Thomas Shaller of FiveThirtyEight–a website that takes its name from the 535 electoral college votes as it crunches polling data and other numbers–makes a compelling case that Placer County in Northern California is the new Orange County when it comes to bastions of conservatism.
While Orange County is credited with giving root to Barry Goldwater's
turning-point presidential campaign of 1964 and proceeding to deliver strong
Republican majorities for four decades, “[n]o such political
treatments have been written about California's Placer County, a
narrow, east-west horizontal strip of land about 80 miles northeast of
Sacramento that borders Nevada,” Shaller writes. “But today Placer County is more
emblematic–or symptomatic, to be precise–of the state of American
conservatism than Orange County.”
He backs up this assertion with data and anecdotal evidence.
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–Though 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain carried
California's Fourth Congressional District, which includes Placer, by
just 10 points, four years earlier George W. Bush won it by 24 points.
In November 2008, 60 percent of Placer voters supported the state's
Proposition 8 gay marriage ban, two points higher than Orange County.
-Placer County was recently cited as the state's “worst offender” in the
disgraceful practice of homeless dumping, wherein homeless people are
rounded up and driven to neighboring counties and left there so the
county can avoid any social or financial responsibility for them.
-Arch-conservative Congressman Tom McClintock boasted on his 2008 campaign website that his Fourth District is “widely considered to
be California's most conservative.” He is avowedly anti-choice and opposed to
same-sex marriage–typical positions for conservative Republicans. He
opposed the so-called “Lilly Ledbetter Act”–named for a female manager
at a Goodyear tire plan in Alabama who learned that men with same
position were paid significantly higher salaries–and bucked his own
Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's call for higher vehicle
emission standards.
-Compared to OC, Placer today is less diverse, less densely populated, older, and more rural.
It also has higher high school graduation rates, and higher home
ownership rates; in fact, its homeownership rate exceeds the average
statewide and even in Orange County. Placer's per capita building
permit rate in 2007 was thrice that of Orange's. The median home value
in Placer now exceeds the statewide median and, although it lags
slightly behind Orange County's, when cost-of-living is taken into
account any real difference evaporates. Likewise, Placer's slightly
lower median household income is compensated by its lower
cost-of-living.
The author also puts Orange County under his microscope and discovers “a steady retreat from its traditionally strong Republican roots. Carried by a Democratic presidential candidate just twice–by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936–Orange is fast becoming a purple
county. In 2008, Barack Obama almost won it.”
Mercy!
Shaller's conclusion: “In the story of modern American conservatism, Placer is the new Orange.
But that replacement is symptomatic of conservatism's decline, because
Placer is simply too small and remote to effect the kind of
conservative revolution Orange County did a half a century ago. A rural
outpost, Placer is a place to escape from, not push back against, the
political changes occurring in America.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.