California and Texas: Two Polar Opposites

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright, author of the new book God Save Texas, maintains that America’s two largest states, Cali­fornia and Texas, are the poles between which American society turns. 

Both are giants. Of the top ten cities in the United States, California and Texas have three each.

The gross domestic product of California is US$2.6 trillion, which would make it the world’s fifth-largest economy. Texas, at US$1.6 trillion, would have the tenth-largest economy in the world if it were a country. Both would eclipse Canada. 

“They are the most ambitious states in the union, each reaching for the steering wheel as America lurches into the future,” Wright contends. They also “define the vivid political divide that besets the country. Whichever is in the ascendant tends to pull politics in its direction.”

Home to such liberal outposts as Los Angeles and San Francisco, Californians in 2016 voted for Hillary Clinton, at 61.7 per cent, at a rate higher than any other state save Hawaii, and she won its 55 Electoral College votes. 

She gained four million votes more than Donald Trump in the Golden State, the main reason she won the overall popular vote. 

Even Orange County, once the seedbed of right-win Republicanism, voted Democratic -- for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936.

President Trump, on the other hand, did worse, at 31.6 per cent, than Herbert Hoover, at 37.4 per cent, did against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, during the Depression.  

Ever since Bill Clinton won California in 1992, it has voted for Democratic presidential candidates by steadily increasing majorities.

Seen by most Californians as a virtual enemy, Trump didn’t even bother visiting the state during his first 13 months in office.

California appears to be, as the title of a new book by Manuel Pastor, a professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles indicates, a “State of Resistance.”

From Governor Jerry Brown downwards, California today doesn’t have a single Republican elected by a statewide vote. There may be no Republican candidate for governor or United States senator on the state’s ballot this November. 

That’s because candidates compete in open, nonpartisan primaries, and the two candidates who get the most votes, regardless of party, advance to the November general election.

It would be the first election since 1914 where a major party had no candidate in either the race for senator or for governor.

The state is in open defiance against many federal policies, a jurisdiction where municipal and state officials defend sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants against attempts to deport them.

Known officially as the California Values Act, the law prohibits nearly all communication between local law enforcement officials and federal immigration agents.

Pastor points out that between 1970 and 1990, the share of California’s population that was foreign-born rose from nine per cent to 22 per cent, most of the increase coming from Asia and Latin America. 

Hispanics now account for about 40 per cent of the population, outnumbering Anglos.

This was distinctly different from the rest of the country, where the foreign-born share rose in the same period from around four per cent to just over six per cent.

By contrast, the last Democratic president who carried Texas was Jimmy Carter in 1976; four years later, Ronald Reagan won Texas it has been in the Republican column ever since.

Trump beat Clinton by 52.2 per cent to 43.2 per cent in 2016, to win its 38 Electoral College votes, the second-largest number.

No Democrat has won the governorship in Texas since Ann Richards in 1990 or any statewide office since 1994.

Economically, Texas presents itself as California’s extreme opposite. Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, warns against the “California-ization” of the state, through such things as plastic bag bans and burdensome tree ordinances, which in his view pose a threat to liberty. 

Texas is growing at twice the rate of California. (In Texas, too, Hispanics account for 40 per cent of the population.) Politically, this translates into more congressional seats and electoral votes.

It is expected to receive four new congressional districts after the 2020 census. That would bring the number of electoral votes to 43. California has 12 more, but that number hasn’t increased since 2003.

If the United States were ever to devolve into a civil war, these two states probably would be, as in 1861, on different sides.