Our next book will look at the 2024 election. Democrats gained three House seats in California, but the state also showed its conservative streak.
Harris this year still easily won California, beating Trump by about 20 percentage points. But that marked about a 9 percentage point shift toward Trump from 2020. Trump flipped 10 counties that had voted for Joe Biden and made gains across the map. He reduced his loss margin in heavily Democratic Los Angeles County by more than 11 percentage points. And here in Orange County, a Republican stronghold before Hillary Clinton flipped it in 2016, Trump lost, but by nearly 7 percentage points less than in 2020.
And that’s just at the presidential level. When I called Gray Davis, the former governor, he began ticking through the left’s losses across the state.
“Look at what happened in San Francisco,” he said, where the mayor, London Breed, was ousted by a moderate Democrat who blamed her for the city’s homelessness and drug problems. Or in Oakland, where the city’s mayor and progressive district attorney were both thumped in recall elections. In Los Angeles, a Republican-turned-independent ousted another progressive district attorney, George Gascón.
And then there were the ballot initiatives. A decade after Californians voted to reduce penalties for some drug and property crimes, they approved a tough-on-crime ballot initiative calling for more stringent penalties. They rejected a ballot measure that would have banned forced prison labor. They defeated a measure to raise the minimum wage, and another to expand rent control.
