A State of Change: California’s Tilt Toward the Left

On Tuesday, California voters will go to the polls and most likely entrust their state entirely to Democrats. Despite the fact that the Democratic ticket is headed by an incumbent governor about as popular as a strain of bacteria, every Democratic candidate for statewide office is leading in the polls. The party’s huge majorities in the state’s legislative and congressional delegations will remain intact not just in this election but for the foreseeable future.

For a state that was the spawning ground of modern American conservatism -- home to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Howard Jarvis -- this total make-over into the nation’s foremost Democratic bastion has been stunning. But this partisan realignment is just one aspect of the transformation of America’s mega-state. In fact, California has become by many measures the most liberal state in the land. Here are just some of the laws enacted by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Gray Davis in the course of the year:

* The nation’s first paid family leave program, guaranteeing workers up to six weeks off for medical and other emergencies. Such programs have long been a staple in social democratic Europe but entirely absent from the United States.

* Long-overdue legislation granting binding mediation to farm workers, who over the last quarter-century had been able to win first contracts at just one-third of the farms where workers had voted to establish a union.

* Much stricter auto emissions standards than those mandated by the federal government.

* A statute requiring utilities to produce one-fifth of their energy from renewable sources by 2017.

* The promotion and funding of stem-cell research in California’s universities and laboratories.

* Legislation making gun manufacturers liable in civil court for gun violence.

With statutes such as these, 35 million Californians, representing one-eighth of the nation’s population, now live in a state that is diverging dramatically from the policies of the national government. Labor and environmental interests that are stymied in Washington are heeded in Sacramento. The religious right and the gun lobby, which loom so large in national politics, cast a very small shadow here. Davis may veto many of the bills that an increasingly liberal Legislature plunks onto his desk, but this year, standing for reelection, he found himself compelled to move not to the center but to his left.

Partly, that’s a function of the Legislature itself. Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, a tough and crafty San Francisco liberal, is the driving force behind many of the bills that vex Davis’ sleep.

But Burton’s not acting by himself. Bay Area legislators have been famously liberal for decades. In Los Angeles over the last five years, with the considerable assistance of a revitalized labor movement, liberals have consistently defeated more centrist candidates in one Democratic primary after another. And with the new reapportionment creating safe Democratic districts across the state, this year’s March primaries featured contests far from the state’s two major metropolises in which Democrats backed by labor and environmental groups defeated Democrats backed by energy companies and other corporate donors in half a dozen open Assembly seats.

Ultimately, however, California’s leftward march isn’t the result of liberals’ legislative legerdemain. It’s Californians as a whole who have changed.

To begin with, over the last decade a lot of Californians up and left -- taking the old California of Nixon, Jarvis and Reagan with them. With the collapse of aerospace that followed the end of the Cold War, and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of middle-income jobs, 2 million Californians left for other states. California continued to grow, of course, filling up with millions of immigrants chiefly from Mexico, Central America and East Asia.

In 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson’s support for Proposition 187, which sought to deny public services to illegal immigrants -- adults and children alike -- shocked the Latino community, which in turn prompted a massive effort (with the assistance of the Latino-led Los Angeles labor movement) to naturalize and register Latinos, who then voted Democratic. Since 187, the Latino share of the electorate has been steadily growing -- from 9% in 1992 to 15% two years ago to a projected 17% next Tuesday. What’s important to realize is that it’s not just a preponderantly Democratic electorate. It’s a liberal electorate, too.

In their support for a series of ballot measures since the mid-’90s -- raising the minimum wage, approving school bonds, protecting unions’ right to participate in elections -- Latinos have shown themselves to be the most liberal group in the state on questions of economic equity and opportunity, even more than African Americans. Now, a new nationwide poll from the Pew Hispanic Center underscores the depth of Latino exceptionalism.

Asked whether they supported bigger government with high taxes and more services or smaller government with lower taxes and fewer services, whites preferred the smaller government by a margin of 61% to 32%; blacks preferred it by 52% to 39%. Latinos actually favored bigger government, by a margin of 55% to 38%. This is one reason why Jarvis’ anti-statist California is no longer with us, and why the kind of school bonds routinely rejected throughout the ‘80s are routinely enacted today.

On cultural questions, Latinos, like most heavily immigrant groups throughout U.S. history, have hewed to more traditionalist perspectives, but this affords little opening to the GOP. Most Latinos are anti-choice, but it’s not an important political question for them. Fifty-eight percent told the Pew pollsters that education was either the first or second most important issue to them; 39% said the economy. A scant 4% said abortion.

The changing orientation of white voters has been the other key to California’s metamorphosis. As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira demonstrate in their new book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” the more conservative and socially traditional workforce in aerospace has been supplanted by a more creative and socially liberal workforce in industries like motion pictures.

Indeed, it’s the regions of Los Angeles where aerospace declined the most that have been the scenes of the greatest political transformation. Burbank and Glendale, home to thousands of Lockheed Martin workers and a solid Republican terrain since the 1910s, shifted Democratic at all levels of government by 2000 after Lockheed left and the studios and immigrant populations expanded. Ditto Long Beach, where the downsizing of the once-immense McDonnell-Douglas plant and the coming of gay and immigrant communities handed that terrain to Democrats as well.

Indeed, it’s the transformation of Los Angeles County, home to 30% of California’s population, that has been pushing the transformation of the state. In 2000, L.A. County voted for presidential candidate Al Gore at the same rate as the seven counties of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since when did L.A. become as liberal as S.F.? In 1988, L.A. County cast 52.1% of its vote for Michael Dukakis -- 4.3 percentage points higher than the figure for the state as a whole. In ‘92, it gave Bill Clinton 52.5% support, 6.5 points higher than the state. In ‘96, Clinton won 59.3% of the L.A. County vote -- 8.2 points higher than the state. And in 2000, Gore pulled down 63.5% of the local tally, 10 points over the state figure.

Look at these figures and you understand why secession will flop on Tuesday. The white-backlash voters who made Sam Yorty mayor in the ‘60s and who were the shock troops for Proposition 13 in 1978 don’t live here anymore. In the 2000 census, Los Angeles -- the most WASP of large American cities straight through the mid-20th century -- was the least white of the eight largest American cities (29.8%), and the whites who lived here were a pretty liberal bunch, too.

Does this mean it’s curtains for California Republicans? Not necessarily, but the magic words “Arnold Schwarzenegger” will not in themselves raise the party from the ashes. Schwarzenegger and his party will need to learn what Gov. George Pataki learned in New York: When you’re the Republican governor of a heavily Democratic, liberal state, you have to be pro-union, support social spending and environmental protections -- you have to govern, in a word, like a Democrat.

California Republicans have shown themselves allergic to candidates who stray even a few steps down this road, as Richard Riordan can attest. Maybe Schwarzenegger can cow them into submission; he’ll have to if he’s to have a shot at the statehouse four years hence.

Meanwhile, contemplate the new California. The state that’s home to the world’s sixth-largest economy is much more diverse and tolerant than the nation as a whole. It shuns the politics of the gun-and-Bible belt. With an increasingly assertive immigrant working class and a powerful labor movement, it is rigging new safety nets even as the national government seems bent on shredding the old ones.

In short, even as a White House filled with xenophobic provincials casts a cold eye on a more statist and liberal Europe, a more statist and liberal California is taking shape right on the Pacific coast -- with 55 electoral votes, no less. It’s another country out here, and a better one.