If you want to look at a real underperformance from that cycle, then look no further than the most over-hyped political candidate since Dan Quayle/DayQuil: CA AG 2010 Results
I don't think you'll find any pushback to the idea that Kamala Harris is a poor candidate on this forum (although, as mentioned, she did fine in 2014), but it's important to point out that she had a really strong opponent. It's hard to imagine now, because it's been over a decade since the California Republican Party had a genuinely strong candidate for any statewide office and it's unlikely to happen again in the foreseeable future, but Cooley would have put up a very tough challenge for any Democrat. I interpreted the result when it happened as a sign of Cooley's strength.
Not at all. He won Del Norte County, something not done before [quite possibly since Brown 2.0] or since.
Brown had good WWC appeal. Whitman did well in suburban SoCal areas, winning OC by 19, SD by 5, and Ventura by 4, but Brown did better than Biden in most of non Bay/Sac NorCal.
I think that attributing this to "WWC appeal" misses what was actually going on. Most white working-class voters in California do not live in the remote far north. I had some thoughts about this last month:
Here's something I thought would be useful: gubernatorial swing from 2010 to 2018.
It's striking how different the map from 2010 looks: Orange was one of Whitman's best counties, while Brown came within eight points (738 votes) of carrying Lassen. In the span of just eight years, Orange swung 20 points Democratic while Lassen swung 47 points Republican. That was an anomaly, as Del Norte at 26 points was the only other county in the state to swing more than 20 points toward Republicans, but of course in any case that's a trade that Democrats would gladly make.
It's really striking how strong Jerry Brown was in the historically Democratic counties of the far north (he had carried many of those counties in his 1974 gubernatorial campaign and all of them in his campaign for secretary of state four years prior) and how quickly that all went away. Part of that was that Gavin Newsom was a foreign city politician (he ran well behind Brown in that region in his lieutenant gubernatorial campaigns) and part of it was just the changes in politics in the intervening eight years.
