Bill Clinton was busy filling Cabinet positions and shaping his economic agenda when a memo landed from a team of political advisors. Although Clinton was still more than a month away from becoming president, the topic was his reelection nearly four years off.
The document outlined a strategy considered vital to Clinton’s hopes for a second term: Lock down California and its generous share of electoral votes so his campaign could “concentrate its energy on other, more tightly contested, states.”
In 1992, Arkansas’ five-term governor became the first Democratic presidential candidate in nearly three decades to carry California, the political birthplace of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Few, if any, considered Clinton’s victory in California the start of a political realignment; he won just 46% of the vote.
For much of its history, the West was Republican ground. Today, it’s a bastion of Democratic support, a shift that has transformed presidential politics nationwide.
But his victory and a repeat in 1996 helped color California a lasting shade of blue and dramatically reshaped the fight for the White House.
It augured a major partisan shift throughout the West, which over the last 20 years has become a Democratic stronghold, stretching from the Pacific Coast, across the desert Southwest into the Rocky Mountains.
That political base has freed Democrats to compete in the battlegrounds of the Midwest and reach for states like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia that were once well beyond the party’s grasp.
In California, there were several factors that led to the change.
Among them, the polarizing politics of the state’s Republican governor, Pete Wilson, which helped activate the state’s rapidly growing Latino population and turn those voters against the GOP. The rightward drift of national Republicans, especially on issues like guns and abortion. An economy that scraped bottom under President George H.W. Bush.
But the transformation was also the result of a purposeful White House effort to remake California and turn the historically Republican-leaning state into a blue bulwark for decades to come.
California Democrats were used to being ignored by party leaders, except when it came time to extract deposits from the state’s rich vein of campaign cash.
Clinton loved the state: the sun, the lifestyle, the possibility.
By the time Clinton ran for president in 1992, he’d built an extensive network of California connections — in politics, business, Hollywood.
Still, Clinton needed help carrying the state in 1992. He benefited from the presence of Ross Perot, the feisty third-party candidate who spent most of his time attacking Bush. He got a lift from the buzz surrounding two groundbreaking Democratic women, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, running for separate U.S. Senate seats.
Above all, Clinton capitalized on the sour mood of Californians amid the worst economic downturn since World War II, which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of a decades-long arms race that fueled the state’s robust defense and aerospace industries.
His victory and an end to Democrats’ prolonged political drought was, however, only a start.
“It will continue to be important to communicate your connection with this state and your concern for its problems,” a team of California strategists wrote in their confidential strategy memo as Clinton prepared to enter the White House. “Californians are looking to you to improve conditions,” especially the economy.
Failing that, they warned, “the volatile California electorate is likely to swing back to the Republicans.”
It led to the formula Clinton followed throughout his presidency: Lavish time, money and attention on California.
Then make sure everybody knew it.
“We didn’t just step up on disaster relief,” said John Emerson, who ran Clinton’s 1992 campaign in the state and helped stock his administration as deputy personnel director. “There was a concerted effort to be present and visible every step of the way.”
Hundreds of Californians served under Clinton. Among them Secretary of State Warren Christopher; budget director and later White House chief of staff Leon Panetta; press secretary Dee Dee Myers and chief economic advisor Laura D’Andrea Tyson.
Other states could only envy California, as the federal spigots opened up.
In all, Clinton visited California 56 times from 1993, the year he assumed the presidency, through 2001, the year he left the White House, according to a tally kept by his presidential library.
The effort paid off handsomely.
Clinton easily carried California on his way to winning his second term in an electoral college landslide. By the time he left the White House, the state had become a Democratic fortress.
In 2000, Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, carried California by 12 percentage points. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won by less than double digits.
Mark Z. Barabak is a Los Angeles Times columnist.
