IRVINE, California — The resistance isn’t lifeless. It’s doing deep-breathing workouts in California.
Not lengthy after the election, a bunch of Orange County Democrats invited a therapist to assist them course of Donald Trump’s return to energy. She clicked via matters starting from “phases of grief” to how one can “improve misery tolerance” and “how one can self-soothe.”
And if the Irvine Democratic Membership’s explicit strategy to dealing with a second Trump administration positively screamed California, it appeared to suit the temper on this state — a fortress of progressive politics that served as an antithesis to Trump in his first time period.
“This can be a secure place,” the therapist, Rachel O’Neil, informed the group of about two dozen Democrats as she put up her slides. Then, by present of arms, she requested how many individuals felt unhappy, or scared, or exhausted. She talked about mindfulness, “micro-dosing hope” and “radical acceptance.”
“Holding house for our emotions proper now is essential,” she stated.
It didn’t take lengthy after Trump’s election to determine that the Democratic resistance to him will probably be totally different from when he took workplace in 2017. Throughout the nation, fewer Democrats are getting ready to march. Some are tuning out from the information solely. In Washington, Democratic lawmakers are recalibrating, with some progressives embracing a few of Trump’s populist coverage proposals — if additionally anticipating him to fail.
And in California, Democrats are discovering not solely that the character of the resistance is altering, however that the state itself could also be, too. The state actually seems lots totally different than it did when Trump was first elected eight years in the past — when Elon Musk was calling Trump “not the fitting man,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was residing right here in relative obscurity and Kamala Harris, then the state legal professional normal, had solely simply gained election to the Senate. Immediately, after the November election, it seems in some methods extra conservative. And Democrats are confronting, if not an identification disaster, a studied reassessment of their occasion’s — and their state’s — place within the political panorama.
Harris this yr nonetheless simply gained California, beating Trump by about 20 proportion factors. However that marked a couple of 9 proportion level shift towards Trump from 2020. Trump flipped 10 counties that had voted for Joe Biden and made positive factors throughout the map. He decreased his loss margin in closely Democratic Los Angeles County by greater than 11 proportion factors. And in right here in Orange County, a Republican stronghold earlier than Hillary Clinton flipped it in 2016, Trump misplaced, however by almost 7 proportion factors lower than in 2020.
And that’s simply on the presidential degree. After I known as Grey Davis, the previous governor, he started ticking via the left’s losses throughout the state.
“Take a look at what occurred in San Francisco,” he stated, the place the mayor, London Breed, was ousted by a average Democrat who blamed her for town’s homelessness and drug issues. Or in Oakland, the place town’s mayor and progressive district legal professional have been each thumped in recall elections. In Los Angeles, a Republican-turned-independent ousted one other progressive district legal professional, George Gascón.
After which there have been the poll initiatives. A decade after Californians voted to scale back penalties for some drug and property crimes, they permitted a tough-on-crime poll initiative calling for extra stringent penalties. They rejected a poll measure that may have banned compelled jail labor. They defeated a measure to lift the minimal wage, and one other to broaden hire management.
“Everybody must look within the mirror,” Davis stated, “as a result of they’re working for voters who’re marching to a unique drummer.”
Davis, who was ousted within the 2003 recall election that put Arnold Schwarzenegger, the final Republican governor of California, in workplace, is aware of as a lot as anybody about how shortly political winds can shift. California isn’t turning crimson. However even after all of the Democratic Social gathering’s positive factors right here in current many years, he stated, “the combat isn’t totally gained.”
In Irvine, Democrats weren’t planning to riot on the Capitol, as Republicans did after they misplaced 4 years in the past. They weren’t mendacity that the election had been stolen. They have been listening to a therapist, after which handing out playing cards with a hotline for immigrants to name if they’re in hassle.
Strolling out of the assembly, I caught up with Florice Hoffman and Lauren Johnson-Norris, two Democratic Social gathering of Orange County officers, and Tammy Kim, a now-former Irvine metropolis council member who had simply misplaced her race for mayor. Standing within the car parking zone, the resistance felt totally different.
“In 2016, we went proper to the streets,” Hoffman stated. This yr, Johnson-Norris stated, “we acquired one thing incorrect … I believe we simply missed what folks care about.”
Eight years in the past, within the run-up to the 2016 election, 54 % of Californians stated issues within the state have been usually on track, in accordance with a Public Coverage Institute of California ballot. The identical time this yr, the identical survey put that quantity at 38 %. They’re down, particularly, on the financial system, with almost two-thirds of Californians — 62 % — saying they anticipate dangerous financial instances over the following yr. That’s a reversal from 2016, when way more Californians held an optimistic outlook.
Immediately, residence values in California are greater than double the nationwide common, with excessive rents and low homeownership charges — and the variety of homeless folks is rising. Partly due to devastating wildfires, insurance coverage corporations hold dropping those that should purchase properties from their insurance policies.
After cruising to reelection in 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval score is underwater, with a majority of California adults — 53 % — disapproving of means he’s dealing with his job.
Which may assist clarify why even on this Democratic stronghold, and even after California Democrats flipped three Home seats in November, the posturing forward of Trump’s return to workplace has been disjointed. Frightened of Trump’s agenda on all the things from abortion rights to electrical automobiles and immigration, Newsom known as a particular session of the legislature to bolster the state’s authorized defenses, saying California “gained’t sit idle.”
However he additionally promised to strategy the administration with an “open hand, not a closed fist.” And he launched into a post-election jobs tour that took him via among the state’s extra conservative reaches. It was a tacit acknowledgment by Newsom of his occasion’s losses with working class voters.
Elizabeth Ashford, who was a senior adviser to 2 former governors and chief of employees to Harris when she was state legal professional normal, informed me Newsom’s jobs tour has “quite a lot of humility in it.”
“Californians are miffed about the price of residing, affordability points and the course the state goes,” she stated. “What it means to be a Democrat within the state goes to shift — not towards the extremist and racist views of the Trump administration, no person goes to cease resisting these. But it surely positively goes to be a time to mirror on what does it imply to be a Democrat.”
And whereas Republicans are nowhere close to aggressive in California — a state the place Democrats maintain supermajorities in each homes of the Legislature and the place no Republican presidential candidate has gained since George H.W. Bush in 1988 — it’s not inconceivable that even right here, if Democrats don’t right course, issues may change.
“It wouldn’t be stunning,” Ashford stated, “if we returned to extra of a purple look.”
Jerry Brown was consuming half a muffin after we met at a espresso store in Sacramento earlier this month. California’s governor the final time Trump took workplace in 2017, Brown had solid California, the nation’s most populous state, as a “beacon of hope to the remainder of the world.”
As Trump deserted the Paris local weather settlement, promoted coal manufacturing and in any other case labored to undo progress on local weather change — a chief explanation for Brown’s, each then and now — he positioned California as one thing of a sub-national different to Trump’s Washington, marshalling states and regional governments overseas to embrace their very own packages to scale back greenhouse fuel emissions.
After I requested him in regards to the state’s preparations for a second Trump administration, he recommended it wasn’t sophisticated.
“No matter he does that we don’t like, that’s the dispute,” he stated. “Simply write your rattling transient and get going, that’s what the legal professional normal does.”
However what’s totally different this yr, he stated, is that “Trump is extra ready … he’s going to be extra excessive.”
Throughout our chat, Brown noticed the identical issues everybody did for Democrats within the election outcomes. He pointed to Imperial County, a high-unemployment, agriculture-heavy swath of California bordering Mexico, the place Biden gained by almost 25 proportion factors however the place Trump beat Harris this yr.
“Once you see Imperial County going for Trump and Orange County going for Harris,” he stated, it mirrored a celebration that was profitable wealthier, coastal Californians, however that had “misplaced a proportion of the working households.”
Democrats, he stated, must “get their act collectively,” he stated, “specializing in the essential stuff — the financial system, the atmosphere.”
However he additionally predicted Trump may provide them a gap. Brown was speaking about local weather change. “If the assault on the atmosphere is as excessive as anticipated, then I imagine the fervor for safeguarding the atmosphere will improve far past what it’s right now,” he stated. Different Democrats right here apply the identical reasoning to any variety of different points.
Throughout Trump’s first administration, the state legal professional normal, now-Well being and Human Companies Secretary Xavier Becerra, sued greater than 100 instances on topics starting from immigration to well being care and the atmosphere. In Sacramento right now, some lawmakers and activists are pushing for much more cash than Newsom has requested to arrange for authorized battles with the incoming administration.
It appears doubtless that, after Trump takes workplace, California will assert itself once more as a outstanding alterative to him. Newsom is formidable, and he’s a possible contender for president in 2028. Harris is, too. In her first main speech since conceding the election, she urged Individuals to “keep within the combat.” And as soon as Trump takes workplace and begins implementing among the insurance policies reviled by the left in California — particularly round immigration and local weather change — it’s exhausting to think about he gained’t be met by an uproar.
It’s not that California Democrats are within the fetal place as they fight to determine their subsequent steps. On a Sunday morning final month at First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, one of the vital outstanding Black church buildings within the metropolis, the Rev. Robert Shaw II known as for a brand new technology of civil rights leaders within the mildew of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. And, invoking the Montgomery bus boycott, he recommended congregants boycott Amazon, after billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Washington Publish controversially introduced it will not endorse a presidential candidate, and Tesla, after Musk spent greater than $250 million to assist Trump’s marketing campaign.
“We have been on the lookout for America the attractive, however as a substitute we acquired the specific model,” he informed the gang. “Not A-M-E-R-I-C-A. However we acquired A-M-E-R-I-KKK-A.”
“It’s time for us to face up and do one thing,” he stated.
That very same weekend, outdoors a nonprofit in South Los Angeles, a coalition of advocacy teams gathered to start discussing California’s position within the subsequent Trump period. They did respiratory workouts right here, too. However throughout the road from a Church of Scientology, there was additionally speak of “occurring the offensive,” “discovering our group” and discussing “how will we shield one another.”
Daniel Jimenez, a group organizer, stated Californians have been “about to be dealing with a really difficult second in historical past,” however that, in response, they might “ignite the motion.” On a giant display, the labor icon Dolores Huerta known as the activists “Marines within the battle.” And as a airplane touchdown at Los Angeles Worldwide Airport flew overhead, a type of activists, Agustin Cabrera, informed me, “Immediately is about expressing the actual California, those who need extra progressive insurance policies. That’s the actual California.”
It has been, actually, and in some ways nonetheless is. However that isn’t so apparent after November.
On the identical day this month that the California legislature convened its particular session, I met in suburban Los Angeles with the state’s former Meeting speaker, Anthony Rendon, who had simply termed out of workplace days earlier than. After I informed him in regards to the therapist in Orange County, he rolled his eyes.
“That’s so us,” he stated, “It’s new age crap.” (He texted me later that what the Democratic Social gathering actually wanted was one thing edgier. “It’s punk,” he wrote. “That’s the reply.”)
One downside with California Democrats, he stated, is that “it looks as if all we do is preach to the choir.”
On one hand, he stated, political observers can draw too many conclusions from a swing in both course of a comparatively small share of the vote. Trump, in spite of everything, gained the favored vote nationally by lower than 2 proportion factors. However even when he hadn’t gained, Rendon stated, “In the event you don’t understand now that there’s an enormous a part of this nation who doesn’t care about democracy, devoted to a strongman mannequin, whether or not you name that fascism or no matter, that wouldn’t have modified if Kamala Harris had gained the election.”
He stated, “we’re not the place I believed this nation was 15, 20 years in the past.”
California may not be, both. Following Trump’s election in 2016, Rendon and Kevin de León, the president of the state Senate on the time, had launched an announcement saying they “awakened feeling like strangers in a international land.” California, they wrote, had “was not part of this nation when its historical past started, however we’re clearly now the keeper of its future.”
However in 2024, Rendon was pondering in another way in regards to the nation and about California’s place in it. We have been speaking about our kids, and Rendon joked that by the point they’re of voting age, “Possibly California gained’t be a part of the republic.”
“We consider nation-states as geographically certain,” he stated, including that he now wonders “how for much longer that’s going to make sense.” The thought of getting a collective sense of identification in such a sprawling nation, he stated, is “sort of bizarre.”
“My spouse and I’ll go to Tokyo or Mexico Metropolis and we’ll wander right into a cool craft bar scene and really feel like we now have extra in widespread with these folks than we do with some NASCAR, evangelical child from Mississippi … We’ve gotten kind of nostalgic in and round concepts of the U.S. I imply, the nation began as a small little factor and now it’s 300 million folks.”
No, Rendon stated he wasn’t fascinated with secession, a fantasy that has percolated on the fringes for years in varied types — and on each the left and proper — in California and elsewhere. However he was fascinated with the connective tissue between his personal actuality and the one a lot of the remainder of the USA perceives. And he was fascinated with options: “It’s not time to be nostalgic.”
The nation-state, he informed me, “is an outdated concept.” California had as soon as been the locus of the resistance. However right here was Rendon telling me he wasn’t certain what it meant when folks talked in regards to the American spirit or the American dream.
He picked a crimson state, Idaho, for example the purpose — and what he stated had much less to do with the concept of resistance than the concept of separation.
“I used to be in Idaho just lately,” Rendon stated. “I don’t know that they wish to be with us any greater than we wish to be with them.”
