Blue Orange County

Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
I remember when I was a kid Orange County in Southern California was a Republican stronghold.  The Orange County Register newspaper was more conservative than its Los Angeles, San Diego, and Inland Empire cousins, so my folks took the OC Register as their paper even though they lived in Riverside County.

When I bought my house in Murrieta in 1989 the area had one stop light on Rancho California Road, and a single stop sign along Winchester Road.  Now, Rancho California has split into Temecula and Murrieta, with a quarter million people between them.  The Press Enterprise, a few years after we moved in, as the housing boom in southwest Riverside County was in full swing, called Temecula Valley the “new Orange County.”  Between the rise of illegal aliens moving in, along with Los Angeles County escapees, Orange County was on its way to heading Democrat.

In 2018, the black and blue bruising of Orange County has completed its process.

According to the Associated Press:

Democrat Gil Cisneros captured a Republican-held U.S. House seat in Southern California on Saturday, capping a Democratic rout in which the party picked up six congressional seats in the state. 

In what had been the last undecided House contest in California, Cisneros beat Republican Young Kim for the state’s 39th District seat. The Cisneros victory cements a stunning political realignment that will leave a vast stretch of the Los Angeles metropolitan area under Democratic control in the House. 

With Kim’s defeat, four Republican-held House districts all or partly in Orange County, California, a one-time nationally known GOP stronghold southeast of Los Angeles, will have shifted in one election to the Democratic column. The change means that the county — Richard Nixon’s birthplace and site of his presidential library — will only have Democrats representing its residents in Washington next year. 

Democrats also recently picked up the last Republican-held House seat anchored in Los Angeles County, when Democrat Katie Hill ousted Republican Rep. Steve Knight.

 If things keep going the way they are going, the Inland Empire’s Riverside County region may be soon to follow . . . and then the State of California will finish its journey to become Venezuela.

– Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary