'We Got Something Wrong': California Prepares to Resist, But Differently

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : And if the Irvine Democratic Club's particular approach to coping with a second Trump administration positively screamed California, it seemed to fit the mood in this state -- a fortress of progressive politics that served as an antithesis to Trump in his first term.
61% : But he also predicted Trump might offer them an opening.
59% : California's governor the last time Trump took office in 2017, Brown had cast California, the nation's most populous state, as a "beacon of hope to the rest of the world.
53% : Trump flipped 10 counties that had voted for Joe Biden and made gains across the map.
53% : Trump, after all, won the popular vote nationally by less than 2 percentage points.
52% : Harris this year still easily won California, beating Trump by about 20 percentage points.
49% : But that marked about a 9 percentage point shift toward Trump from 2020.
49% : It seems likely that, after Trump takes office, California will assert itself again as a prominent alterative to him.
46% : "But what is different this year, he said, is that "Trump is more prepared ... he's going to be more extreme.
43% : He pointed to Imperial County, a high-unemployment, agriculture-heavy swath of California bordering Mexico, where Biden won by nearly 25 percentage points but where Trump beat Harris this year.
40% : "On one hand, he said, political observers can draw too many conclusions from a swing in either direction of a relatively small share of the vote.
37% : And once Trump takes office and begins implementing some of the policies reviled by the left in California -- especially around immigration and climate change -- it's hard to imagine he won't be met by an uproar.
35% : "When you see Imperial County going for Trump and Orange County going for Harris," he said, it reflected a party that was winning wealthier, coastal Californians, but that had "lost a percentage of the working families.
31% : "As Trump abandoned the Paris climate agreement, promoted coal production and otherwise worked to undo progress on climate change -- a chief cause of Brown's, both then and now -- he positioned California as something of a sub-national alternative to Trump's Washington, marshalling states and regional governments abroad to embrace their own programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
22% : The state certainly looks a lot different than it did when Trump was first elected eight years ago -- when Elon Musk was calling Trump "not the right guy," Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was living here in relative obscurity and Kamala Harris, then the state attorney general, had only just won election to the Senate.
10% : And in here in Orange County, a Republican stronghold before Hillary Clinton flipped it in 2016, Trump lost, but by nearly 7 percentage points less than in 2020.

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