Orange County (CA) is now a Blue County.

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As a result of the recent mid-term elections, Orange County, California is now represented in Congress solely by Democrats.

What was once a bastion of Republicanism has made a sharp turn to the left, mainly due to demographics -- as wealthy white families have shrunk in size and/or moved to other parts of the country, minority families have moved in and taken their places.

The GOP is down to 24 percent registration; the reason being is that they started off with a huge deficit in minority involvement, which spilled over to include a deficit with whites.

77 percent of Republican likely voters in California are white, while Orange County's white population is only 39 percent.

Former gubernatorial candidate Assemblyman Travis Allen -- a far-right conservative who fully supports Trump's wall and immigration policies -- has kicked off his campaign to head the state GOP, announcing that it's time to "take back California". The only way he is going to be able to do that is to either disenfranchise minority voters (taking away their right to vote), by registering more white voters as Republicans, or by encouraging white Republican women to have more babies than minority Democrat women.

Good luck with any of that, Travis.

Source: "There is no message. There is no messenger. There is no money. And there is no infrastructure"

Hays County, just outside of Austin, is considered a “swing” suburban county. Fort Bend, just outside of Houston, is solid Blue.

Suburbs of NYC and Chicago have been blue for decades. Jan Schakowsky, who represents many upscale Chicago suburbs (including uber-wealthy Winnetka), is one of the most liberal House members.

As for OC, do you think the switch was primarily because of Trump? Would this have happened if, say, Jeb Bush was president?

Dems were smart to crank up the taxes, and make middle class people and retirees flee.

California personal income tax
8% on taxable income between $40,774 and $51,530.
9.3% on taxable income between $51,531 and $263,222.
10.3% on taxable income between $263,223 and 315,866.
11.3% on taxable income between $315,867 and $526,443.
12.3% on taxable income of $526,444 and above.
https://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/ ... ornia.aspx

California sales tax 7.5%. Highest in the nation.

Many CA cities have a 10% sales tax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_and ... California

Second highest gas tax nationally at 41.7 cents per gallon
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/19/califor ... state.html

This doesn't really matter, since California is already a fringe state and a Republican could not win with or without OC. The people there aren't normal Democrats like you'd find in a swing state, these people are oftentimes very radical as evident by the many, many videos of conservative rallies where crazed people dressed in black with masks storm the place with masks and dangerous weapons and viciously assault anybody they see that even LOOKS like a Republican. One time they even attacked a Bernie supporters, one of their OWN, for carrying an American flag at one of these rallies in protest. Trump's hollywood star got defaced repeatedly, every California rally during Trump's campaign was met with violent attacks on his supporters just minding their own business walking back to their cars by masked Democrat thugs, I do not think California is at all representative of this country or even the Democratic party in America, and it's getting worse because moderates and conservatives are reasonably getting the hell out of there to a more reasonable minded place and as a result, California is becoming a gigantic echo chamber where you can't even speak an opinion different from the collective without being branded as a racist bigot. It's a bastion of identity politics of the most toxic kind, and as far as their thread to succeed from the US over Trump, I'd say good riddance if they were able to do that.

FYI, I'm a libertarian, not a Republican. But no, California is not a state with reasonable people in it.

California has many more reasonable people in it than you could possibly imagine.

Pasadena-based Jacobs Engineering Group is one of the world's largest providers of professional technical services, with more than $12 billion in revenue in the past 12 months.

Rosemead-based Edison International, parent of San Onofre nuclear power plant operator Southern California Edison, had nearly $13 billion in revenue in the last year.

Construction giant Aecom Technology Corp. is new on the list with more than $13 billion in annual revenue. Los Angeles-based Aecom acquired URS Corp. in October. Among Aecom's projects has been the renovation of the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport.

Irvine-based Western Digital Corp., the largest maker of hard-disk drives, had more than $15 billion in revenue in the past year.

Health insurer Health Net, based in Woodland Hills, had more than $14 billion in revenue in the past 12 months.

Thousand Oaks-based biotechnology company Amgen Inc. had more than $20 billiion in revenue in the past 12 months.

San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc., the largest seller of semiconductors for mobile phones, had more than $27 billion in revenue in the past 12 months.

El Segundo-based DirecTV, whose chief executive is Michael White, had more than $33 billion in revenue in the past year. The company is the the largest U.S. satellite-television provider.

Santa Ana-based technology distributor Ingram Micro Inc. had more than $46 billion in revenue in the past 12 months.

Entertainment behemoth Walt Disney Co. is the biggest public company in Southern California, with more than $50 billion in revenue in the past 12 months. The company is based in Burbank.

In fact, California now has the fifth-largest economy in the world. California’s economic output is now surpassed only by the total GDP of the United States, China, Japan and Germany. The state has 12 percent of the U.S. population but contributed 16 percent of the country’s job growth between 2012 and 2017. Its share of the national economy also grew from 12.8 percent to 14.2 percent over that five-year period, according to state economists.

Now, just because we refuse to bow down and worship that ignorant, knuckle-dragging, crotch-grabbing, orange-skinned baboon with the small hands and the lousy toupée living in the White House does not make us “unreasonable” — it only makes us better than the rest of the country.

You pointed out a bunch of tech firms, you think high taxation is helping out with the advancement of the tech industry? I mean perhaps if the government invested tax money into tech, but I don't think the tech industry should be controlled by just the government. There's a reason so many people from California have been moving out, the taxes are completely off the wall. It is objectively better financially to be wealthy in Texas than it is to be wealthy in California because you don't get a huge part of your income stolen by the state.

I think I've been misunderstood in the last poster's reply, see I'm not saying people in California are unreasonable because they "don't worship" Trump, I don't care about somebody's OPINION on Trump. But people in California seem to be disproportionately responsible for PHYSICAL ASSAULT against Trump supporters and other conservatives. Just now in your argument, you are demonstrating that you can't have a reasonable discussion. Instead of telling me your personal problems with Trump, you just called him a bunch of middle school playground insults and said your state was superior for not blindly following you. Unless you can produce an actual reasonable argument against Trump, without emotionally based arguments or petty personal attacks, you're doing nothing more than repeat what everybody else around you is saying, and not even in a reasonable way. You are proving my point.

The amount of tech firms in California has nothing to do with the amount of reasonable people there, it's a red herring to pull out. I'm talking about the radical and oftentimes irrational actions by political activists in California that isn't seen on the same scale. Look at the antifa attacks during conservative rallies at UC Berkeley to see what I mean. Texas also has many tech firms, Ohio is the home of aviation, and so on and so forth. But, as I said- if you Californians truly believe you are superior to every other state and can hold your own economically, please secede from the union.

From the outside, California seems like a mess:

-mega high real estate prices
-congested
-traffic
-smog
-illegal aliens sanctuary
-probably many non-English speakers
-high taxes
-racial problems
-fires
-homeless problem
-heavy-handed government
-cities on the hook for mega pension debt (some have gone bankrupt, others will raise taxes)
-state on the hook for mega pension debt (expect tax increases)
-preachy types calling people "racist" and "capitalism is evil"
-advocates of causes looking to raise more taxes

My relatives just visited San Francisco, and were shocked by the human feces on the sidewalk.

am a california native.

can confirm that the state is indeed a mess.

but it's our mess to fix.

Yes, there are parts of Cali that are a mess. People coming into this state with no money, no job prospects, and no skills to get either one end up on the streets. I’ve met people at the shelter who had high hopes of getting into the movies, or who thought that they could work part-time and earn just enough to support themselves while surfing, or who thought that working in the fields and orchards would be easy. I’ve met veterans who simply could not handle civilian life, and college drop-outs who could not deal with the rigors of first-rate academia.

Then of course there are the street people: the ex-cons, the illegal immigrants, the junkies, the schizos and the psychos who come here seeking a mild climate because they simply don’t have what it takes to be an “indoor person”. No sane person would trash his or her own home and community.

Yeah, some parts are a mess, but those messes are caused by criminals, the mentally ill, the willfully homeless, and people from other states and countries. Most of us are actually proud of our state, and will do what we can to improve it. Beach and wetlands cleanups, animal rescues, homeless shelters, and addict recovery programs abound. California is a great state, and one of the best reasons is that — except for Alaska and Hawai’i — it’s about as far as you can be from the idiocracy in Washington, D.C.

It would take an armed insurrection to turn Texas blue.