OP-ED: Republicans aim to regain what used to be their California stronghold
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. – In the 1960s, Orange County south of Los Angeles fascinated social scientists who, like anthropologists studying primitives, considered its residents exotic. The county gave Barry Goldwater 56% of its votes in the 1964 presidential election while he was winning just 38.5% nationally. In 1966, 72% of Orange County embraced a novice gubernatorial candidate, Ronald Reagan.
In 1967, James Q. Wilson, the nation’s preeminent political scientist (a Southern Californian, then at Harvard) explained in an essay for Commentary magazine, “A Guide to Reagan Country: The Political Culture of Southern California,” why Reaganism “will be with us for a long time.” The region’s single-family dwellings (few apartments) and car culture (negligible public transportation) produced a property-centered, aspirational, individualistic orientation of life with “intensely middle-class values.”
Times change, and Orange County certainly has. But Scott Baugh, the Republicans’ probable congressional candidate in the 47th District, thinks a GOP revival will send him to Washington. National Republicans consider the 47th one of the most promising districts to flip from Democratic control. It is currently held by Democrat Katie Porter, who is running to replace Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Baugh, 61, was born on a Fourth of July, a good career move for a future state legislator, Republican Party official and perhaps congressman. With his granular knowledge of local demographics, he understands how Goldwater country evolved to elect the hyper-progressive Porter.
Baugh says the two parties’ registration percentages were about equal in 1978, but during Reagan’s presidency “you couldn’t print registration forms fast enough to register Republicans.” Baugh says Orange County’s Republican registration reached high tide in 1991, with 55.6% of registered voters. The next year, Ross Perot’s third-party presidential candidacy, an early symptom of coming populist fevers, won 23.9% of the county’s votes. Today Orange is 33% Republican, 37.5% Democratic.
In 1980, the county was 78.2% White (not counting people who declared mixed-race), 14.8% Hispanic, 4.1% Asian and 1.2% Black. Today it is 38% White and 23.3% Asian – partly the result of Vietnamese fleeing to America in the aftermath of a lost war. The 47th lost many Vietnamese when the district was reconfigured after the 2020 Census, but Baugh says it retains 31,223, plus 62,070 Chinese and 22,212 Koreans. The county’s most politically portentous change – one replicated around the nation – is the growth of the city of Irvine, driven by the University of California campus there, and the biotech and other industries that cluster around research universities. The city’s population has grown from 60,600 in 1980, to 141,200 in 2000, to 310,250 in 2022. In 2000, Republican registration in Irvine was 36,823 and in 2022 was 37,487, an increase of just 664 while the city’s population was doubling, and Democratic registration increased 41,386.
Recently, Politico reported that since 2000, of 171 communities designated “college towns,” 38 have transformed from red to blue: “Name the flagship university – Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others – the story tends to be the same. If the surrounding county was a reliable source of Democratic votes in the past, it’s a landslide county now.” Porter came to UC-Irvine to teach law, and seven years later ran for Congress. Democrats have mastered the use of “motor voter” — voter registration of people acquiring driver’s licenses — and universal mail voting to engage “low propensity” voters who usually vote only in presidential years and 0-for-4 voters who have not voted in four consecutive elections.
Orange County reflects not only the nation’s dramatically increased diversity since the 1960s, but also today’s crime issue, which might now be as salient as it was in the 1960s, when “law and order,” even more than the Vietnam War, propelled Richard M. Nixon into the presidency. Progressive reforms in California have reduced many felonies to misdemeanors, new bail policies require judges to release many of the accused, and the legislature has declared California a “sanctuary state,” so sheriffs cannot notify federal authorities when they release immigrants who are suspected felons. In Orange County’s most affluent communities, Baugh says, law enforcement is instructing homeowners how to prevent burglars from disabling alarm systems by disabling a home’s WiFi.
Baugh, who lost to Porter by 3.4 percentage points in 2022, when he was outspent about 9 to 1, knows the GOP won’t let such a spending disparity occur next year. Any margin of victory is apt to be close because this area is not exotic but normal, closely divided and reflecting the nation’s political geology of fault lines along educational and cultural differences.
George F. Will is a columnist for The Washington Post.