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Zorro

(15,691 posts)
Sun Jun 4, 2023, 01:37 PM Jun 2023

How California, land of Nixon and Reagan, turned blue and changed American politics

Bill Clinton was busy filling cabinet positions and shaping his economic agenda when a memo landed from a team of political advisers. Although Clinton was still more than a month away from becoming president, the topic was his reelection nearly four years off.

Marked confidential and spilling over nearly eight pages, the document outlined a strategy considered vital to Clinton’s hopes for a second term: Lock down California and its generous share of electoral votes so his campaign could “concentrate its energy on other, more tightly contested, states.”

In 1992, Arkansas’ five-term governor became the first Democratic presidential candidate in nearly three decades to carry California, the political birthplace of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Few, if any, considered Clinton’s victory in California the start of a political realignment; he won just 46% of the vote.

But his victory and a repeat in 1996 — the product of relentless courtship and a fire hose of federal spending — helped color California a lasting shade of blue and dramatically reshaped the fight for the White House.

It augured a major partisan shift throughout the West, which over the last 20 years has become a Democratic stronghold, stretching from the Pacific coast, across the desert Southwest into the Rocky Mountains.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-06-04/how-democrats-won-west-reshaped-presidential-politics-california-bill-clinton

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How California, land of Nixon and Reagan, turned blue and changed American politics (Original Post) Zorro Jun 2023 OP
Why California Politics Is Always 15 Years Ahead usonian Jun 2023 #1
Bears watching how California handles AI and it's disruptions. brush Jun 2023 #2

usonian

(9,429 posts)
1. Why California Politics Is Always 15 Years Ahead
Sun Jun 4, 2023, 01:49 PM
Jun 2023

From an earlier post:
https://democraticunderground.com/?com=edit&forum=1016&thread=326146&pid=326155


https://medium.com/s/state-of-the-future/americas-paralyzed-politics-today-is-california-s-15-years-ago-5fc9c50eebc3

summary:

Why California Politics Is Always 15 Years Ahead
The Remarkably Prescient 15 Year Rule Means Trump & the National Republicans are on the Verge of a Spectacular Collapse
Peter Leyden
Oct 16, 2017
·

What do we mean by California is the future when applied to politics? Modern California politics has an uncanny knack of prefiguring what happens in the rest of America in about a 15-year timeline. In other words, what happened in California 15 years ago should be studied closely to see how it will play out in America today. And what’s happening now in California will roll out over America in the next 15 years.

California experiences the future earlier than other parts of the country. Californians invent many new technologies, adopt them early and adapt new systems around them relatively quickly. They absorb waves of immigrants at the highest numbers in the country and accommodate them into their society quicker. The state is a magnet for young people, entrepreneurs, and people who want to change the world. Much of the population is unusually open to trying new things in the economy, society, and in politics.



Prescient?

Lots more at the link. It's true.
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