State’s Geography Hews Party Line

Barely 100 miles separate the day-to-day lives of Santa Monica office manager Harriet Orinstein and Bakersfield teacher Andre Casillas. Yet these two Californians hold wildly different views that illustrate the state’s two political worlds.

Orinstein, a 52-year-old vegetarian who votes for Democrats and Greens, lives with her boyfriend in a rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment near the beach. She opposes the Iraq war and supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights. She loathes President Bush.

“I wouldn’t vote for him if he was the last person on Earth,” she said.

Casillas, a 37-year-old conservative Republican who owns a Bakersfield tract house with his wife, supports the war. To him, same-sex marriage and legal abortion are wrong. An evangelical Christian, he goes to church every Sunday. Bush’s religious faith inspires him.

“He prays before he makes decisions, and that’s important to me,” Casillas said.

These contrasting sentiments capture not only the national polarization that has defined the 2004 presidential campaign, but the increasingly distinct split between the two Californias: coastal and inland.

Over the last decade, Republican influence has grown more concentrated in conservative inland California -- largely the Central Valley and Inland Empire but also the Antelope Valley, the Sierra and rural north. Since 2000, Republicans have outpaced Democrats in signing up new voters in the burgeoning communities around Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, San Bernardino and Riverside.

At the same time, Democrats have strengthened their domination of counties along California’s coastline, building overwhelming advantages in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas as Latino voters have expanded the party’s base. And from San Diego’s beachfront suburbs to the Central Coast, Democrats have eroded Republican support among moderates, especially women.

In some ways, California’s east-west split reflects America’s larger cultural divide. And like the national breach, it is playing out strikingly in the presidential race. The state’s coastal counties lean strongly against Bush’s reelection while inland California favors the president over his Democratic rival, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, polls show.

“The division of the United States is right here in California,” said Tony Quinn, co-editor of California Target Book, a nonpartisan election guide.

Among the reasons cited by political analysts: Urban areas, which favor Democrats nationally, are mainly on the coastal side of California. Also, coastal voters tend to back strong environmental protection measures championed by Democrats. The conservative stands on social issues that the national Republican Party has embraced resonate with many inland Californians, but alienate others on the coast.

With close to two-thirds of California’s 36 million residents crowded into coastal regions, the state’s division tilts heavily in the Democrats’ favor. In statewide races, Republican victories have been rare, and one of the party’s main roles has been simply to keep Democrats from drifting too far to the left.

“Clearly, the Democrats have an advantage. But it’s not permanent, and no one should assume it is,” said Roy Behr, a campaign strategist for U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Bay Area Democrat up for reelection in November.

Boxer’s race against Republican Bill Jones of Fresno illustrates the fault line. An August poll of likely voters by the Public Policy Institute of California found Jones, an ex-secretary of state for California, running 6 points ahead of Boxer in inland California, but 25 points behind on the coast and around San Francisco Bay. The upshot: a 17-point statewide lead for Boxer.

In the race for the White House, both major parties see California as solid Democratic turf. The state functions mainly as a detour to scrape up donations between campaign stops in more closely contested areas.

Although Democratic now, not long ago California was a key part of the Republican calculus for victory in presidential campaigns. Republicans won the state in every race from 1952 to 1988, with the sole exception of Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson’s national landslide victory in 1964. Bill Clinton ushered in the Democratic dominance by ending his party’s 28-year drought here in 1992, a position he and Al Gore reinforced in 1996 and 2000.

The question that bedevils political professionals is what happens next.

In the last four years, the state’s population has grown by nearly 2 million, and demographers project an additional 3 million residents by 2010. The surge promises profound but unpredictable consequences for California politics.

Could it tighten the Democrats’ grip on the state? Or does the concentration of growth in the conservatives’ inland strongholds offer hope to Republicans for a revival more broad-based than the extraordinary election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor in the 2003 recall?

“As quickly as we became Democrat, we could swing back to the middle,” said Douglas M. Johnson, a senior research associate at Claremont McKenna College’s Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

For now, strategists of both major parties are cautious in projecting any turnaround for Republicans, who hold just one statewide office and are outnumbered in California’s congressional delegation and both houses of the Legislature.

“This state is going to be a difficult one for a statewide Republican to win for a long time unless you’re truly an exception to the rule, the way Schwarzenegger is,” said GOP strategist Matt Rexroad, alluding to the governor’s unique personal appeal as a champion body-builder and movie star, along with his moderate stands on abortion and other social issues.

That said, Democrats control the state not just because of their own prowess but because the state’s nonpartisan voters have sided with them.

By one measure, both parties’ power has become more tenuous: A growing share of California’s 15.1 million registered voters belongs to neither one. From February 2000 to February 2004, the portion of voters unaffiliated with any party rose from 14% to 16%.

As of February, the last time figures were collected, 43% of Californians were Democrats and 36% Republicans.

There are notable exceptions to California’s coastal-inland split. Most glaring is Orange County, the coast’s most enduring Republican bastion despite robust Democratic advances in ethnically diverse spots. Also resisting the Democratic pull, if less forcefully, are the other, less urban coastal counties that favored Bush over Gore in 2000 -- San Diego, Ventura, San Luis Obispo and Del Norte, on the Oregon border.

Inland, the most striking breaks in conservative ranks are the Sacramento region, where the state workforce and UC Davis supply an abundance of Democrats, and Imperial County, a cluster of hardscrabble desert towns on the Mexican border.

But overall, voting patterns and polls show the sharpening contrast between the 38 inland counties and the 20 on the ocean and around San Francisco and San Pablo bays. From 1996 to 2002, Democrats Clinton, Gore and former Gov. Gray Davis scored decisive victories on the coast but struggled to cut their losses inland.

Some Democrats have made gains in the interior by stressing moderate or conservative positions. In 1998, Davis fared well there by campaigning on his Vietnam War service and his support for the death penalty and fiscal restraint. In the Inland Empire, “you can’t get too far to the left of them, or they abandon you,” said former Davis strategist Garry South.

The geographic split is clearest on social issues. In an April poll by The Times, two-thirds of coastal voters said abortion should always be legal; just half held that view in inland counties. Stricter gun control was favored on the coast but opposed inland. On the coast, just over a third supported same-sex marriage, compared with barely a quarter inland.

Outside a Bakersfield movie theater, retired banker Barbara Roskam recently praised Bush for proposing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

“I believe the Bible, and that’s the way it is,” said Roskam, 68, as she and her husband left the theater.

The next day at the Arizona Avenue farmers market in Santa Monica, Sarah Klein, 24, a radio promoter and independent voter, shrugged at a question on same-sex marriage.

“If two people are in love, why not?” she asked.

Predictably, in 2000 Bush won 61% of the vote in Bakersfield and 21% in Santa Monica.

Central to the question of how long the east-west breach might last is the political fate of the state’s fastest-growing counties: Placer, San Joaquin, Merced, Stanislaus and Sacramento in the Central Valley, and Riverside and San Bernardino.

Apart from Sacramento and Merced, all those areas now lean Republican. But many of the new arrivals are residents of Democratic coastal areas migrating east in search of cheaper housing.

It remains to be seen whether Republican voter registration gains in those inland regions will translate into electoral victories. Demographers and political scientists say it is possible that the bulk of coastal newcomers will ultimately have a moderating influence on inland California.

“If it’s a big migration, they just export their views,” said James G. Gimpel, co-author of “Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics.”

Although the population shifts are certain to affect local and legislative elections, where a smaller number of votes can be crucial, strategists of both parties suggest the effect on statewide races could be minimal.

Among other things, they cite the migration of African Americans -- the most reliably Democratic voters -- from Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley and Inland Empire or of urban Latinos and Asians to San Bernardino and Riverside counties and the Central Valley.

“A good deal of the population that’s expanding is ethnic, and therefore generally Democratic,” said Democratic strategist Gale Kaufman, who guides Assembly campaigns.

“Statewide,” said Rexroad, a consultant to Republican legislative candidates, “it’s just moving around the deck chairs.”

Yet California has adjusted its moorings before, leaving political veterans to wonder how soon it might do so again.

“This state is too large and too diverse to be controlled by a single party forever,” said Allan Hoffenblum, publisher of the Target Book election guide. “No one party can serve the multitude of interests.”

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Times staff writer Doug Smith and staff researcher Sandy Poindexter contributed to this report.

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California results

1992

Bill Clinton: 46%

George H.W. Bush: 33%

Ross Perot: 21%

2000

Al Gore: 53%

George W. Bush: 42%

Ralph Nader: 4%

Others: 1%

Source: California secretary of state