Stupid, stupid...
I ask again (and no offense to Cali Freepers intended...)-
Why is California such a great place to live? Is it the exorbitant real estate prices? The crime? The earthquakes? The socialist politics?? The Hollyweird crowd?
There is one good thing to come out of California, and that was Ronald Reagan. At one time the state was full of the same kind of Western libertarian-conservative Republicans that still populate most of Arizona, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming (and Nevada outside of Las Vegas) but no longer. Colorado is also going the way of the Blue stater...
The reddest of the red states can't generally boast that percentage.
California really was once a good place to live. Yes, there were earthquakes, just as there are hurricanes in Florida, but people can withstand an occasional jolt from nature to live in an otherwise beautiful place.
California was also a state that leaned Republican. Even San Francisco wasn't all that liberal until the 1960's. Exotic, but not leftist as it is now. California elected Ronald Reagan twice as governor. In national politics, it usually took a huge Democrat landslide to put California in the Democrat column. Harry Truman carried the state in '48, but he was the guy who nuked Japan, which made him quite popular in California, where fear of Japanese attacks were high. From 1952 until 1988, the state went Republican in every presidential election except the Democrat landslide in '64.
So what happened? Why is the state now such a leftist dumping ground?
Two things: leftists moved there from elsewhere in the country, and immigrants have poured in from other lands.
Leftists love to live in beautiful surroundings, but only after someone else has tamed the land and made it "safe" for them. You won't find many leftists out on the untamed frontier. By the 1960's, California had been tamed, so to speak, by the morally strong people who built the state's infrastructure, dammed its rivers, bridged its harbors, and so on. Millions of lefties, with a tilt of the wrist, said, "Ooooh, I'd just loooove to live in San Francisco or Santa Monica!"
And so the influx began. But that alone wasn't enough to flip the state firmly into the leftist column. After all, a lot of conservatives also moved to California from elsewhere in America.
What finally flipped California was the 1965 immigration law, which threw open our borders to the Third World. The fact that we pretty much stopped even guarding the borders at about the same time added icing to the cake. This massive flow of Third Worlders into California not only added Democrat voters, but had the effect of running many conservatives out of the state. The combined power of the minority vote and the white leftist vote by the 1990's dominated the state.
California has become a microcosm of what the left plans for the entire country. They envision a society where large racial voting blocs join forces with elite, culturally exotic whites to ravage the middle class (e.g., the conservative voters who pull the wagon and do the heavy lifting). This is why elite whites support "multi-culturalism". They don't want these minorities to become Americans like prior generations of immigrants. They want them to stay a hostile racial pack dependent on government.
There's some risk to the left in this. Hispanics appear to have voted pro-life yesterday on prop 73. But overall the left appears to have taken California over, and like the Soviets they plan to entrench socialism there ever more deeply.
The state's future appears pretty grim, and it affects the future of our entire nation.