I can see how that could happen if you weren’t paying much attention and were a farmer from the southern part of the country. You might think “Farmer/South” over “California/Actor” if you weren’t paying much attention to politics. Plus, if my grandmother is any example, Texans have an instinctual distrust of Californians since they somehow resent the Okies who picked up and moved to California during the Great Depression. I don’t quite understand how or why this is exactly.
At the time, Okies was a catchall term for everybody what was displaced by the Great Depression and the associated drought conditions in the Southwest. Everywhere except in Oklahoma, that is -- where I understand we used the term Arkies...
By definition, an Okie was poor, uneducated and without any redeeming social virtue -- the epitome of "poor white trash".
Never mind that, ten years later, Okies owned most of the businesses in the Central Valley of California...