It’s been said more than once that where California goes, so goes the nation — not only culturally but politically and especially economically. After all, were California a country, it would rank fifth among the world’s economies, behind the rest of the U.S., China, Germany, and Japan.

At first thought, the prospect is downright terrifying, given the unchecked leftism, the exploding debt, the rampant crime, the failing schools, the sexual deviancy, the environmental insanity, the tent cities, the poop patrols, all that.

But what if Californians had walked up to the edge, stared down into the abyss of failed statehood, and said, No mas?

Don’t look now, but a new poll suggests this may already be happening. Released last Thursday, a survey conducted by David Wolfson and sponsored by the media firm Madison McQueen said that nearly 50% of likely voters would consider a Republican governor. And not only that:

• 83% of voters think the state’s gas prices are too high
  
• 73% support the state’s anti-crime Proposition 36, which the state’s Democrat leaders have refused to fund
  
• 72% say homelessness is a big problem
  
• 69% blame the state’s Democrats for soaring energy and utility costs
  
• 62% support a “full independent investigation” of the LA wildfires
  
• Only 24% think men should compete in women’s sports

California hasn’t exactly been sprouting jobs lately, either, especially when compared to the nation’s red-state heavyweight, Texas. Indeed, the Lone Star State enjoyed a jobs boom in 2024 while California lost private-sector jobs. Indeed, the only job gains California saw last year were in — surprise! — government and government-related sectors.

Apparently, Californians are waking up. As the Washington Examiner’s Elisha Krauss writes, “Data released in the past week show that since Democrat Gavin Newsom became governor, Republicans have gained more than one million registered voters in California. The latest updates show that Republicans gained 125,000 voters over Democrats in the last few months alone. This marks the sixth consecutive time the California GOP has increased its share of voters.”

This seems counterintuitive. How can the Golden State be gaining Republican voters when much of what we’ve been hearing about in recent years is the convoy of outbound U-Hauls and the exodus of Californians — presumably Republicans — to more reasonable states nearby, such as Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho? If the shift rightward is taking place even as Republicans are abandoning California, it means that shift might be even more profound than these numbers indicate.

It makes us wonder where all these Californians were four years ago when the state’s voters resoundingly rejected a Republican-led recall effort of Governor Gavin Newsom — an effort that offered conservative talker Larry Elder as the gubernatorial alternative.

Much has happened to California in the interim, however, and nearly all of it bad. Historian Victor Davis Hanson, who’s also a Central Valley farmer, has been chronicling the state’s demise for a couple of decades at least. He writes:

The collapse of the blue-state/blue-city model and those who work within and promote it reflects the radical environmentalism of the college-educated, as well as an array of high taxes, high crime, endless government regulations, housing shortages, massive homelessness, illegal immigration, critical-legal-theory prosecutors, ethnic and racial chauvinism, defund-the-police city councils, and, most importantly, chronic budget deficits and vast, unfunded pension liabilities and obligations.

That’s quite a laundry list of maladies, and all of them have been delivered to Californians by their state’s one-party rule: The Democrats hold veto-proof supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature.

Hanson attributes the failure of California’s Democrat governing model — and the broader implosion of the Democrat Party — to two powerful phenomena. The first is the Left’s general antipathy toward procreation. Conservatives tend to reproduce at or above the replacement rate, while left-leaning urban professionals don’t. As VDH puts it, they’ve become “antithetical to fertility.”

The second of these phenomena, though, should be keeping the Democrats up at night because the political party that was once inevitably ascendant seems now to be in something of a death spiral. As Hanson writes:

We are witnessing the greatest internal migration in U.S. history since the post-Civil War era. Millions are leaving California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, and other northern blue states. And they usually head to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, and other red, low- or no-tax states. So large have become the dislocations that conservative red states will in the next decade grab some 10-12 congressional seats away from liberal blue states along with some 10 or so votes in the electoral college.

If the Democrats can’t cobble together a House majority with their outrageous gerrymanders in California, New York, and Illinois, what prospects for national governance might they have when these demographic shifts put them even further in the hole?

“Democrats have long been the 800-pound gorilla in the room in California,” said LA County GOP Chairwoman Roxanne Hoge. “And what have they done with that incredible privilege? They’ve betrayed the trust of parents, business people, citizens, and legal residents alike by being unable to provide even a modicum of good governance. Of course people are taking a step to the right.”

The Golden State isn’t red yet — not even close. But it bears watching. Because as California goes…