SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s political establishment spend a lot of time blathering about protecting “California’s values,” but the election results show that even voters here have tired of that nonsense. Vice President Kamala Harris — a product of the Bay Area Democratic establishment — received a far lower percentage of the California vote for president than her predecessors, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
The county election map tells the usual stark picture of two Californias, although it’s starker this year after Donald Trump flipped eight counties from blue in 2020 to red in 2024. Those include San Bernardino and Riverside. Those massive counties (San Bernardino is larger in area than nine states) encompass vast deserts, but their populations are centered in the Los Angeles suburbs. He also flipped four heavily Latino counties in the agricultural Central Valley.
California has never been a uniformly liberal state, it’s just that its most liberal areas — the population of 10 million in Los Angeles County and eight million in the San Francisco Bay Area — swamp the votes of the rest of the state. Because the dominant progressives mainly reside in white-collar coastal regions, the Democratic Party has focused on their peculiarities rather than on more traditional Democratic messaging that used to resonate in blue-collar Fresno or Stockton.
Republicans appear to have made some legislative gains, which are hard given the district maps — and certainly not enough to reform the Capitol circus. But, as I reported recently in The American Spectator, they soundly rejected progressive nostrums in statewide initiatives. They opposed rent control, a minimum wage hike, and a measure to make it easier to pass local affordable housing bonds.
Most significantly, they passed — with 68.5 percent approval — a tough-on-crime measure that Newsom and leading Democrats tried mightily to defeat. The measure passed in every one of our 58 counties, including San Francisco. Did I mention that overwhelmingly Democratic Los Angeles County ditched their progressive district attorney, George Gascón, and replaced him with a former Republican, Nathan Hochman, who is a former federal prosecutor? (READ MORE: Last Gasp of ‘Progressive DA’ Movement?)
Even mainstream media sources grasped the message, seeing the general election as a retort to the state’s political trajectory. I loved the headline from a Los Angeles Times post-election news analysis: “If Democrats want to win back the American people, does California need to stand down?”
It quoted former Democratic Assemblymember Mike Gatto:
We don’t want to ever get into a position where we’re not sticking up for the least among us. But at the same time, we also have to focus on the things that the majority of voters care about and those things are affordability and the perception that some of the more extremes of the left-wing of the Democratic Party have gone too far.
The Times’ Sacramento columnist George Skelton looked at the anti-crime results (Proposition 36) and concluded: “One message from California voters couldn’t have been more clear: They’re fed up with toothpaste and bandages being locked up behind glass doors on store shelves as shopkeepers try to protect their merchandise from petty thieves.” He quoted Democratic sources who agreed.
There’s no love of Donald Trump here and the word “Republican” often is the kiss of political death, but Democrats need to read the tea leaves. Even San Francisco has gone through a years-long self-correction. Voters elected a moderate mayor who railed against the city’s crime and dysfunction. They previously approved a series of conservative ballot measures, recalled their leftist district attorney, and recalled progressive school board members.
What’s needed, obviously, is a Democratic Party focused on bread-and-butter issues, rather than one devoted to social causes and campaigns against corporate greed. And they need to address the crises that continue to erode our quality of life — from unaffordable housing (caused by government regulation) to fleeing insurance companies (also caused by government regulation) to gridlock (caused by a government focus on climate change rather than mobility).
The quality of life has diminished noticeably since I moved here 26 years ago. As writer Joel Kotkin put it in a recent New Geography article:
Once upon a time, California could sell itself as a shining alternative, attracting millions from near and abroad while serving as the epicenter of unrivalled tech and entertainment. Today that reputation is seriously tarnished, in large part the victim of almost two decades of one-party progressive governance. Since 2000, California has lost 3.8 million residents in net domestic migration, a number equivalent to the population of Los Angeles. Once a beacon for the young and ambitious, today California ranks towards the bottom in attracting newcomers.
Yet instead of adjusting his thinking, Newsom is doubling down on his tired shtick, going so far as calling a special legislative session to craft California’s legal approach in the face of a second Trump administration. This is governing by posturing given that his recently concluded special session about gas prices was a farce that blamed corporate greed rather than the state’s high taxes, special fuels mandate, and efforts to shutter the fossil fuels industry. (READ MORE: Newsom’s Oil-Price Show Hearings)
Perhaps unlike most readers of this publication, I am troubled by many of Trump’s proposed policies (tariffs, militarized deportations, etc.). Whoever is in charge, it’s useful to have checks and balances and an intelligent opposition leader. As I noted in my Southern California News Group column, however, “Newsom is not that person.”
I’ve been here long enough to remember when California values meant the pursuit of the dream of a better life in this remarkably beautiful state. It did not mean a crusading state government that viewed the citizenry as antagonists who needed to be regulated and hectored into compliance. There’s a huge opportunity here. Not only did the nation reject our state’s current values, but so did California voters.
Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
READ MORE from Steven Greenhut:
State Officials Give Nod to Far Higher Gas Prices
Californians Reject the Worst Initiatives
Time for a Teachable Moment on Tariffs
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