CRPA March-April

According to the Secretary of
State, only 72.7% of California’s
24 million eligible voters
in 2015 registered to vote, a percentage
that hasn’t changed much since the
2012 presidential election (72.58%).
But since then, the number of both registered
democratic and republic voters
have slightly decreased, while the number
of independent voters has grown
significantly. The latest numbers show
that of California’s registered voters,
43.2% (7.6 million) identify as democratic,
and 28.0% (4.9 million) identify
as republican. Meanwhile, the percentage
of independent registered voters
has increased from 19.5% in 2008 to
23.6% in 2015.
The surging number of independents
are nearly equally split at 37%
democrats and 34% republicans.
Republicans are more cohesive as a voting
block than democrats. Democrats,
on the other hand, are more susceptible
to peeling off into issue specific voting
blocks. In fact, there is enough ideological
diversity within the complex personal
political mix in California that gun
rights issues do motivate certain segments
of pro-self-defense conservatism
in moderate voters, and can even motivate
some democratic voters to vote to
defend gun owner’s rights.
Although 43.2% of registered Cal-
ifornia voters generally vote democratic,
Californians (including democrats
and non-voters) nonetheless hold some
important core conservative beliefs that
dictate their voting decisions in most
parts of the state, even in parts of the
state where democrats hold a majority.
On an ideological scale ranging from
strong conservative to strong liberal,
public opinion data shows the average
Californian in the middle, and even
leaning slightly conservative. For example,
54% of California’s likely voters
would prefer paying down the states
debt, while only 42% would prefer to
restore funding to social services. And
both 49% of non-Hispanic white and
53% of African American voters are
more likely to say that immigrants are a
burden on the state rather than a benefit.
Getting this mix of voters to the polls
is possible. If gun owners were motivated
to engage in the process, it could
easily result in the defeat of anti-gun
political candidates and ill-conceived
gun control efforts like Newsom’s ballot
measure and other gun bans recently
introduced in Sacramento.
GEOGRAPHY IS MISLEADING
Growth in Democratic voter concentration
over time has not been uniform
across the state. Instead it has had
a strong geographic dimension. The
conventional historical wisdom was
that California had a north-south political
divide (with the north voting Democratic
and the south voting Republican).
That notion was replaced with the idea
of an east-west, or coastal-inland political
divide (with the coast voting Democratic
and inland voting Republican).
But even this newer east-west geographic
generality still tells only part of
the story.
Today, the real ideological divide
pits the urban population centers in Los
Angeles County and the Bay Area against
everywhere else in California. The majority
of Democrats are located along
coastal and urban centers while the Republican
concentration is focused with-
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MARCH / APRIL