“Sadly, Santa Monica has changed for the worse in the years since its voters sent B-1 Bob Dornan to Congress.”
That was Orange County, which used to be solid Republican, not Santa Monica which has always been goofy leftist.
Santa Monica wasn't leftist until the 1970s.
Prior to that, it was known for tough but corrupt policing. At least that's how Raymond Chandler portrayed it. His fictitious Bay City was a thinly veiled reference to Santa Monica.
Bob Dornan was first elected to represent a district along the coast of Santa Monica Bay in 1976. I was active in this campaign—on Halloween, I went door to door placing doorhangers that read “even the Great Pumpkin is voting for Dornan” on the front doors of homes in Venice. Some of my colleagues went over to the Sepulveda Tunnel, a tunnel that carries traffic along Sepulveda Blvd. beneath the runways of LAX, and plastered it with hundreds of Dornan signs, making the airport authority, Caltrans and the highway patrol hopping mad. But it did get the word out to thousands of commuters.
Dornan won re-election against Carey Peck, the son of actor Gary Peck, in 1978. However, he later ran in Orange County when his original district was gerrymandered by adding some deep-blue neighborhoods immediately to the east to turn it blue.
Although subsequent redistricting brought the district almost back to its original boundaries, the demography has changed, and it is now represented by Comrade Ted Lieu, who is one of the worst Congressmen.