To recycle a post of mine from some months ago:
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I doubt that the famous Long Beach episode was what cost Hughes California. Secretary of the Interior Lane, a Californian, wrote after the election:
"The result in California turned, really as the result in the entire West did, upon the real progressivism of the progressives. It was not pique because Johnson was not recognized. No man, not Johnson nor Roosevelt, carries the progressives in his pocket. The progressives in the East were Perkins progressives who could be delivered.
The West thinks for itself. Johnson could not deliver California. Johnson made very strong speeches for Hughes. The West is really progressive. . . ."
https://books.google.com/books?id=8mwoAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA227
What alienated California progressives (and progressives in the rest of the West) from Hughes was not his manners (his snub of Johnson at Long Beach) but his politics. California labor, for example, which strongly backed Johnson in his own campaigns, spurned his backing of Hughes. Wilson did especially strongly in heavily unionized cities like San Francisco. This should not be surprising, given Hughes' opposition to the Adamson Act, which provided for an eight-hour day for railroad workers. William Allen White, who supported Hughes, nevertheless lamented, "He talked tariff like Mark Hanna. He talked of industrial affairs like McKinley, expressing a benevolent sympathy, but not a fundamental understanding. He gave the Progressives of the West the impression that he was one of those good men in politics—a kind of a business man's candidate, who would devote himself to the work of cleaning up the public service, naming good men for offices, but always hovering around the status quo like a sick kitten around a hot brick!"
https://books.google.com/books?id=cnU9AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA138