I've extensively travelled the length and breadth of the state, got to know people all over. It's a wildly diverse place: economically, geographically, socially, and politically. But the key thing to understand is that California isn't a monolith. It's a place largely defined by agriculture, as well as the coastal elite.
You can travel for hours upon hours within this state and see only farmland. Once you leave the Bay Area or the LA regional sprawl, just about every square inch of arable land has some kind of crop growing on it. There's a whole northern third of the state that's farmland up to the foot of the mountains, and people are barely cognizant that it even exists. There's also a whole southern section of the state that's nothing but farmland to the Mexico border that people don't think much about, either. And of course, there's the Central Valley which everyone knows as the area between where they were and where they want to be.
That parts of the state that aren't arable are rugged, mountainous terrain and harsh, yet beautiful desert filled with a variety of interesting people. There are sights in this state that take your breath away, but the deserts are where I feel most at home. There are parts just a few miles away from any highway that are stone quiet, not even the sound of wind hitting your ears. You don't realize how much ambient noise is with you at all times until you're standing alone on the desert floor with billions of years of history on display before you and beautiful Quiet all around you.
Politically, the state is deceptively complex. What you see playing out on the national stage, especially with immigration, already happened in California 20 years ago. The Republicans shot their load on immigration, which turned out to be a self-inflicted wound from which they slowly bled out until they effectively died in the last couple of years. It turns out that when you vilify the family members of children, those kids grow up and remember it at the ballot box. Over the last 20 years, as the Republicans lost their bastions along the coast, the thin veneer of economic conservatism gave way and they doubled-down on the racism to appeal to an ever-shrinking base of white men in the suburbs and agricultural areas. At this point in 2019, the Republican party in California is a white nationalist group who can only find relevancy by getting specifically targeted items on the Proposition ballot, which are usually defeated.
What remains is an interesting political situation. Absent a viable opposition party, the Democratic party enjoys singular rule, which is usually a scenario ripe for overreach and inevitable backlash. That may yet come in the form of a formal party split, or even a renewed Republican party that's not just the political arm of the Klan, but for now we have a Democratic Party comprised of the core elements from the large cities, as well as those of the suburbs and many of the rural areas who've come along in more recent times.
The Democratic Party now encompasses the whole of mainstream political activity, as well as the socialist/progressive elements of the Left. The thing is, the interests that the Republicans used to represent are still there. The situations that lead to a conservative agenda still exist. There are people who don't want the state to get more crazy with taxes. There are those who want to ensure fiscal transparency and moderation in spending. There are homeowners. There are small business owners. There are large corporations -- Tech, Oil & Gas, and Agribusiness, to name a few. Those people used to be represented by Republicans in the state legislature, but are now largely represented by conservative Democrats.
This leads to a fairly complex interplay of competing interests within the same party. As Democratic representatives from the suburbs and rural areas gain influence and tenure, they may start caucusing together in a more formal way than they have so far. Corporate, business, and agricultural elements representing the rural parts of the state that have been politically ignored the last dozen years may ultimately find more influence in the Assembly & Senate than they did with the Republicans, simply due to intra-party tit-for-tat voting (i.e., "You support me on this, and I support you on that.").
As the new political reality began to emerge and express itself, Jerry Brown was actually pretty effective at walking the line between these various interests to serve as a moderating hand on the exuberance that single party rule tends to produce. But with him gone and Gavin Newsom in office, that may change. As the socialist Left gains more prominence and influence within the Party, they'll run right into the moderate and conservative Democrats, and something will have to give at some point. I don't know what will happen politically in the years to come, but we're in a moment of transition right now, dominated by ethnic and economic transformations & pressures that could play out in all different kinds of ways. But it's a safe bet that what's happening here (and our responses to it) will be a preview of what's to come at the national level 20 years from now.
At any rate, California is much more than the shorthand labels that liberals & conservatives outside the state pin on it. It's a fantastically interesting state filled with a wide variety of people and places that can't be easily pigeonholed or stereotyped.
