For all the focus since Election Day on the Republican Party’s precipitous decline in California, the true depth of the collapse is still only coming into focus. And so are the implications of that fall for the GOP’s prospects in other western states following the same trajectory of geographic and demographic change that have transformed California’s politics over the past 25 years. …
The GOP’s retreat in California long predated Trump, but there’s no question he has intensified and accelerated it. In the past two years, California House Republicans, under pressure from then–Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, compounded their risk by voting with Trump more reliably than their Republican counterparts in other blue-leaning coastal states such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
“They bet on Trump and they bet wrong,” says John J. Pitney, a Claremont McKenna University political scientist and former aide at the Republican National Committee. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic