Bingo. I went to California for graduate school and had a very very good reason for being there at the time. I was amazed at the milieu of ne'er do nothings and ne'er do wells that migrated from somewhere else, all doing " a bit of this and a bit of that" and asking me how much I liked it there. Then as I met actual native Californians I discovered that they were decent civilized hard working folks, like an old uncle of mine who lived in the real Berkeley back before it became the modern Berkeley. They were also horrified to watch this beautiful place that they had helped build sink into a cess-pool of drifters and grifters.
I don't know whether there is much if any of the old California left any more.
There are still holdouts there, a lot of the state outside the LA Basin and the Bay Area are pretty red. They feel like they’ve been run over by the left in state politics, and they have. They soldier on and do their best in spite of it.