LOS ANGELES (AP) - If the future happens first in California, the future is going to have to wait.
As the country veered to the political right on Election Day, delivering the White House to Donald Trump and leaving Congress in Republican control, California moved assertively in the other direction.
The state delivered a landslide win for Hillary Clinton in her failed attempt to become the first female president while approving taxes on the wealthy and tobacco, legalizing marijuana and rolling back a two-decade old ban on bilingual education.
Voters also loosened parole restrictions on certain offenders and toughened gun laws.
If a Republican tide reordered the electoral map Tuesday, the state known as a Democratic stronghold didn’t budge. Every statewide office and both chambers of the Legislature remain in Democrat hands. The U.S. Senate contest easily won by Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is black and Indian, didn’t have a Republican candidate on the ballot.
“Today we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land,” Democratic leaders of the state Legislature said in a joint statement.
“Californians overwhelmingly rejected politics fueled by resentment, bigotry, and misogyny,” wrote Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. “While Donald Trump may have won the presidency, he hasn’t changed our values.”
A small group of demonstrators angry about Trump’s election smashed windows and set garbage bins on fire early Wednesday in downtown Oakland. Meanwhile, the outcome gave a social media boost to a budding plan for California to secede from the nation. The Yes California Independence Campaign hopes to qualify an initiative for the November 2018 ballot that, if passed, would authorize a vote in the spring of 2019 to break away from the U.S.
“People are starting to come to the realization … ’Wait a minute, this is not the type of country we want to live in,’” campaign president Louis J. Marinelli said Wednesday.
In his victory speech, Trump called for unity after a campaign that divided the nation and said he would be “president for all Americans.”
California has become something of an outlier in U.S. politics, where the Republican Party has drifted toward irrelevance. Trump was out of step with most voters on touchstone issues, including abortion rights and climate change.
According to preliminary returns, Clinton carried the state by a 28-point edge, with more than 61 percent of the vote, one of the strongest margins in the country.
An exit poll conducted for AP and the television networks by Edison Research found 70 percent of state voters have an unfavorable view of the president-elect, and nearly the same number see him as lacking the temperament to serve in the White House.
“I’m not convinced that Trump is concerned about the people, about my children and my children’s children,” said Clinton supporter Phyllis Lewis of Fresno, a 39-year-old Democrat.
A big reason for the state’s political tilt is demographics.
The white, working-class voters behind the Trump insurgency, many frustrated with government, are scarcer in California compared to the nation as a whole and states where the billionaire businessman performed well.
The exit poll found about one-third of voters nationally were non-college-educated whites, and they flocked to Trump. But in California, that group represents only about 19 percent of the electorate.
Meanwhile, minority voters who mostly snubbed the billionaire businessman make up a majority of the population in California.
The number of Hispanics, blacks and Asian-Americans combined has outnumbered whites in California since 1998, and Latinos alone now outnumber the white population. Most of the new voters are Democrats, or independents who tend to vote like them.
Hispanics made up nearly a third of people who voted in California, while the number was 11 percent nationally. They favored Clinton by a nearly 3-1 margin in the state.
Trump was supported by 24 percent of Latinos in the state, the survey found, several points below the vote for Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.
Nationally, Trump was favored by voters who described themselves as angry or dissatisfied with the federal government, but in California Clinton even held an edge over Trump with that group.
California’s ballot propositions provide a window into the political makeup of the state, which over time has become more diverse and Democratic.
Republicans were strongly opposed to legal pot in the state, but it was handily enacted because it was favored by Democrats and independents, the exit poll found.
Voters expanded some of the nation’s toughest gun control measures, banning large-capacity ammunition magazines and requiring background checks for ammunition sales. The also overwhelmingly repealed a law that limited bilingual education in public schools.
It wasn’t all dark for Republicans and conservatives.
Several endangered congressional Republicans held off tough challenges. And a top target for Democrats, Republican Assemblywoman Catharine Baker of Dublin, defeated Democratic challenger Cheryl Cook-Kallio in a district that typically votes overwhelmingly for Democrats.
Voters rejected a proposal intended to save the state money on prescription drug costs but that could have raised prices for veterans, and also voted down a repeal of the state’s death penalty.
But those victories were anomalies for the GOP.
“It’s not like the state is in complete lockstep,” said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. It wasn’t all dark for Republicans and conservatives. “But it’s pretty close to that.”
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