Column: The California exodus is a myth. But that doesn’t stop the haters

Early in the 1990s, Time magazine published a lurid cover — the sun setting into a blood-red sea — fronting a special edition devoted to the decline and fall of the great Golden State. Half of registered voters surveyed in a 2019 Berkeley IGS poll described the state as “one of the best places to live,” and 25% said California was “nice” if not outstanding. “California in recent decades has been so ascendant,” Newton said, “so dominant in terms of national culture and politics, that people like to see it taken down a peg or two,” in the same way Hollywood stargazers might relish a trashy scandal humbling one of its celebrities. Bashing California, he said, is “like rooting against the Yankees in baseball.” But he California has come to be the capital of Blue State America, a land where residents pay higher taxes in support of more generous services, embrace a credo of live and let live, and condone stiffer regulations to give greater protection to the environment. Residents of those states, along with their politicians, think-tank evangelists and media allies, are “looking for any sign of weakness or failure in California and other blue states as evidence of the superiority of their models,” said Miller, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of “Texas vs. California: A History of Their Struggle for the Future of America.” Through good times and bad, Californians have considered their beautiful, bounteous, demanding and sometimes maddening home a place apart, an “island on the land” in the felicitous phrase of the state’s great chronicler, Carey McWilliams.