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I do know that Southern California was so full of Midwestern transplants that Los Angeles was derisively called “Double Dubuque.”

And Long Beach was called Iowa's seaport. Thousands of Iowa transplants used to attend the annual Iowa By the Sea picnic in Long Beach. Although it attracts much smaller crowds than it did in the mid-twentieth century, the event is now held in LA Harbor on a dock next to the battleship USS Iowa.

Many of the first settlers of Southern California were Southerners. There was a good amount of pro-Confederate sentiment in Los Angeles and San Diego. However, the New England and New York settlers in Northern California were more numerous, and the Golden State stayed in the Union. These migration patterns persisted after Appomattox. Clint Eastwood’s ancestors came from New York to the Bay Area after the Civil War. General George Patton’s grandfather migrated from Virginia to Orange County, California in 1877.

The Midwestern predominance in California occurred after the railroads developed fully. Good self promotion by Southern California chambers of commerce attracted huge numbers of Midwestern people looking for a new life in a better climate. The parents of John Wayne and Richard Nixon came to the state from Iowa and Ohio, respectively, for that reason in the early 1900s. Sam Yorty, the last conservative mayor of Los Angeles, came from Nebraska. Waves of Northeasterners after World War II, blacks, Asians, and most notably Hispanic, changed the character, and unfortunately the politics of California again. Orange County, where a 1960s era GOP candidate once joked he joined the John Birch Society to get the middle of the road vote,was carried by Hillary Clinton last year. Barry Goldwater carried the county in 1964.