How bashing California became a requirement for conservative politicians

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, residents of the rest of the country often saw California as the place their wacky or adventurous or beautiful cousin went to seek gold, celebrity, sunny beaches, sexual freedom, and maybe a new identity, away from the family and the baggage in St. Paul, Philadelphia or Levittown. “Some of it, from a conservative standpoint, was sort of positive: surf’s up, the Beach Boys and Reagan,” Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker, said in an interview. “Tragically, it wasn’t Reagan’s California” by then, Wilson said in an interview. Ron DeSantis, in a last-ditch attempt to wrestle the 2024 presidential nomination from former President Trump, tried to recharge his campaign with descriptions of drug-addled homeless people defecating on San Francisco’s streets, before agreeing to a televised showdown with Newsom in which he declared the state “failed because of his leftist ideology.” “Even though California was always considered a high-tax and high cost-of-living state, it was still the place to be,” said Frank Luntz, a pollster who helped Republicans craft language for several decades with polls and focus groups, and then used some of his earnings for a home in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of reasonable conservatives and Republicans that feel California’s gone off the rails.” Gingrich, however, doesn’t think California will remain a focus in conservative media.