Ronald Reagan won reelection in 1984 in a landslide, claiming every state except his opponent’s home state of Minnesota and Washington, DC. Then in 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s deputy, was the last Republican presidential candidate to win California. For a state where Reagan served two terms as governor, what happened?

William Voegeli attempts to answer that question at City Journal.

He starts with some statistics about the Electoral College and California’s massive margins for Democrats in recent years. Why did Donald Trump lose the popular vote in 2016 and 2020? Almost solely due to California.

California’s transformation — from what we would retroactively call a red state in the early twentieth century to a purple one after World War II to deep blue in the twenty-first century — is obviously more consequential. With a population 22 times larger than West Virginia’s, California is home to nearly one out of eight Americans. Its 54 electoral votes provide one-fifth of the total needed to win the presidency.

But the emergence of blue California is also fascinating historically, given the state’s legacy as the birthplace of Reagan Republicanism. Ronald Reagan abandoned show business for politics in 1966, when he won 57.6 percent of the state’s vote in his first political campaign, defeating Democratic governor Pat Brown, who was seeking reelection to a third term. In that era, California was somewhat more Republican than the rest of America, at least when it came to voting for presidents. Richard Nixon had carried his native state against John Kennedy in 1960 and would go on to win it again in his successful campaigns of 1968 and 1972. Even in 1976, with no Californians on the ballot for president or vice president, Gerald Ford won in California, despite losing the national election to Jimmy Carter. All told, in the ten presidential elections from 1952 through 1988, Republican nominees secured California’s electoral votes nine times, Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide against Barry Goldwater being the sole exception.

Beginning with Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992, the Democratic nominee has won California in the eight most recent elections.

The story down the ballot is even worse for Republicans. But, again, it wasn’t always that way. Voegeli explains at length some of the reasons Reagan won the governorship in 1966 and how California voters viewed the issues.

So, what changed? How did California’s Republican Party go from being dominant to competitive to irrelevant? Any explanation must begin with the simple truth that the kinds of people inhabiting California, and the conditions of life there, are very different in 2023 from the way they were in 1966. Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 after Ted Kennedy asserted on the Senate floor that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset” as a result of the new law.

This turned out to be incorrect, profoundly so in California. In 1970, 76 percent of California residents were white, a proportion that fell below 50 percent by 2000 and stood at 35 percent in 2020. The black proportion of the population also declined, from 8 percent in 1970 to 5 percent in 2020. Standing against these losses were big gains among Asians (from 3 percent in 1970 to 15 percent in 2020) and Hispanics (13 percent in 1970, 39 percent in 2020). Going into the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center reported, the only states where white residents accounted for fewer than 50 percent of registered voters were Hawaii, New Mexico, and California.

One huge way this came into play was Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187, “which amended the state constitution to deny many public benefits to illegal immigrants.” That policy won at the ballot box, lost in the courts, and Hispanics eventually turned heavily against the GOP.

Another ironic aspect of California’s shift was, ironically, “Reagan’s greatest achievement in public life: laying the groundwork for peaceful victory in the Cold War.” That led to a huge decrease in defense investment, which caused a massive outflow of defense workers and their families from the state. In short, Voegeli says, “Not only did Hispanic (and Asian) voters start becoming more numerous and, perhaps, more Democratic, but growing numbers of Republican voters started to become ex-Californians.” This population shift put the state solidly in the Democrat column.

Still another factor in California’s shift were two other things Reagan did: ease restrictions on abortion and implement no-fault divorce. as the rest of the nation followed, marriage suffered: “While fewer than 20 percent of the marriages begun in 1950 ended in divorce, 50 percent of those that began in 1970 did.” Both measures ended up wreaking havoc on families and, eventually, politics, which is why Reagan came to deeply regret both.

Voegeli concludes:

According to Lou Cannon, his discerning biographer, Ronald Reagan applied to politics the lesson that he had learned in show business: it’s important to know when to leave the stage. Eligible to run for a third gubernatorial term in 1974, Reagan declined. Many factors entered into that decision, of course, but it is plausible that a sixth sense about public opinion, also carried over from a career in Hollywood, warned Reagan that his message would play better outside California than in it. It’s true that Reagan went on to carry California against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and against Walter Mondale in 1984, but he won 93 out of a possible 100 states across those two elections. In the 1984 landslide, California was only his 37th best state.

At the moment of its greatest victory, then, Reaganism’s birthplace had begun to turn away from it. The sensibilities that Reagan expressed in 1966 and James Q. Wilson explained in 1967 have little purchase on California’s public life half a century later. Will they ever again? The biggest reason to doubt a second act for Reaganism in California is mobility: as conservative voters leave, the state turns even bluer, inducing still more registered Republicans to vote with their U-Hauls. The biggest reason to think that Reaganism might be part of the future here is unpredictability: nobody saw Reaganism coming in 1966, either. (Pat Brown was delighted when Reagan won the GOP primary, confident that the party had nominated its least electable candidate.) If California voters draw the Occam’s razor connection between Democratic hegemony, government dysfunction, and a declining quality of life, Reaganism 2.0 may not only arrive, but it might show up sooner than anyone thinks possible.

Read the whole thing here.