I'm down in Orange County visiting family for Christmas and saw this long LA TImes profile piece about the fast-growing Republican counties in inland California. Had to post on it, despite my promise to stay away from daily kos. :) The piece profiles the booming exurb Murrieta, a place where people willingly commute two hours or more in southern California traffic to work in order to afford a house with a yard and garage.
Here in the stout heart of red California, voters snort with disdain when they hear that President Bush's strong victory caught America's Democrats by surprise. Not a single Murrieta precinct swung Sen. John Kerry's way in the bitterly fought 2004 election; in many parts of town, 70% or more of the electorate cast votes for Bush --- a strong show of red in one of America's bluest states.
This article is worrisome news to any of us who were relying on California's huge amount of electoral votes for the next election --- as well as our plans to build party strength by taking back state legislatures. more below the fold.
According to this article, "The number of California counties where Republicans outnumber registered voters of any other party has nearly tripled from 1992 to 2004." I can't scan in the maps of counties --- anyone with an LA Times and a scanner want to post it? --- but the picture is ominous; the shaded regions now cover all of inland California, and only a thin slice --- the same region that will supposedly slide off into the ocean in the next big earthquake --- remains unshaded.
Where are these people moving from, exactly? The article doesn't say. Does this trend mean that people are moving to places where they expect people to share their background and values? The LA Times piece notes that statistically, the population of Murrieta is overwhelmingly white and with families with children, but doesn't give any details on income levels. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser documents what he calls a trend of white flight out of California, as it becomes increasingly multiracial and multicultural, to Colorado, where conservative middle-class white people can build up new suburbs in areas segregated from the brown immigrants who do the dirty work of meatpacking. Is this the same case here, or is it a more depressing trend, where people are being made a certain political stripe in these exurbs? What I mean is, are all the republican mortgage dads and soccer/security moms moving to a safe enclave where they can be together, or does moving to this kind of conservative enclave make you think more like a republican?
This article also notes the importance of those two-plus hour commutes in shaping people's beliefs. Several of the people interviewed get most of their news from conservative radio demagogues like Rush and Laura Schleshinger, and one converted from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity from listening to an evangelical radio station. (I'm not up on how these similar "conversions" fit together, but the pairing of these did seem significant)
So, my question is, what do we do about this? Obviously we need to get a Democratic party organization out there into all these new exurbs to try to counteract these forces --- or will that even work? Personally, I don't have the money to move into a bedroom community and own my own house (and I'd hate to live in a place like this, where there's nothing but churches and chain stores and you have to drive everywhere). And I know how difficult it is to organize where you're not wanted, so we'd have to take in to account that being the lone Democrat trying to talk to a bunch of committed repubs would be draining, an even more thankless task than usual. What we need is a plan, a systematic and coherent means and method for attacking this republicanizing trend, and tie it to the upcoming assembly races. Any suggestions? Anyone willing to sign on?