The Interocitor

Bush won 97 of 100 of the fastest growing Counties in the country.

If you want a real shocker, look at a 1980 electon map of california and look at todays county by county vote. They are almost exactly reversed in terms of counties and their voting preferences. The Central Valley was once a solid Democrat enclave, but no longer.

As a state, we went through a big transition when the aerospace and military industries figured out that they would get more passed by parcelling their work over many states rather than having everything in southern california. We also saw a great deal of bases close, and while the closings themselves werent the big deal, the infrastructure they provided that allowed many ex military to retire nearby was. When they closed the bases, the ex-military looked elsewhere, taking with them a once large amount of conservative voters.

Central valley farmers, who were in large part survivors of the depression found themselves at odds with an increasingly leftist and anti-american democrat party.

Today, after the end of the "internet gold rush" ,we see a natural expansion in areas of the state where housing is cheaper and family life is the norm. the continued expansion of broadband is allowing many of us to work at jobs in remote areas of the state where we used to require travel for 2 hours each way to do in the bigger cities.

My suspicion is that we have reached the bottom of the curve and are about to start swinging upwards in terms of California conservative voting patterns.

If you want to frighten a Democrat, mention the idea that we here in california should try to do what Maine does and parcel our electoral votes up by congressional district and not "winner take all". If this were to happen, the automatic 55 votes democrat suddenly becomes about 17 with the rest going to a republican. Democrats should hang on to the electoral college like grim death as its their only hope to remain competitive.

Well, if done by congressional disctict, I suspect they'd go the same way the gerrymandered Congressional district goes. Democrats have an advantage here in CA.

Studies of such a distribution in the 2000 showed no great difference in electoral votes. Bush still won.

See my previous posts on electoral voting here and here

Gerrymandered though the districts may be, that still leaves some solidly Republican ones, so Martin's point is valid: anything less than a winner-take-all system here in CA would hand over a goodly number of electoral votes to the Republicans. Maybe not as many as a pro-rata split along the popular vote, but a number above zero at least.

AND, I think we'll see an initiative soon that will attempt to fix the broken redistricting system here in CA. Making districts competitive is the main thing we can do to get the state legislature swung back toward sanity, not to mention getting our congressbeings to stop talking one game and voting another, such as on the illegal alien issue.

yeah, but it does the opposite in other states, to no net benefit. I'll take a system which is lumpy but not manipulable over one that's fixable every time.

See here, from the Center for Voting and Democracy:

Although we can see how this method might benefit some states individually, it is actually quite detrimental on a national scale. Because the spoiler dynamic, gerrymandering and very few competitive districts would be so decisive in the outcome of an election using the Congressional District format, FairVote does not support this reform method.