[cripplecreek]

The immigration issue is what doomed the GOP in California, a formerly GOP state.

The open border crowd used a couple of high profile losses in the last election to blame strict border control for the losses . They refused to acknowledge that many of the democrats who were elected had taken a strong stance on border control. The recent vote in the house to cut emergency funding for sanctuary cities had around 50 democrats voting for it. Also there were congressional districts where "moderate" GOP incumbents lost to conservative GOP candidates.

[Wallace T.]

Until the 1980s, California was a bellwether state to a great extent because the state's population was largely derived from the Midwest, South, or Northeast, or from European nations like Italy and Norway, which contributed millions of immigrants to the United States. Except for 1960, when it went for native son Richard Nixon, and in 1976, when it voted for adopted son Gerald Ford, California's voters reflected national trends very closely. The Golden State produced both conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan, S.I. Hayakawa, and William Knowland and liberal ones like Earl Warren, Pat and Jerry Brown, and Gene Tunney. There is no doubt that the influx of Hispanics in the wake of the 1986 amnesty was a major cause for the leftward political shift.

Going back to the Scots-Irish immigration of over 200 years ago, most immigrants have supported the Democratic Party, as it was the party of the small farmer and the urban worker, vs. the Federalist/Whig/Republican support by the professional and middle classes and the industrialists and merchants. The Scots-Irish immigrants and their children, widespread on the frontier, elected Jefferson and Jackson to the White House. Most later immigrants followed this path. The exceptions to this rule have been few: British settlers in the Northern states after 1840, German and Dutch Protestants, and post-Castro Cubans.

The fact is that increased numbers of Hispanics in the voting booths will cause politics in Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and eventually Texas and Florida to shift leftward. Combine increasing Hispanic numbers in the Southeast with Yankees migrating from New York and New Jersey into Virginia and the Carolinas and those states are no longer reliably conservative or Republican and become "purple" at best.