As the GOP stands firm, California is changing direction

Those of us who practice or analyze California politics share an enduring conviction about the state. There's coastal California, stretching from the Oregon border to the southern boundaries of Los Angeles, which is liberal and Democratic. And there's inland California -- the Central Valley, the Sierra, the exurbs of Los Angeles and the desert -- which (along with Orange and San Diego counties) remains a bastion of right-wing Republicanism.

We use this fault line in state politics to explain, among other things, why all of California's Republican members of Congress could safely vote against President Obama's stimulus plan, and nearly all of California's GOP state legislators could safely delay a centrist budget for months. Republicans may be a clear minority in this state, but their lawmakers are so safe in their arch-conservative districts that they don't need to cooperate across the aisle.

Or so goes the conventional wisdom.

But there's a problem with this analysis: The fault line in California politics has shifted dramatically. And the state's Republicans haven't yet noticed.

To see the shift, one has only to look at the results of the 2008 presidential election. Now, it's hardly news that Obama carried California. In 2000, Al Gore carried the state with an 11-percentage-point margin over George W. Bush. In 2004, John Kerry prevailed over Bush by a 10-point margin. Same old, same old.

In 2008, however, Obama carried California over John McCain by a stunning 24-point margin -- 61% to 37%. He bettered Kerry's vote total by 1,528,998 votes, while McCain got 498,045 fewer votes than Bush did in 2004. This was not the result of an exceptional get-out-the-vote campaign. Like Gore and Kerry, Obama devoted virtually no general election resources to California: His Golden State volunteers drove to Nevada to turn out voters there, or phone-banked swing voters in Ohio. What's more, there were no other major statewide candidate contests on the ballot, no senatorial campaigns trying to push voters to the polls. And yet, a record number of Californians voted for Obama.

But it's when we break down the Obama-McCain vote by congressional district that the long-term political future of the state's GOP legislators really begins to look dicey. In 2004, Bush carried 22 of the state's 53 congressional districts -- all 20 districts represented by the state's GOP members of Congress and the two of the 33 districts represented by the state's Democratic members. In 2008, McCain carried just 11 of the state's 19 Republican districts (the Republicans lost one in the 2006 congressional elections). Obama carried all 34 Democratic districts and eight Republican ones.