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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Now imagine if California reverses course and enacts conservative-friendly policies - and turns into a red state.

By and large califirnia is a red state: outside the major urban areas the state is mostly quote red; some urban areas (e.g. Orange county) are also quite red and those populations send conservatives to congress.

But because the majority of the population do live in major urban areas you see the state legislature about 70/30 D/R and the statewide offices tend to go to the majority as well.

But within recent memory there have been several republican governors, two of whom (nixon and regan) became US presidents.

So though I don't see much chance of the state tipping "red" any time soon it's not an utterly outlandish idea.

That is true of the entire US: rural areas are mostly red, urban areas are mostly blue.

That's the cliché but it seems a bit unfair, because in my mind, "rural" evokes small towns of 21 people and vast expanses of farm/ranch land. My hometown has a population of about ~70,000 spread out over 55 square miles (~1,300 people per square mile); is that "rural" or "urban?"

What I'm getting at is, it's more precise to say "most of the US--rural and urban--is red, while the densest population centers are overwhelmingly blue."

The threshold from red to blue corosses at 800ppl/sqm:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/11/what-republicans-are-...

The definition of "urban" according to the USA census department have cores of 1000ppl/sqm and are surrounding by areas of 500ppl/sqm.

So if you have a density of 1,300, then there is a higher chance the area went blue. Of course, there can be lots of exceptions, and 1,300 is rather close to the crossover point.

It would be interesting to see those 2012 calculations updated, especially with regards to the results of the 2016 Presidential election; judging by the resulting red-or-blue-by-county political map, things have changed since then.

I didn't find a nice graph, but the rural-urban divide actually increased for the 2016 election. See:

https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14/501737150/rural-voters-played...

> Here's another divide that started to get more attention this election: the rural-urban gap. Rural voters vote more Republican, while urban voters vote more Democratic, and that divide grew this year from where it was in 2012 and 2008. It's a nuanced divide, too; strikingly, as counties get progressively more rural, they more or less steadily grow more Republican. And it's possible that living in a rural area caused people to vote more Republican this election.

> Exit polls show that the rural-urban divide grew from 2008 to 2012, and again this election. What's particularly interesting is that the rural vote seems to have moved more than the urban or suburban votes.

In turn, I was born in a hospital next to a Seoul apartment complex that was part of a 3-apartment complex thing that had more people than your hometown. That's density.

Oh most definitely, a friend from my hometown spent a couple of years in Seoul and related just how different it was from our hometown but also any other US city he'd lived in, including the greater Seattle area. But I would never mean to imply that my red/blue density supposition would apply to a place as culturally and politically distinct from the US.

> By and large califirnia is a red state: outside the major urban areas the state is mostly

...unpopulated.

Seriously, compare the Bay Area + LA metro + San Diego Metro population to the state population.

Sure, most of the land area is Republican-majority, but...

  republican governors, two of whom (nixon and regan) became US presidents

Nixon was never Governor.

Thanks. Too late to edit my post.

It wasn't a very long time ago that California was red. You don't have to imagine. It was only after Pete Wilson decided to crackdown on latinos that the state shifted into solid D.

It's been almost 20 years since Pete Wilson was governor. In the meantime, the GOP has moved quite a bit to the right, and CA as a whole has moved left on most issues. If anything, it looks like the remaining red districts in places like Central Valley could be at risk as first generation Latinos hit voting age and start to outnumber the conservatives.

Much of the potential 2018 shift in Congress may come from CA, for example: http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/369254-perfect-storm...

Eg for the Central Valley districts: "Walters’s district has grown by 33,000 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Of those new residents, 30,000 are nonwhite. The white population actually declined in Royce’s district while the overall population grew by 10,000 residents. In Denham’s district, 17,000 of the 21,000 new residents are nonwhite."

(Not to mention the new tax plan was hugely unpopular in CA in general.)

  It wasn't a very long time ago that California was red.

In Presidential voting, and only through 1988.

Even then, the Legislature was consistently Democrat-controlled (in recent years, Democrat supermajorities).

I don’t think you remember Nixon and Reagan, or when the OC was a conservative bastion.

"OC was a conservative bastion" is very, very different from claiming "not long ago, California (overall) was red".

Without looking it up: when do you think was the most recent time that Republicans controlled both houses of the Legislature?

"...the most recent time that Republicans controlled both houses of the Legislature"

I looked it up.

The answer?

1970. And that just 1 2-year term and with bare single-seat majorities in both houses.

Before 1969? Next most recent: 1956.

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