, the author John Gunther travelled the country and wrote profiles of the 48 U.S. states. "California," he wrote, "holds in microcosm the fundamentals of almost all American problems from race relationships to reconversion, from the balance of pressure groups and the democratic process to the balance between factory and farm."

For a state that is America's relentless engine of change, at least that much has stayed the same.

David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.