![]() ![]() ![]() In 1996, as president, he campaigned at Santa Barbara City College for Democratic congressional candidate Walter Capps. Shearer, a freelance journalist at the time, went on to teach at Occidental College in Los Angeles and served as Clinton's host and guide during regular California visits.Ĭlinton loved the state: the sun, the lifestyle, the possibility.īill Clinton loved California's sea and sunshine, starting as a young man. One of them was Derek Shearer, a native Californian whom Clinton met years later as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. At the time, Clinton was a gregarious 18-year-old college student who collected friends the way others gather wildflowers. "There was never a day after that he forgot about California."īefore Clinton, the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state was Lyndon Johnson, who won California as part of his 1964 landslide. "All of a sudden, everywhere I went people would say, 'I just got a call from the White House,' 'I just got a letter from the White House,'" said Mulholland, who flew to Washington to witness Clinton's swearing-in as president. That changed the instant Clinton took office. "They felt no one cared," said Bob Mulholland, who spent decades as a California Democratic Party strategist. Bush, then bounced back strongly under Clinton.īut the transformation was also the result of a purposeful White House effort to remake California and turn the historically Republican-leaning state into a blue bulwark for decades to come.Ĭalifornia Democrats - a continent away from the East Coast power axes - were used to being ignored by party leaders, except when it came time to extract deposits from the state's rich vein of campaign cash. ![]() An economy that scraped bottom under President George H.W. The rightward drift of national Republicans, especially on issues like guns and abortion. In California, there were several factors.Īmong them, the polarizing politics of the state's Republican governor, Pete Wilson, which helped activate the state's rapidly growing Latino population and turn those voters against the GOP. In this series, called "The New West," I'm exploring the reasons - economic, demographic, political - for that change. That political base has freed Democrats to compete in the battlegrounds of the Midwest and reach for states like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia that were once well beyond the party’s grasp. It augured a major partisan shift throughout the West, which over the last 20 years has become a Democratic stronghold, stretching from the Pacific Coast, across the desert Southwest into the Rocky Mountains. Few, if any, considered Clinton’s victory in California the start of a political realignment he won just 46% of the vote.īut his victory and a repeat in 1996 - the product of relentless courtship and a fire hose of federal spending - helped color California a lasting shade of blue and dramatically reshaped the fight for the White House. In 1992, Arkansas’ five-term governor became the first Democratic presidential candidate in nearly three decades to carry California, the political birthplace of Richard M. Marked confidential and spilling over nearly eight pages, the document outlined a strategy considered vital to Clinton’s hopes for a second term: Lock down California and its generous share of electoral votes so his campaign could "concentrate its energy on other, more tightly contested, states.” Although Clinton was still more than a month away from becoming president, the topic was his reelection nearly four years off. (Mike Nelson / AFP/Getty Images)īill Clinton was busy filling Cabinet positions and shaping his economic agenda when a memo landed from a team of political advisors. His success helped lay the groundwork for today's solid-blue state. ![]() President Clinton, greeting well-wishers at a 1996 election rally in San Diego, made a political priority of keeping California in the Democratic column. ![]()
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