AHC: Make california a swing state.

California is a major labor union state. Maybe making it a right-to-work state early in its history, balanced with a California-Republican push to ensure workers rights would weaken the liberal status and give conservatives a stronger foothold statewide.

Basically have Republicans not treat it like a Southern State, but as a unique entity.
 
Bonus points if it's just as populated as it is now.

Butterfly away Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant
initiative in 1994, which IOTL had the effect
of irrevocably turning California's Hispanic
voters- a big slice of the electorate- away from the Republicans to the Democrats.
 
Last edited:

samcster94

Banned
California is a major labor union state. Maybe making it a right-to-work state early in its history, balanced with a California-Republican push to ensure workers rights would weaken the liberal status and give conservatives a stronger foothold statewide.

Basically have Republicans not treat it like a Southern State, but as a unique entity.
I don't think that it is that hard with a Reagan(or pre-Reagan) era POD. They want a swing state, not a red state.
 
Butterfly away Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant
initiative in 1987, which IOTL had the effect
of irrevocably turning California's Hispanic
voters- a big slice of the electorate- away from the Republicans to the Democrats.

But Texas has a similar % of Hispanics and a much larger % of African Americans and yet it's solid red.
 
You might actually be able to pull this off with a pod in 2012, if you have the Republicans actually learn from their loss that year instead of letting the even more extreme parts of the party take over. Basically if the GOP can let go of immigration and appeal to older hispanics on social issues they might have a shot.
 
It was into the late 1990s (George HW won it in 1988). A few different options:

Less hispanics for any reason at all

Southern strategy butterflied and GOP relationship with non-whites much different
 
You could also approach it from the other side and keep the GOP more centrist with some kind of POD that keeps Ford-type Republicans at the top of the party, and maybe somehow undermine the growth of right-wing talk radio by never getting rid of the equal time doctrine.
 
Prop 187 did not turn California blue, its effect is really very marginal compared to the status it has assumed. The key point of departure is 1992, two years before Prop 187 was even voted on, when Clinton won California in a rout. Prior to that point, California had been a very mildly Republican-leaning state in its popular vote but strongly Republican in outcome; the last Democrat to win it in a presidential contest before Clinton had been LBJ. Clinton winning it was a massive break with the past. George Bush went from winning it in 1988, to losing it by over thirteen points in 1992. 1992 is the sort of outcome we are familiar with today, and a thirteen point loss isn't just a result on the back of the nineties recession or whatever, it's a sign of a historic voting shift already underway.

What really turned California blue was the end of the Cold War and the coming of nineties politics; BRAC base closures, and defense industry cutbacks cost literally hundreds of thousands of jobs in metro LA. Millions of people dependent, either directly, or at one or two removes on a hard foreign policy had that gone. In the nineties you also have the fracturing of a lot of Cold War political paradigms, with Clinton, who was a solid fit for California voters on all the issues, and the GOP, shorn of its foreign policy focus and shifting southwards, going more extreme and emphatic on social issues and guns, which was not remotely a good fit for California. Extrapolate that process all the way to today.

If you want to keep California red, find some way of keeping the Cold War humming, and the political fractures the end of it produced kept bottled; that's a pretty deep POD though, depending on how resilient you reckon the Soviet Union was.
 
Last edited:
Top