Trump, California, and Rotten Boroughs

At Western Journalism last summer, James V. Lacy made an important point about Trump's strength in California:

Tim Donnelly is no Donald Trump. Yet he really did make an impact capturing a strain of California voters, angered over illegal immigration, with a greatly under-funded campaign. Moreover, highly unreported is the fact that Donnelly was THE leading GOP vote-getter in the Governor’s primary in many counties throughout the state that will be sending delegates to the Republican National Convention. Donnelly did not best Kashkari in all the hard-core conservative southern California counties near the border with Mexico, but he won San Bernardino and Imperial counties; and he scored big in North State counties, around Republican Congressman Doug LaMalfa’s district where dissatisfaction with government runs high, namely Butte, Del Norte, Glenn, Lake, Lassen, Nevada, Trinity, Tehama, Siskiyou, Sierra, Shasta, Plumas, and Modoc. He drew to a tie in the central valley county of Merced, won nearby Mariposa, and took the central valley prize of Kern County (in Congressional Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Congressional District no less); and Donnelly surprisingly even topped Kashkari in a clean-sweep of the state’s top wine country counties of Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino. Donnelly beat Kashkari, who was considered the GOP establishment’s candidate, in the central coast counties of San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, and San Benito, the Bay Area counties of Alameda and Contra Costa and even won most of the handful of GOP voters in San Francisco, in Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional District!