Californians may believe that their state is moving in the wrong direction, but the midterms have proved that they’re not willing to do much about it.

Xavier Becerra, a decades-long Democratic Party machine politician, comfortably defeated his feisty GOP opponent Steve Hilton in the race to replace Gavin Newsom as governor. Hilton, a onetime adviser to Britain’s former prime minister David Cameron, ran an underfunded campaign that never really took off. Thanks in part to timely gerrymandering, the Republicans now control just three of the state’s 52 congressional seats, with only five races yet to be called.

Californians’ stubborn backing of an establishment that continues to fail is certainly odd. The number of billionaires has soared since 2022, yet the state continues to see some of the nation’s highest poverty rates and a growing gap between the middle class and wealthy elites. Voters in California also worry about the high cost of living, particularly housing and weak job growth. Somehow, however, Democrats don’t take the blame for any of this, despite the fact that their green energy push has been a key driver of rising costs.

Nothing, it seems, can dent the Democrats’ dominance in the Golden State. It matters little that half of Americans believe California is in decline, or that an equal proportion of Republicans nationally consider it effectively a foreign country. Unfortunately, this election failed to incite any serious debate about those issues.

It’s a similar story in Los Angeles. Despite the city’s deserted downtown high-rises and a general sense of disorder, a GOP candidate could not even make the run-off. Now, the “moderate” Karen Bass is set to lose to democratic socialist Nithya Raman. For all the dissatisfaction with the direction of the city, voters look likely to respond by moving further to the Left rather than entertaining an alternative from the Right. The notable exception was the rejection of Proposition 40, a ballot measure proposing a one-time 5% wealth tax on residents with a net worth exceeding $1 billion.

Anti-Trump feeling, after all, remains the dominant sentiment across California. The President’s policies — notably on immigration — alienated the state’s key Latino bloc, which makes up 40% of residents. Migration flows have also tended to drive middle-income families, the historic base of the California GOP, away. That has been reinforced by the relocation of corporate investment and headquarters outside the state.

One thing is clear from these midterms: residents of blue states such as California have an enormous capacity for pain. In a poll taken earlier this year, roughly half of Massachusetts residents said they had considered leaving the state. Similarly, one-third of New York residents say they plan to leave within the next five years, while four in 10 Californians have considered doing the same. Yet in all three states, Democrats continue to enjoy considerable electoral support. The prospect of a declining quality of life, it seems, is not enough to persuade voters to change political allegiance.

It seems that no degree of progressive failure can have a negative impact on politicians in states like California. The future, if there is one, for the state’s GOP will require separation from Trump and his policies, and crucially running dynamic candidates — particularly from Asian and Latino backgrounds — who emphasize everyday issues. But for now, Trump has made California Democrats seem much saner than might otherwise be the case. That is another part of his dismal legacy — a tragedy for residents of deep-blue states and the nation as a whole.

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Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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