How California did - and perhaps the US will - Turned Blue

 Two U.S. presidents have come from California: Richard Nixon (born here) and Ronald Reagan (governor here). Both Republicans.

So how did California become one of the bluest states in the country?

A huge part of the answer is Proposition 187.

Prop 187—branded the “Save Our State” initiative—aimed to deny public education, non-emergency health care, and many other state services to undocumented immigrants. Republican Governor Pete Wilson made it the centerpiece of his 1994 re-election campaign, and he won. The measure passed with nearly 60% of the vote.

But it backfired—spectacularly.

The campaign energized conservative voters in the short term but was widely understood in Latino communities as an attack not just on undocumented immigrants, but on Latinos as a whole. Before 1994, California Republicans often split the Hispanic vote with Democrats. After Prop 187, the association between the GOP and anti-immigrant politics became durable and deeply felt. Latino support for Republicans collapsed and never recovered.

The measure also unintentionally activated a wave of civic participation: thousands of legal permanent residents chose to **naturalize and register to vote* specifically to oppose the direction the state GOP was heading. The long-term result: a larger, more Democratic electorate.

It’s worth asking whether something similar could happen nationally.
Trump has already sent troops into cities, and ICE has conducted aggressive roundups—sometimes detaining people who are American citizens or deporting people to countries they’ve never lived in. Policies like these reveal far more about a movement than its slogans do. Sometimes the moment a party finally gets what it has been demanding is the moment voters finally understand what that party stands for.

California has a long history of exporting its culture—blue jeans, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the modern internet. It’s not impossible that the political backlash pattern that reshaped California after Prop 187 could one day serve as a template for how the nation responds to the excesses of Trump-era politics.

History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes—and California has already written one version of this rhyme.