Thread title: California Trending R?
California:
1988: D 48, R 51
1992: D 46, R 33
1996: D 51, R 38
2000: D 53, R 42
2004: D 54, R 44
2008: D 61, R 37
2012: D 60, R 37
2016: D 61, R 32
What that suggests is that the McCain-->Romney-->2016 3rd party/write-in vote was huge in CA, which makes this harder to predict than other states. Do they stay 3rd party until Trump is off the ballot, go back to Trump, or go to the Democrat outright next time? Complicating things further, there is likely also a significant block of Bernie supporters who went to Stein because they knew CA was Safe D.
In the top 2 GE for CA-GOV, Cox basically picked up all of the 2016 "other" vote, Newsom's topline was within 1% of Clinton's, the statewide margin looked like Obama vs. Romney, and Orange County went Dem by <1%. But of course, Cox wasn't Trump. I think Biden could pick up a good chunk of the Johnson/McMullin/write-in vote but would lose more leftist votes to Stein types.
Bernie would be in a great position to pick up the 2016 Stein/LaRiva vote, but he's going to send some of the (larger) Romney->Other vote back to Trump and probably lose some wealthy Clinton supporters to Trump/3rd parties as well.
It really could go either way. My gut feeling is that Biden would do perhaps 1% better than Clinton with the same PV result and Bernie would do perhaps 2% worse.
