I’ve written before about comparing Placer County to what was once the state’s bastion of conservatism, Orange County. (In 1978, an Assemblyman from there — John Briggs — introduced legislation to remove all gay school workers from their jobs. The Briggs Initiative failed.)
Well, the comparison is catching on — this one in a more pointed way.
“A revitalized and militant Right—fueled by a politics of antistatism, virulent anticommunism, and strict normative conservatism—burst onto the scene nationally in the early 1960s, and nowhere more forcefully than Orange County. At living room bridge clubs, at backyard barbecues, and at kitchen coffee klatches, the middle-class men and women of Orange County ‘awakened’ to what they perceived as the threats of communism and liberalism …” writes Tom Schaller on “FiveThirtyEight,” politics done right.
Times have changed.
“Today Placer County is more emblematic—or symptomatic, to be precise—of the state of American conservatism than Orange County,” Schaller writes. “The county is a major beneficiary of white flight caused by the arrival in California of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, and the in-migration of white Americans from other parts of the country. . . . Placer County has become a magnet for exurban growth and development.”
Schaller writes, however, that Placer is too small and remote to bring about the kind of “conservative revolution” Orange County did a half century ago. “A rural outpost, Placer is a place to escape from, not push back against, the political changes occurring in America,” he writes.
(Indeed, we do have our share of vocal “right-wingnuts” around here. We have them on the left, too.)
Schaller points to arch-conservative Congressman Tom McClintock as the “most fitting testament to this reality.” He cites McClintock’s narrow victory over Democrat Charlie Brown for the district’s Congressional seat in November.
McClintock is a “carpetbagger” who moved north to run for the seat, because “there was no district left for a state senator of his ideological bent to run,” he concludes. The post is here.
A chart from the blog post tracks voting patters. Notice where the lines cross.
Orange County’s heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s when it was really really conservative, and the John Birch Society was important. In 1968, the combined vote for Nixon and Wallace in OC was about 70%! Since then large communities of Vietnamese and Latinos have helped change Orange County in new ways which don’t show up in the voter registration statistics.
As for Placer County it looks like it voted for McCain with about 56%. This ain’t no Utah! If I were a Republican, I would be worried, and if I were a determined Democrat (like Charlie Brown), I would give it another go.