They don’t call this the Left Coast for nothing. And in nine months, this state – once a cauldron of conservatism and the launchpad for three Republican presidents in the 20th century, now a redoubt of the new American liberalism – will be a vital battleground in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.
California’s new profile might be just a curious footnote in U.S. politics but for a summertime campaign-altering phenomenon: The fact that the Democratic presidential candidate with the greatest momentum right now is this state’s junior senator, Kamala Harris, whose jousts with former vice-president Joseph R. Biden Jr. about school busing to achieve racial integration created a political earthquake that earned her vast public attention, prompted a flood of contributions into a campaign treasury that had been performing poorly – and with astonishing speed and force catapulted her into the front ranks of the presidential fight.
To be sure, Mr. Biden remains the front-runner and Elizabeth Warren is leading her own charge, quickly replacing Bernie Sanders as the voice of the party’s energized hard left. But Ms. Harris has one advantage, only now coming into focus: California, which often held its presidential primary in the first week of June, moved up its contest to the early days of March, 2020.
The significance: California possesses a huge treasure of delegates to the Democratic presidential nomination, and a big victory here would convey enormous momentum and carry enormous significance.
All this came into focus recently when President Donald J. Trump, who lost this state three years ago by landslide margins to former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, misunderstood a reporter’s question in Japan and began a tirade against California and its new politics, inadvertently reinforcing the importance to liberals of this state’s primary.
When the President was asked about the future of Western-style liberalism, he didn’t go into a classic civics-textbook recitation about free expression, democratic political processes and equality under the law. Rather than offer a boilerplate response – the ennobling Enlightenment-era values of the American Revolution, the enduring virtues of the Constitution – Mr. Trump launched into an attack on California and some of “what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.”
Besides displaying an apparent ignorance about the fundamental values of the West, Mr. Trump drew fresh attention on this state just as its junior senator was surging in Democratic polls.
To be sure, for decades, California – populated, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, with “the pick of the Earth” – has been a state of contradictions.
This community is the site of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, but this area gave an overwhelming vote in last year’s Senate race to Ms. Harris, now a strong favourite in the March 3 primary that will account for 22 per cent of the Democratic National Convention delegates required for the party’s presidential nomination.
For more than a quarter-century this corner of California, 64 kilometres northwest of downtown Los Angeles, was represented on Capitol Hill by white male Republicans. But this winter, Katie Hill, a 31-year-old Democrat who made her mark as an advocate for the homeless, became its congressional representative. This state provided the foundation for mid-20th-century conservatism, fuelled by the legendary “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” but is now headed by a Democratic Governor who is a fervent advocate of the pro-environment Green New Deal derided by moderates and conservatives alike as a destructive, radical, anti-business program with no chance of enactment.
As long ago as 1947, California was recognized as the country in miniature. “California holds in microcosm the fundamentals of almost all American problems from race relations to reconversion, from the balance between pressure groups and the democratic process to the balance between factory and farm,” John Gunther wrote in his classic Inside U.S.A., a bestseller that year.
That is still true – along with the notion, fostered by forward-looking Californians such as Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., whose two separate stints as governor covered 16 years between 1975 and 2019, that Pacific-facing California is a laboratory for the American future.
And as it has grown in cultural prominence and population, California has become a political giant – but not the kind that Republicans Herbert Hoover (president from 1929-33), Richard M. Nixon (1969-74) or Mr. Reagan (1981-89) would recognize, and not only because a state that had no women in Congress when Mr. Reagan took office now has 20, a state that had one Latino in the House but now has 15.
The heart of California conservatism – indeed, perhaps the beating heart of American conservatism – was, until last year, Orange County, populated by sun-bronzed surfers, the Mickey Mouse-style denizens of Disneyland and a powerful strain of right-wing thought that took root in the vast, empty spaces that were a part of Los Angeles until the area broke away in 1898, the result of rural resentment of the big urban centre to the north. The ranchers, citrus growers and family farmers comprised a Republican empire, home to John Wayne and other symbols of American brawn, skeptical of central planning, terrified if not paranoid of Communist conspiracies.
Seven months ago, Orange County had four Republicans in Congress. They all lost in November’s midterm congressional elections. The Democrats also picked up two GOP seats in the state legislature and a county supervisor seat.
Across the state, Democrats predominate, holding 46 of California’s 53 members of the House in Washington. As a result, this is hostile country for Mr. Trump – but congenial territory for Ms. Harris, suddenly a symbol of change from a state that has always symbolized change, perhaps a symbol of the future from a state that has reached the United States’ future first.
David Shribman