California - 2024 Election Compendium

Topic: 2024 Election Analysis

California 2024 Presidential Election Review

Author’s Note: All 2024 Election Reviews can be found here.

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Outcome

Harris +20.1% (+3,194,482)

My Prediction

Harris by minimum of 20.0%

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Preface

California is the Democrat mother ship, and even in years they don’t win the Electoral College, it is often capable of ensuring their nominee wins the fabled popular vote, which diminishes the so-called mandate for the GOP winner. This was the case in 2000 and 2016, when George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively, won the presidential election, but came in second for national votes.

The state has been kept afloat by the U.S. Census Bureau and probably has at least 5 more electoral votes and U.S. House seats than it should thanks to the counting of illegal aliens in population data. The Republican Party needs a complete overhaul since so many traditional conservatives have fled California for other states, like Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, which of course costs all California GOP candidates base votes.

Republicans making major headway in California would permanently throw off the gridlock of U.S. politics, but even with the progress of 2024, that is a long way off. The corruption of the Golden State is a national nightmare, and urban dominance is still the name of the game. Hope for the GOP lies in sticking to its working-class message and going tough on crime and big city problems. I anticipated Trump would make big gains with the Hispanic working class, and following party registration analysis, I pegged a 20% win for Harris at minimum. She wound up at +20.1% in what is most definitely an inflated margin in her home state.

California shifted toward Republicans in party registration since 2020, moving from D+21.9% to D+20.9%.

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Analysis

· 40 of 58 counties (69.0%) shifted toward Republicans by party registration since the 2020 election, as shown below by county:

· As indicated by the swing map below, 57 of 58 counties shifted Republican by percentage margin in presidential results. Only Alpine County, which showed a Democrat registration shift, moved left by percentage, and only by 0.7%. That means the party registration indicator went 41 for 58 (70.7%) in forecasting the trajectory of individual counties by percentage margin.

· Impressively, Trump flipped 10 counties:

Butte – flipped back to Trump after being lost in 2020

Fresno – first GOP presidential win since 2004

Imperial – first GOP presidential win since 1988

Inyo – flipped back to Trump after being lost in 2020

Lake – first GOP presidential win since 1984

Merced – first GOP presidential win since 2004

San Bernardino – first GOP presidential win since 2004

San Joaquin – first GOP presidential win since 2004

Stanislaus – first GOP presidential win since 2004

Riverside – first GOP presidential win since 2004

· Trump’s win of Imperial County, which wasn’t apparent until December thanks to prolonged counting, is perhaps his most impressive achievement in the entire state. Imperial is over 80% Hispanic and was lost by Trump in 2016 by 41.5%. Similar progress and related county flips can be observed up the central spine of California, notably in Fresno County, as many of George W. Bush’s 2004 counties came back to the fold with the conversion of much of the Latino working-class to Trump supporters.

· Much of Trump’s statewide gain came to his extensive cut to the Democrat margin in six counties that gave Harris a raw vote margin of victory over 200,000 each. Notably, Trump evaporated 656,108 in Democrat margin in Los Angeles County alone, despite making only modest gains of his own there, and in Contra Costa, San Francisco, and Alameda Counties. Quite clearly, the Democrat ballot harvesting machine wasn’t able to match Biden’s enormous ballot counts in the major urban areas, or in most of the state, or orders were to keep California’s ballot count at palatable levels so as not to create an unrealistic national count:

· This is how California’s outlying 52 counties performed relative to the “Big Six” counties:

· In her own home state, Harris lagged Biden by 1,834,460 ballots, an enormous drop-off of 16.5% resembling that seen in New York. Incredibly, Trump only added 75,179 ballots to his 2020 count. This underscores the incredible magnitude of the ballot stuffing and extreme manipulation of the 2020 election in California, which was instrumental to the 81 million votes narrative needed to seal public support of Biden’s supposed victory. Harris lost net ballots in every county except Alpine, where she netted 3 ballots over Biden’s total from 2020. She lagged Hillary Clinton in seven counties, including Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Alameda, and San Francisco. The three-cycle contrast map is shown below: