Essential California

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Thursday, Aug. 8, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. Some place names are just words, while others act as a kind of shorthand for an entire way of life. For decades, the very phrase “Orange County” has conjured both demographics and values in the collective imagination: suburban, affluent or aspirant middle class, white and, most of all, conservative. Of course, Orange County’s demographics have long since shifted from that stereotype (the county has been majority-minority since 2004), and the GOP has had a loosening grip on its California stronghold ever since. But on Wednesday, the once unthinkable happened: Orange County officially turned blue, according to voter registration records. [Read the story: “Orange County, longtime GOP stronghold, now has more registered Democrats than Republicans” by Seema Mehta and Melanie Mason in the Los Angeles Times] The county registrar of voters released new statistics early that morning showing that Orange County is now home to 547,458 registered Democrats, compared with 547,369 Republicans. The news comes just shy of nine months after the November 2018 election, when Democrats swept the entirety of Orange County’s seven-member congressional delegation in an epochal shift that marked the first time since the 1930s that the county didn’t send a Republican to the House. Orange County, whose population boomed with new suburbs in the years after World War II, first emerged as a visible and often hard-line symbol of American conservatism in the 1960s. This is where Richard M. Nixon — who became the first Californian ever elected to the Oval Office toward the end of the decade — was born in a modest wood-frame house assembled from a kit by his father. Orange County is where Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential ambitions “caught fire” in suburban kitchens, and where Ronald Reagan held his first political fundraiser in 1965. There was a time when left-leaning residents were such a beleaguered minority that they printed “It’s OK to be a Democrat in Orange County” bumper stickers for their cars. Orange County also spawned the 1978 Briggs initiative, which would have banned gays and lesbians from working in California public schools, and 1994’s Proposition 187, which would have denied public services, including education, to undocumented immigrants. (The former failed at the ballot box and the latter passed, but most of its provisions were struck down in court.) [See also: “In Orange County, land of reinvention, even its conservative politics is changing” in the Los Angeles Times] “It was never a question of whether or not you would win Orange County,” former GOP strategist Reed Galen, who relied on the county during campaigns for President George W. Bush and others, told The Times. “The idea that you could lose it wasn’t even on the books.” But the books, it seems, have changed, with a new narrative for Orange County. “Democrats gaining an edge here over Republicans is a watershed moment for a place that has long been a citadel of GOP strength — and one that could have national implications for the future of the Republican Party,” as my colleagues Seema Mehta and Melanie Mason wrote in their story yesterday.