To those of us old enough to remember the Reagan years, the phrase “Orange County is Republican” was one of those unfortunate unshakeable verities, like “AIDS is a swift death sentence.” CNN’s article here is riddled with idiot bothsiderism, but it just might be one more proof that everything Trump touches dies:
If recent population trends continue at their current pace, it’s likely that by Election Day this November, minorities will constitute the majority of the population in the Congressional District centered on this prospering small city in Orange County about an hour south of Los Angeles.
That places the 45th Congressional District of California, whose seat is now held by Republican Rep. Mimi Walters, at the forefront of a trend that’s steadily reshaping the landscape of House seats across the country: the inexorable growth of racial and ethnic diversity…
For decades, Orange County sent conservative firebrands such as Robert Dornan and William Dannemeyer to the House and was so reliably red that President Ronald Reagan famously joked it was where all good Republicans went to die. After Franklin Roosevelt carried the county in his landslide first re-election in 1936, no Democratic presidential candidate won it again until 2016, when Hillary Clinton narrowly beat Donald Trump there.
Now Democrats are mobilizing to mount their most serious challenge yet against Walters, a low-key former mayor of coastal Laguna Niguel and state legislator first elected to Congress in 2014. Democrats are also pressing hard for the neighboring Orange County seat held by Republican Dana Rohrabacher, as well as the open seats being vacated by GOP Reps. Ed Royce and Darrell Issa, who are retiring.
Demographic change has keyed that political transition. When Reagan was first elected President in 1980, whites still composed nearly 80% of the county’s residents, with Hispanics representing 15% and Asians just 4%. By 2010, whites had fallen to 44% of the population, with Hispanics soaring to 34% and Asians spiking to 18%. (African-Americans, at 3%, and mixed-race residents, at 1%, remain small communities.)…Orange County’s Asian-American community has tilted consistently toward the Republican Party. That orientation began with the staunchly anti-communist Vietnamese community in the 1970s. Republicans have sustained the advantage since, even as Asian-Americans have moved sharply toward the Democrats elsewhere around the country in recent years.
“If you look [in Orange County] at the city councils, the mayors, to school boards, those Asian-Americans for the most part have been Republicans, and Republicans have done more outreach,” says Linda Trinh Vo, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California, Irvine. “And because Orange County is so Republican, that’s how they thought they could win. So the two kind of reinforced one another.” …
Long beleaguered, local Democrats believe the county’s dynamics are shifting under Trump — as exemplified by Clinton’s surprising win here in 2016. (She carried all four of the Republican-held congressional districts in the county.) As in many white-collar suburbs, local polls show college-educated whites cool toward Trump. And many local observers believe Trump’s racially infused nationalism, punctuated by his recent attempt to reduce not only undocumented but also legal immigration, could prompt both a large turnout among Hispanics and new openings for Democrats with younger Asian-Americans not as firmly tied to the GOP as older generations.
David Min is betting she’s right. Min, a former aide to Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and a law professor at UC Irvine, is the son of Korean immigrants who settled in Orange County during the 1970s. Now, behind a grass-roots campaign that’s seen him knock on 10,000 doors since early last year, he’s a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to oppose Walters. He believes unease with Trump is creating openings both with white independents and Asian-Americans who have traditionally leaned Republican.
“I think a lot of the folks here you might describe as fiscally conservative,” Min told me recently. “At the same time they are not really Trump Republicans. They voted for Mitt Romney at a heavy clip. But these folks are not anti- immigration, they are not anti-education, they are not anti-science. So I think there is a real chance to win over these types of voters.” …
What we were told, back in the 1980s, is that Asian-Americans (and even capitalist-aspirational Hispanic-Americans) voted for RWNJs like B-1 Bob Dornan and William Dannemeyer because they didn’t mind “honest graft” and rabid bigotry in the service of “protecting America” from those godless Communists. I’m sure Fox News is still reassuring the older OC voters that the Repubs remain their only hope against the teeming hordes of sociamalism, but it’s hard for those not already cocooned in arteriosclerosis and retirement communities to believe that when “President” Trump is so very eager to promote Russian or Chinese interests over those of America.
lollipopguild
If I remember correctly in 1988 Dukakis won the rest of California but daddy Bush won Orange County by such a wide margin that Bush took the states Electoral College votes. Time changes everything.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
This phrase has got to die.
And now the dirty Commies are fascist oligarchs. What is old is new again.
ETA: But this sounds like good news. The GOP is riding on the fumes of past glories and accomplishments.
efgoldman
Aren’t all CA congressional primaries “jungle” elections – first two, regardless of party, get on the ballot?
Mike in NC
AKA fascism
Omnes Omnibus
@lollipopguild:
No, money changes everything.
efgoldman
@Omnes Omnibus:
Moving the Overton window to two states away helps, too.
SteveinSC
The only hope we have left after the republican’s have sold their souls and betrayed their country is the Mid-Terms. I fully believe that while trump may not be Putin’s puppet, he is beholden to him and he wishes Putin’s help to fuck-up the fall elections and the blue wave. I would not put it past Putin to try to cause some sort of major distraction or turmoil in this country to allow trump to declare marital law and defer the elections (and justice) indefinitely. We must hope with all our hearts that the Intelligence community along with other patriotic Americans in a position to act are on the highest state of vigilance.
WereBear
I want the pendulum to swing the other way! I don’t care if I get dizzy!
Since I am disoriented now.
Amir Khalid
I was under the impression that minority communities in the US tended to vote Republican because they tended to be social conservatives and thus more wary of Democrats.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: Walters is probably going to be first in the primary, if there’s a big democratic field.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Honestly, it was just an excuse to link to a good song.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amir Khalid: [To the extent that] minority communities in the US tended to vote Republican [it has been] because they tended to be social conservatives [or that they had fled Communist countries and bought into GOP anti-Communist bluster] and thus more wary of Democrats.
Edited a bit.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Amir Khalid:
Hispanics and Asian-Americans do. African-Americans don’t. They tend to know the score due their history in this country.
ETA: Omnes Omnibus explained better than I did. The anti-Comminism and the myth of Reagan definitely played a role.
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: yeah it’s really hard to overstate the allure of bugfuck anti-communism, to somebody who just spent a year crammed twenty people on a five person boat fleeing communism.
Chet Murthy
@Amir Khalid: IIRC, that was the case (at least amongst recent-immigrant minority communities, e.g. Msulim-Americans, South-Asian-Americans, East-Asian-Americans). So for instance, I remember that Muslim-Americans were pretty strongly for Shrubya. But heh, C+ Augustus taught us (those of us who needed the lesson) that the GrOPers weren’t to be trusted — that they’d turn on a dime and demonize and attack people for looking different. And shrug at racist violence. So since that date, from what I’ve read, Asian-Americans of all kinds, and other immigrant communities, have been trending Democratic.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Amir Khalid: I think to a certain extent that was true, but the precise story varies of course from community to community. Among Spanish speakers, Republicans did well among Cubans who fled Castro and also had a privileged immigration treatment. Republicans once were able to peel away some of the socially-conservative African-Americans.
But they are so horrible, and the racism so blatant, that they’ve managed to pretty much burn away any allegiance in those communities. And they never had much allegiance among the younger voters coming of age, including the Cubans.
Patricia Kayden
@Mike in NC: No no no. “Economic anxiety” is the correct terminology.
Major Major Major Major
I know a couple wealthy Indian families in OC and I could see them being trump people. I know for sure one of the kids is.
scott (the other one)
@Amir Khalid:
According to NPR, Trump lost the Asian-American vote by a pretty huge (if not quite big enough, because it wasn’t by 99 points) margin.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
So one of the races that I’ve been reading was important, was the Texas primaries, but I couldn’t remember why.
The Democratic candidate for Senate, Beto O’Rourke, is going against Ted Cruz. That’s why. And it’s not looking like a sure thing at all for Cruz.
LosGatosCA
Don’t underestimate Leisure World!!
Major Major Major Major
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: also there’s that district in Texas that had their primary today, that everybody decided to turn into another Hillary/Bernie proxy war.
Chet Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: Some of that is their money talking; some of it is anti-Muslim bias. They don’t seem to realize that to Cletus, they don’t look any different than the Muslim family down the block. As I once said about Dinesh D’Felon: “has he checked the back of his hand?” I mean, even on the -barest- basis of self-interest, these people are imbeciles.
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: The reflexive anti-Communism has faded as Communism faded. But the post-WWII “displaced persons” were, yes, pretty reflexively Republican. The Vietnamese followed that trajectory. But not so much since then.
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: Indian-Americans and other South Asians vote D heavily (went for HRC by more than 80%) but the deplorable groups (like Hindus for T etc) get the media coverage
Cacti
Orange County Republicans got screwed into the ground by the GOP slashing the SALT and property tax deductions.
I’m not saddened by this.
mad citizen
So looking at Texas right now, I count around 800K R votes and 450K D votes cast in the Senate races. How does this portend that the general is winnable for the Democrat?
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: That’s the thing that still makes me a little shocked by modern Republican anti-immigration sentiment: in the Reagan years, while they were already quite paranoid about Mexicans, being all misty-eyed about immigrants from Communist countries was a big Republican thing. And that’s gone, replaced by this hardcore racist nativism. If anyone comes from a tyrannical or war-torn place, the attitude is to think of them as a carrier of contagion.
Gin & Tonic
Just found out my wife’s plane to Europe turned around and returned to Logan because of a “hydraulics issue.” Dramatic photo of the plane landing with fire trucks running alongside. I guess that’s the sort of thing better discovered earlier than later.
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: anecdotally I think W ruined the republican brand forever with a lot of older Vietnamese-Americans.
Gin & Tonic
@LosGatosCA: I may have mentioned before how I love your little town, home of my favorite-ever restaurant.
Patricia Kayden
@scott (the other one): Wow. Those percentages are comparable to the African American vote. Looks like Republicans have overwhelmingly lost the minority vote. Not good. They better pray for more White babies.
Major Major Major Major
@LosGatosCA: oh god I heard about that on KQED today, when they said Leisure World me and my carpooler just lost it.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s really sad. I knew this Indian girl who’s family had moved here and own a gas station/convenience store in this small town where the campus is. She was going to be a nurse (and is as far as I know, now). Before we got into nursing school, she and I were in this class, “The World as a Musical Phenomenon”. I never knew much about her background (her last name was Patel, the most common surname in India fwiw), but she regularly displayed an inability to understand that just because people live in a certain place, doesn’t mean they all believe the same things. For example, she assumed everyone in Saudi Arabia was muslim. She even assumed I was a Christian, simply because I was white and American. I never had the heart to tell her I was an atheist.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
As Omnes said, Latinos and Asian-Americans tended to vote Republican because they thought the Democrats were Communists. (Many US Latinos are from Central America, where they had very nasty civil wars between fascist and communist groups starting when Carter was still in office.)
I think the last ethnic groups holding the line on that after the Bush years were Cuban-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans. Everyone else realized the Republicans are bugfuck nuts and bailed out to the Democratic Party.
Patricia Kayden
@mad citizen: It doesn’t. Democrats still have time to work on get out the vote strategies though. Plus, it’s easy to demonize Cruz.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s because communism, real communism, is pretty much dead. The former communists are corrupt fascist crooks and they resemble the modern GOP.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@mad citizen: Are we concern trolling?
At 9 pm Central, that has to represent a very small percentage of precincts. And I don’t know if it includes the early voting either, which I’m reading set records.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: Amir used past tense, so I assumed he was talking in historical terms. Also, few immigrants that i know trend GOP these days.
Amir Khalid
Thank you all for the explanations re minorities voting Republican. I seem to recall reading that at least some African-Americans voted Republican because of Lincoln who freed the slaves. How important was that?
Gwangung
@Mnemosyne: That’s very old wisdom, actually.
The key is to look at generations. 2nd and later generations tend to be much more Democratic than older generations (with memories of anti-communism), and have been for quite some time, particularly in states like Washington.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Are we even sure that you need the modifier of “concern?”
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: My experience is the exact opposite, at least two of my friends who were pretty apolitical have become anti-T and anti-Republican after the election. One is originally from Russia and the other from India, the only thing they have in common besides being immigrants is that they are women.
Aleta
Does Russia benefit from hurting the European steel industry?
It’s being reported that it won’t affect the Chinese steel industry. (But we know he’s wants to reduce the Chinese trade advantage. Has he been told that this will help somehow?)
Also…It was reported that the State Dept was unprepared for the announcement of across the board tariffs. But isn’t it hard to believe that Trump didn’t at least give Tillerson a heads up, or run it by him? Since Tillerson seems overconcerned (understatement) with Russian business interests.
Mnemosyne
@Gin & Tonic:
Whenever I fly, I wear cargo pants or a hoodie with a zipper pocket so I can have my phone, my ID, and a credit card on my person at all times in case there’s a problem with the plane.
My mom was teasing me about it, and I said, “Hey, if there’s a full-on crash, it won’t make a difference, but it it’s something survivable, I want to be able to call people to say I’m okay and buy myself a drink afterwards.”
Matt McIrvin
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: Yes, but, for instance, the attitude toward today’s hostile ideologies like radical Islam is completely different: they don’t assume that somebody fleeing such a place is an ally, they assume that person is a terrorist faking being a refugee.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: Re-read what I wrote.
Chet Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: [wrote and deleted some text about growing up seeing and hearing anti-East-Asian racism] Maybe it’s something like their position on abortion? “Children are sacred and worthy of protection, until they’re born, at which point, they’re the enemy b/c reasons”?
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Trump got 32% of the Vietnamese American vote, down from McCain’s 54%.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Amir Khalid:
It was important enough that several southern states had Republican controlled legislatures as long as the army was enforcing voting rights during Reconstruction.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus:
They trend GOP ==they lean in the R direction. What am I missing?
Mnemosyne
@Gwangung:
It was still hanging on here in So Cal, as evidenced by the article. But, yes, that’s why I was saying it was rooted in the Carter years — the conventional wisdom stayed the same until W, but things were changing all along.
Adam L Silverman
Nobody tell him that Mexico has an extradition treaty with the US!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@schrodingers_cat: You’re apparently missing the word “few” which implies the majority are trending the other way.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, I can’t account for that. Maybe greater numbers of non-whites that make up the domestic population now is partly to blame?
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: African-Americans who were allowed to vote were pretty solidly Republican until the New Deal era. The FDR coalition started winning them over in the Northern cities to which they had gone in the Great Migration, and it spread from there.
It’s actually one of the most important political shifts in US history. It resulted in a strange coalition that included both African-Americans and Southern white supremacists. The Democratic Party started tentatively embracing civil rights under Truman, then in a much bigger way under LBJ, and ultimately it blew the coalition apart–the white-supremacist Dixiecrats switched to the Republican Party in national elections, and the result was the landslide Republican blowouts in 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988.
Paul T
Gustavo Arrelano is a great writer and making a great name for himself……
In other news, Dana Rorabacher has turned bat-shit crazy, which wasn’t mentioned by the CNN writers at all. How did they miss the Russian promoter in Orange County?
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: The word “few.” I did not say that “the few immigrants that I know.” I said “few immigrants that i know.”
Matt McIrvin
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: Could be as simple as 9/11. During the Reagan era, American conservatives were worried about Communism but had stopped being truly afraid of spies everywhere. But in the 2000s, the US was obsessed with the fact that they’d been attacked at home by suicide terrorists.
schrodingers_cat
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Got it. I read it as, O^2 knows only a few immigrants and they trend R.
@Omnes Omnibus:Got it. Guess, I am too tired to discern the difference between few and the few.
LosGatosCA
@Gin & Tonic:
Thanks!
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: i was gonna say just this when I scrolled to the bottom, but you beat me!
Mnemosyne
@schrodingers_cat:
As Ceci just said, OO is saying that not many of them are trending Republican.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman:
I believe Russia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US. However, I think Kushner wouldn’t want to go there.
No Drought No More
I don’t quite understand why Trump’s treason isn’t taking precedence over all other talk- and I mean everything else under the sun. Including surreal talk of tariffs, or Stormy Davis, or even the November elections, for example, while American democracy is daily raped and mocked by an American traitor who is our POTUS, aided and abetted by every single congressional republican- no exceptions whatsoever. Those people are filth, and the mortal enemies of every patriot in this country.. I refuse to play along with this charade. I call on congressional democrats to denounce Donald Trump as an outright traitor, and do so on the basis of what is already known and a matter of public record.
Let’s look ahead. I’m of the mind that, after being impeached and convicted for his treason, Trump should be executed- perhaps. If only to serve as an historical marker, or perhaps as an act of national penance. I equivocate in the matter only because I’ve never supported a single death penalty conviction in my entire life. But I am admittedly conflicted about Trump, and all his treacherous congressional allies. I’m not at all sure how I’ll feel come the time he, and they, stand convicted of infamous crimes against their own country.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: In my anecdata that would be none.
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne: It’s not over yet. Mnem, maybe you remember this? [I have no dog in this fight, other than wishing they could have got along, and wondering what happened behind-the-scenes to cause such a blowup.]
http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-a-state-senator-is-removed-from-the-1487881031-htmlstory.html
Summary: CA senate wants to honor Tom Hayden. State Senator brought to US as a baby (as a refugee) wants to offer a differing opinion. There’s a tussle, and it ain’t pretty. CA Senate Dems shut her (an R) down.
The past isn’t even past.
Gwangung
@Mnemosyne: I also wouldn’t discount the hounding of Chinese figures by Republicans during the 90s in their general anti-Clinton activities (the so-called Chinagates and investigation of Chinese American fundraising). Again, relatively little effect on the older generation, but made a bid impression on younger voters and voters to be. (Why, yes, they do have long memories on things that outsiders quickly forget).
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
It came up in a meeting today that English is a pain-in-the-ass language. This is a good example: the presence or absence that one little “the” completely changes the meaning of the sentence.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy: the Dems behaved very stupidly, and handed Nguyen a cudgel, which she wisely took and smacked them around with. IMO.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Matt McIrvin:
You’re probably right about 9/11. It was huge blow to our national psyche, much like Pearl Harbor had been
patroclus
@mad citizen: Good question. The turnout has narrowed a bit since – to about a 300,000 difference – but Texas is a very red state and some of the earlier optimism may have been a little over-stated. Beto has won the primary and there’s been good turnout in some of the Dem-leading areas, but otherwise, Texas is so far looking to be still quite reddish on this primary night. In the District that I’m originally from, the 4th, the horrible Republican incumbent, John Ratcliffe has won re-nomination and his Dem opponent is Catherine Krantz, whom I’ve never heard of. Good luck to her! But I’m not optimistic. Cruz won huge; Abbott won but the Dems are in a run-off for Guvner between Valdez and White. Cruz won in 2012 by 16 points, if Beto can get within 10, it’ll be a W in my view.
Matt McIrvin
@Paul T: “Turned”?
Omnes Omnibus
@No Drought No More: You should be taking either a lot more or a lot less of whatever you are taking.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne: Hey, it doesn’t have noun cases.
Adam L Silverman
This is not likely to end well. All of those kids will be tweeting and making recordings with their phones.
jonas
@schrodingers_cat:
Ugh. You mean like the idiot anti-immigrant Chicano Trumpisto in Texas who got a 10-minute tongue bath on NPR this afternoon? How about the laid-off steel worker who voted for Hillary? Never hear about them for some reason.
patroclus
@Chet Murthy: I was really inspired by the Port Huron Statement that Hayden and Jeff Lebowski co-wrote, but it was apparently really watered down in the compromised second draft (possibly because of the frickin Eagles). If the Cal legislature is really going to honor them, I hope they give that 2nd draft a close look. I mean, say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, at least it’s an ethos…
Aleta
@Adam L Silverman: He might prefer a flight to Israel, if Bibi isn’t too busy.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@jonas:
Of course not. They don’t fit the Narrative.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman:
I hope she’s humiliated.
Matt McIrvin
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: If the United States eventually starts burning people by the millions in giant furnaces, it’ll be the ultimate working-out of 9/11.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Mnemosyne: It always catches me by surprise when somebody who is so fluent in English that I unconsciously think of them as a native speaker, does not know something I think of as a common proverb or expression.
But the explanation is as you say, these little subtleties where a tiny change makes a huge difference.
A Russian friend had a funny story she told on herself involving articles. Russian doesn’t have any. So one day after a really difficult meeting with the boss she came out, shook her head and remarked “What A f***” instead of her intended “What THE f***”. That she now understands her mistake and why this was funny, is a testament to her English skills.
Chet Murthy
@patroclus: Dude, don’t DO that! My neck still hurts from the wrench! But seriously, I’m too young to have read it. From what I see on Wikipedia, I think one guy who did read it, was Bill Bennett (Raygun’s ed secy). B/c they for sure neutered the universities as much as they could, by destroying
All it took was to make it unaffordably expensive to anybody other than the rich. Brilliant plan.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah…I think America should see a therapist instead.
opiejeanne
Not soon enough, in answer to the question posed in the title.
I notice that they mentioned Dornan but not the worst of the fucking worst, John G. Schmitz. Read about him here:
Schmitz
efgoldman
@Amir Khalid:
Mixed bag. African Americans were largely kept from voting in the South in the early 20th century, when white the power structure was nominally Democratic. After FDR they moved toward the Dems where they could vote. They’ve pretty much stayed Dem, and moved farther over, since. There’s no chance of a significant movement to the 21st century RWNJs.
efgoldman
@Aleta:
No
SATSQ
jonas
@Matt McIrvin: There was a time in the 80s in particular when Republicans found it useful to leverage lenient immigration policies towards refugees from anti-US/communist countries for political purposes. If you could show you were fleeing a repressive socialist regime, the doors were open. And a lot of Cuban, Vietnamese, Nicaraguan, etc. migrants returned the favor by voting Republican when they gained citizenship. Now they’ve pretty much settled on “we hate all immigrants, so go FYS.” I’m sure this will work out great for them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: s_c did not miss what i was saying because of her English competency. She just missed a word because she was tired. I’ve done it too.
? Martin
They’ve lost OC at least while Trump is in office. We are not hostile to minorities here. Yes there are some, but they are very much the minority. OC is 60% white which is high for the state, but the Prop 187 days are pretty far behind us. The DACA stance infurates us. The anti-tax wave was two decades ago, and we’ve been able to see the consequences. Hell, Brown barely lost OC. And in terms of immigrants, it’s not as solidly hispanic as people might think – we have huge asian immigration populations, India, middle east, eastern europe, etc. Immigrants in OC tend to be highly educated. We don’t buy into the bigotry there.
We don’t have the mystique of the blue-collar white dude shooting heroin because the mill closed 10 years ago. OC is high-tech, mostly biomed firms, lots of automaker design groups, and so on. We pretty clearly get that a developed nation should be operating at the top of the production chain, not the bottom. Steel jobs are fine, but tariffs at the bottom of the production chain threaten those at the top, and the US should be focused on the top. We also don’t have the kind of Jesus worship that the Trump states suffer under, so the LGBTQ bullshit feels like it’s from another century. California has ⅓ of the nations abortion clinics and we continually expand those rights. We have the strictest gun laws and OC likes it that way. We’re not a bunch of fucking gunslingers, even if our airport is named after John Wayne.
But more than anything, it’s the sense that Trump is specifically targeting the state. We are not that different from Texas in that regard. We have a huge sense of self-importance and if you come for us, we’re going to fight, even if don’t dislike you.
Mnemosyne
@patroclus:
I think someone is accidentally comparing the number of votes O’Rourke alone got to the overall number of Republican votes. See this chart.
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin: The sanctimoniousness is what rankles.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
This. It’s been a long week, and it’s only Tuesday.
Jay
@jonas:
A lot of Nazi’s came in too.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: I am living it too.
patroclus
@Mnemosyne: I’m following the NYTimes live stats – currently Republican 1.2 million; Dems 738,000. It’s a good showing by the Dems and a vast improvement, and it’s likely to even out a bit when all the cities come in, but it’s not really indicative of a Dem win this fall. Maybe that’ll change – I’m hopeful, but I’m not going to over-state our chances. I lived there for over 25 years and Texas is quite red.
Feathers
@Amir Khalid: Another thing to remember is that the Republicans are the party of “respectability” and “America” and “family values”. So if you are somewhat insecure in feeling your right to these descriptors, you can claim them via being a Republican. It amazes me how people cling to this, even with all that Trump has done.
Republicans probably lost a big chunk of the Asian vote for attacking Obama as not a real American. Less appreciated as turning off many Asians was their mocking and disparaging his educational achievements. I remember a woman at the gym saying in astonishment about Sarah Palin, “ She’s governor and she couldn’t get her kids into a good college?”
Sm*t Cl*de
Sounds like “minorities” specifically means “non-white minorities”.
HumboldtBlue
Few images capture the current White House like this one.
Citizen Alan
@scott (the other one):
There was a post many years back that has stuck with me that offers an explanation of how the GOP has lost the Asian-American vote perhaps forever.
Quoting from memory:
“There is perhaps no demographic group in America that values education as a means of social advancement as much as Asian-Americans. They place incredible value on those pieces of paper you get at graduation time. So you don’t think they noticed that being President of the Harvard Law Review was an incredible honor … until Obama got it, at which point it became ‘a minority set-aside’? That the Pyne Prize at Princeton was a highly prestigious award … until Sonia Sotomayor got it, at which point it became Affirmative Action”?
At this point, I really can’t see how any minority group could support the GOP for any reason other than self-loathing.
Citizen Alan
@Amir Khalid:
Jackie Robinson was a lifelong Republican until the 1964 GOP convention, which he compared to a Klan rally. I imagine it was the same for most African-Americans of his generation.
Steve in the ATL
@Gin & Tonic:
Did you panic and send your girlfriend home?
Aleta
@efgoldman: You’re right. Or even if he knew something, Tr didn’t care.
@Aleta: Saw one answer re: Tillerson, in the Wapo
Aleta
What does it take to warp a person into a skulker like Navarro? And Ross.
It goes on. It’s quite an article.
Ruckus
@Citizen Alan:
It is of course anecdotal but my ex is a first generation Asian-American and the 4 kids in her family all got college degrees in professional areas. Mom worked as a seamstress, dad in a hand laundry and neither spoke English their entire lives. They worked that their kids could have better lives. And gave them the opportunity. Those are family values.
Steve in the ATL
@Ruckus: uh, no—tax cuts are family values!
But seriously, that anecdote makes a great point.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@scott (the other one): For what it’s worth, the Asian Americans I work with voted for Trump because they viewed Hillary as the result of nepotism, but it was Trump was the lesser of two evils as they saw it.
Chip Daniels
I lived in OC from 2008-2017, and was a member of the Democratic Committee there and watched it turning blue with each election.
Its true, the growth of the Hispanic and Vietnamese communities is driving this. The younger generation of Vietnamese are losing the old memory of the war and experience anti-Communism secondhand as stories their parents tell them.
But they are experiencing white Republican racism first hand, and personal experience trumps old stories.
Chris
This is my district and I can’t tell you how excited we are about Dave Min! We’ve lived in one of the reddest cities in this district (Rancho Santa Margarita) for over 25 years and we’ve never had a viable Democratic candidate ever run here. Dave is great and we’re confident he can win. Mimi Walters is unpopular and so is Trump (2016 election cycle we did not see a single Trump yard sign or bumper sticker which was completely unprecedented for this area).
Kayla Rudbek
@Feathers: yep, when I lived in Silicon Valley, the Taiwan-born VP of engineering I worked with told me that he wouldn’t vote Republican because they were too stupid.