Yep, California wouldn’t be the toilet it is today.
In the 1980s - early 1990s the Californian Republican Party went through an internal power struggle. The native Conservative Republicans lost the Party Leadership to the emigrant East Coast Rockefeller Republicans (RINOs). Since then the leadership traded away competitive state legislature seats for a few “safe” Republican seats. The resulting gerrymandering changed the once dependably Conservative state into a one party wacko Democrat state.
A look at a political map of California will show that except for the coastal areas and the large metro areas of LA, San Francisco, and San Diego, California is still a Republican state. Unfortunatly those aforementioned cities drag the rest of the state down.
Note that those areas also contain a large % of both legal and illegal immigrants. That demographic finds the Democrat rhetoric, with it’s dogs, ponies, and lollipops, irresistible.