Is California a ‘Permanently Blue’ State?

“The very rapid decline of California’s Republican Party,” writes Dan Walters of CALmatters, “from near-dominance in the 1980s and early 1990s to its current irrelevance has been one of the state’s most dramatic political events.” Walters has been writing on the Golden State since the 1970s and on some points shows a keen memory.

California Republican Ronald Reagan served two terms as president during the 1980s. In 1989, Republican governor George Deukmejian was winding up two terms before giving way to Pete Wilson. The Republican won reelection in 1994 and GOP registrations were climbing, and then, Walters explains, “the bottom dropped out.”

After the end of the Cold War, Walters recalls, an out-migration of aerospace workers was followed by “in-migration, primarily from Latin America, that sharply altered its cultural ambiance and political orientation.” More specifically, “what had been a largely conservative, pro-Republican region morphed into a more liberal, Democratic-voting region.”

According to Walters, the transition “was accelerated by Proposition 187,” which denied public benefits to “undocumented immigrants.” Even though overturned by courts, the measure “awakened political activism within the state’s fast-growing Latino population and eventually, the Democratic Party benefited handsomely.”

Walters wonders if California is now a “permanently a blue state,” but fails to take account of voter fraud for the rapid change. According to a State Department investigation, false-documented illegals have been voting in federal, state and local elections for decades.

In 1996, illegals cast 784 votes for Loretta Sanchez, long before California began giving driver’s licenses to false-documented illegals and the state’s  “motor voter” program automatically registered them to vote. More than one million were added to the rolls by 2018, which might be understated given the number of foreign nationals illegally present in California.

“California is home to over 10 million immigrants,” read a chart displayed by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as he announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s public-charge rule. “Immigrants” is code for illegals and the “over 10 million” brings the number between Austria, with 8,766,201 people, and Portugal, with 10,255,666.

Legal immigrants and legitimate citizens could be forgiven for believing that California politicians have made the 10 million illegals a privileged, protected class. Illegal aliens get in-state tuition, welfare benefits and the Newsom administration will spend nearly $100 million on health care on those in the state illegally, without any compensation from the recipients’ own governments. Sanctuary laws protect the illegal aliens from deportation, even the most violent criminals among them.

Despite the million new voters registered through the “motor voter” program, Secretary of State Alex Padilla contends that only six California “residents” were erroneously added onto the voter rolls last year. Of those six, none were “undocumented immigrants applying for AB 60 licenses,” and none was guilty of “fraudulently voting or attempting to vote.”

The Democrats’ default position is that voter fraud never happens. As skeptics might note, after the 2016 election, Padilla refused to cooperate with a federal probe of voter fraud. The audit of the DMV, which runs the motor voter program, was essentially an in-house probe, so Californians have room for reasonable doubt.

More than 10 million illegal aliens now live in California, a veritable occupation. Democrats give these foreign nationals a host of benefits and protect them from deportation. Californians have grounds to believe that ineligible voters now serve as the Democrats’ imported electoral college.

Veteran observer Dan Walters cites the “very rapid” decline of the California GOP. If legitimate citizens and legal immigrants see voter fraud as the primary reason it would be hard to blame them.