CA to GOP: Adios

[babylonsister]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson-california-electorate-20121113,0,5979693.story

CA to GOP: Adios
The demographics of California's congressional delegation tell it all: a broad ethnic and racial mix for the Democrats, and solid white male for the Republicans.

By Harold Meyerson

November 13, 2012


There are many ways to illustrate the descent of the California Republican Party into oblivion. A starting point is the demographic breakdown of the members of Congress elected last week in the state.

Assuming the leaders in the few remaining close races hold their leads, there will be 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans representing California in Congress come January. Of those 38 Democrats, 18 are women, nine are Latinos, five are Asian Americans, three are African Americans, four are Jews and at least one is gay. Just 12 are white men. Of the 15 Republicans, on the other hand, all are white men — not a woman, let alone a member of a racial minority or a Jew, among them.

The composition of the state's new Democratic congressional delegation merely reflects the state's demographic changes. Latinos (72% of whom backed Obama) were 23% of the California electorate in 2012, up from 18% in 2008. The share of Asian voters (who voted for Obama at a 79% rate) doubled, from 6% to 12%, between those two elections. Voters under 30 increased their share of state ballots cast from 20% in 2008 to 27% in 2012, and backed Obama at a 71% rate. The state's proportion of white voters, meanwhile, fell from 65% in 2004 to 63% in 2008 to just 55% last week.

snip//

The press is full of stories recounting how national Republicans were surprised by the demographic changes that reduced the white share of the U.S. electorate to just 72% this year. The future, these stunned Republicans note, arrived early. But California Republicans have no such excuse. Politically, the future has been arriving here in every election year since 1998, when a labor-led effort flipped the increasingly Latino congressional and legislative districts in suburban L.A. County from Republican to Democratic. By 2012, labor's efforts among Latinos reached into the onetime GOP bastion of inland California. Last week, Inland Empire voters sent three Democrats — two Latinos and one Asian — to Congress.

The political transformation of California is a story involving millions of people, but two Latino labor leaders played the most decisive roles. As the Latino backlash mounted against 1994's Republican-backed Proposition 187 (which tried to deny all public services to undocumented immigrants), Miguel Contreras, who led the L.A. County AFL-CIO (and who died in 2005), and Eliseo Medina, a leader of the Service Employees International Union, instituted ambitious union programs in the mid-1990s to mobilize the state's Latino voters — programs that have expanded over the years.

While still in their teens, in the 1960s, both Contreras and Medina had been inspired to take up both the union and the Latino cause by Cesar Chavez — the farmworkers' leader who, visionary though he was, may not have envisioned just how far-reaching the political changes he set in motion would become. Last week, it became clear that his legacy, and that of his followers, includes a whole new California.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. It's a great article, well worth the read.

[flamingdem]

2. Great read n/t

[hifiguy]

3. Note to CA Repigs:

It ain't gonna get any better for you. Only worse. Much worse.

[left on green only]

4. Right on! And how about that new democratic super majority......

.......in the state legislature?

And yet in my own little right wing, red neck corner of this state, I still see the tea party card tables set up in front of Von's on the weekends, preaching their own brand of "reality" to the mentally challenged locals. But the sweet part is that now there is no longer a need to argue with them, because all I have to do is say, "That's OK, it doesn't really matter what you think, because no one else agrees with you. You are but a shriveling pimple of the ass of California civilization."

[joeybee12]

5. Pete "Sack of Donkey Dung" Wilson did some real damage to the GOP...

Good

[wryter2000]

6. All that and Governor Jerry Brown

I can't wait for January.