California Insider
A Weblog by
Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub
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November 10, 2004
On red California
As many of you know by now, California is pretty cleanly divided between “blue,” Democratic leaning counties along the coast and “red” Republican counties inland. The votes from Nov. 2 are still being counted, but I have crunched some numbers to compare the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections and to see how the vote in each region changed from one election to the next.
If you define “blue” California as essentially the nine Bay Area counties plus Los Angeles, Gore beat Bush there last time by about 1.7 million votes. The margin was 3.3 million to 1.6 million. In the other 48 counties, including a few that went for Gore, Bush won by 400,000 votes. His margin was 2.9 million to 2.5 million. Overall, Gore took the state by about 1.3 million votes.
In 2004, Kerry is winning in the 10 blue counties by about the same margin Gore did, 3.3 million to 1.7 million. But in the 48 red counties, Bush is doing better than he did four years ago. This time his edge has grown from about 400,000 to about 600,000. He is winning there by a margin of 3 million votes to 2.4 million.
If those 48 counties formed a state of their own, the 3 million votes Bush won there would make the new state his third largest vote total, after Texas and Florida. And his margin of 600,000 votes over Kerry would be his second largest, after only Texas.
So while Republicans are making progress here, they shouldn't start celebrating yet. If they continue to improve at their current pace, it would take decades to become competitive in California. A quicker route would be to nominate a center-right candidate who could somehow hold and continue growing the red county advantage while also cutting significantly into the Democrats’ blue-county edge.
Also, just like in the rest of the country, the population is tending to move from the blue counties to the red in California. The inner Bay Area is going to shrink as a proportion of the electorate over time, as is Los Angeles, while the Central Valley and Southern California outside Los Angeles will become a larger and larger share of the electorate. As this happens, the question is whether the blue county residents will bring their values and political preferences to the heartland, or whether their move inland will alter their world view and thus their politics.
Here is the latest map from the Secretary of State’s office, which uses green where the rest of the world thinks blue.
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