Three weeks before he was declared the winner of the presidential election, Donald Trump greeted a crowd of impassioned fans in sunny Coachella, declaring that he and he alone could “rescue” California — a once-great state he described as “paradise lost.”
“Kamala Harris got you into this mess, and only Trump is going to get you out of it,” he told the crowd.
His rhetoric — the same anti-immigrant, tough-on-crime rhetoric that characterized his first campaign in 2016 and his second in 2020 — struck a chord.
Early returns show that more than 4 million California voters cast their ballots for him Tuesday night. But though Vice President Kamala Harris won the state handily, support for Trump grew in comparison to elections past.
Now, after years of the right treating California and its progressive values as a political punching bag, celebratory Republicans, grieving Democrats, and a blue supermajority at the Capitol must wait to see how the president-elect’s next administration will affect the Golden State.
Trump’s 2024 win challenged California’s status as a progressive leader on climate change, abortion access, as well as the rights of immigrants and LGBTQ people.
The election results also show a shift in California’s political calculus, revealing emerging power bases that underscore a swing back to California’s political center.
The state’s most powerful Democrats are already preparing themselves for a fight.
On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom, with the support of Attorney General Rob Bonta, called for increasing funding for the state Department of Justice to combat anticipated policy moves and lawsuits from the Trump administration.
However, those leaders will be confronted by the state’s apparently shifting political tastes — and the next four years under Trump will define whether or not California’s leaders are in sync with the voters who elected them.
“Even very intense progressives, like very intense conservatives, have some boundaries that they’re not comfortable crossing,” said Dan Schnur, politics professor at USC. “I think we learned this week what those limits are … and the Democratic majority would be wise to recognize there’s only so much they can ask.”
‘All we want to do is make America great again for everybody’
Donald Trump may be more popular in the state of California than he has ever been.
The president-elect is poised to earn more than 40% of California’s votes in his decisive nationwide defeat against the state’s own Kamala Harris, according to Secretary of State tallies as of Friday morning. That’s up from 31.6% of the vote that Trump won here against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the 34.4% of the vote he won against President Joe Biden in California in 2020.
That boost in support came from many of California’s nonwhite voters.
“Trump did much better with nonwhite voters than he has in the past, or than any Republican has in recent memory,” said Schnur.
“Just as we saw nationally, it’s clear that California’s nonwhite voters, particularly young men, were willing to consider Trump in a way that they simply haven’t been willing for previous Republicans.”
In solidly blue Sacramento County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by over 170,000, Trump supporters were visibly, vocally celebratory.
“All we want to do is make America great again for everybody,” said Teresa Bozynski, a retired state worker from Orangevale, at a gathering of the Freedom Riders 1776, a group that organizes “Trump Trains” around the Sacramento area.
Trump did, and will again, “run the country like a business,” Teresa said. That’s why he’s earned her support since he launched his first campaign in 2015.
The left “puts feelings ahead of facts,” Teresa’s daughter, Kiana Bozynski, said during a Trump victory caravan. Trump is the tough love, facts-first candidate that Kiana wants in the White House.
The mother-daughter duo have ridden in the caravans for a year and a half, but in the months leading up to Election Day, they spent every weekend Trump-training around town.
Sacramento, Placer, Yolo and El Dorado County residents have likely seen the caravans — sometimes with up to 200 cars — driving in the slow lane around the region’s highways with full-size Trump flags whipping in the wind. Keith Schrenk, of Citrus Heights, has a truck outfitted with a neon red, white and blue “TRUMP” sign on the bed, and a trailer carrying a gas station mock-up poster meant to indicate the rising costs of gas under the Biden-Harris Administration.
Freedom Riders 1776 gathered at 3 p.m. Wednesday evening in the empty parking lot of the similarly empty Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights.
Diners and shoppers in Roseville were also mostly supportive, high-fiving Trump Train drivers, tipping their red “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” caps as they came out of the Whole Foods grocery store to film the caravan.
Despite overwhelming wins for Harris and Senator-elect Adam Schiff across the state, Californians still by and large moved to the center.
“We like to think about California as something special and unique and different from the rest of the country, and in a lot of ways, that’s true,” Schnur said. “But if there’s any message that came from the electorate this week, it was, ‘We are very progressive, but even progressives have limits.’”
The passing of Prop. 36, which will increase sentencing for shoplifting and other crimes, marks a notable shift toward tough-on-crime policies, a significant change in tone for the Democratic Party after a post-George Floyd 2020 election, where calls for police reform shaped much of the pre-election discourse.
Californians passed Prop. 36 by 70% after a successful bipartisan campaign effort among city mayors and county prosecutors. Even the state’s most powerful Democrats — Newsom and Harris included — refused to campaign vocally against Prop. 36, despite, in Newsom’s case, saying he “can’t in good conscience support it.”
Pre-election polls showed that crime was a driving force for Californians across the political spectrum as they filled out their ballots – and it’s a force upon which the Trump campaign was eager to capitalize. “Make America Safe Again” became a common refrain in Trump rallies and among groups like the Freedom Riders 1776.
Beyond the issue of crime, progressive politicians suffered some notable losses, to say nothing of the progressive ballot measures — rent control, minimum wage increases, and an end to involuntary servitude in the state’s prisons — rejected by voters.
In Sacramento and San Francisco, voters faced with the choice between two Democrats have so far voted in favor of centrist Dems over their progressive challengers. Progressive district attorneys were thrown out of office.
Further down the ballot, in Assembly and Senate races and school board and county supervisor races, Republicans and conservative-leaning candidates held their seats.
Immigration battles will arise
In this second Trump term, California’s Democratic leaders must come to terms with a changing Latino electorate that, as Schnur pointed out, prioritizes the economy far over immigration.
Exit polls show Trump receiving historic support among Latino voters across the nation. Early data even suggests more Latinos backed the former president in California, where Latinos have largely remained rooted in the Democratic Party over the last three decades.
“Even though the Democrats often have thought that Latinos are a safe bet for voting Democrat,” said Kevin Johnson, the former dean of UC Davis’ School of Law and a legal leader in immigration law, “that is not necessarily the case.”
Immigration will likely be a centerpiece of the brewing battle between California and former President Donald Trump.
Trump repeatedly foreshadowed this throughout his campaign, stoking anti-immigrant nativism and promising the largest mass deportation in American history.
California, home to the nation’s largest undocumented population, had success staving off Trump’s policies during his first presidential term. This time around, however, experts and advocates predict a more determined Trump.
“Trump has made it very clear throughout the campaign that both immigrant communities and California are on his list of folks to target,” said Masih Fouladi, executive director for California Immigrant Policy Center.
The enforcement and administration of immigration will likely “change dramatically” under Trump, said Johnson. He envisions increased immigration raids and arrests at workplaces and courthouses, similar to Trump’s first presidency.
What remains unclear is if California will see an uptick in deportations, as Trump has promised. The state has stronger protections compared with the rest of the country, and mass deportations would require significant costs and time. Several reports have estimated deportation of undocumented immigrants on the scale advocated by Trump would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Regardless, Johnson said a Trump presidency will lead to increased fear among undocumented immigrants and their families. They may be more hesitant to enroll in college, attend church or visit the doctor.
“The saber-rattling of the Trump administration is likely to terrify immigrant communities and people who may not be immigrants themselves, but are in mixed-status families and who fear their loved ones may be removed,” Johnson said.
California lawmakers acted quickly to counter Trump’s hardline immigration stance in 2016 by passing a resolution in the Legislature that protected undocumented immigrants from discrimination. Over the next four years, the state repeatedly sued the Trump administration over his immigration mandates and enacted groundbreaking policies to transform California into a “sanctuary state.”
Among those laws was 2017’s Senate Bill 54, which restricted state and local law enforcement from using their own resources to aid federal authorities in immigration enforcement.
“California is a safer place for immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, than other states, but not sure at this time what the Trump enforcement measures will look like and how safe any immigrants will be in any part of the country,” Johnson said.
Challenges to climate agenda anticipated
After spending months attempting to “Trump-proof” California’s climate agenda, state leaders are bracing for four years of opposition to an incoming president, who on the campaign trail promised to threaten California clean air rules, amp up oil production, and repeal the Biden administration’s landmark climate law pouring billions into clean energy.
California will not slow its fight against global warming during a second Trump administration, said Ann Carlson, a UCLA environmental law professor who served as head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under Biden.
“If we see the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris agreement, if we see the immediate rollback of a number of climate regulations and efforts to scale back the Inflation Reduction Act, I think you’re going to see a vacuum at the federal level that gets filled by states, Carlson said.
Newsom already indicated as much when he called Thursday for a special legislative session to resist the Trump agenda by bolstering legal resources to fight the new administration’s anticipated climate, reproductive health and immigration policies.
Carlson expects California to lead international climate diplomacy, work with other states, promote clean energy technology and make agreements with private industry — especially if its nation-leading regulations get denied.
California is the only state in the nation with the authority to set its own vehicle emissions standards, and it has adopted some of the world’s most stringent air regulations over the last four years.
Those include a ban on new gasoline-powered car sales and a prohibition against diesel-fueled trucks in state ports by 2036. But many of these rules are waiting for federal approval, and a Trump administration will likely reject them.
Threats also loom at the Supreme Court, which recently blocked the Clean Power Plan, an EPA rule to reduce greenhouse gasses from existing power plants. The court also recently overturned the Chevron deference, which rolls back authority of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous language in laws.
Still, the state has ample power to achieve progress, said Craig Segall, vice president of the environmental group Evergreen Action.
“It’s in California’s power to decide how to build a clean grid, and it’s in its power to decide how to electrify and modernize its housing stock,” he said. As one of the biggest economies in the world, “I think it will have to swing that weight.”
Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine, thought the election results also illustrated a need for California leaders to prioritize affordability and kitchen table issues even when it comes to the clean energy transition.
Rising energy costs have taken center stage in recent weeks. This year, investor-owned utilities raised electricity rates to record highs, and regulators are gearing up to vote on a climate program likely to raise gas prices.
“Folks are telling us loud and clear that California is moving in the wrong direction, and are very angry and frustrated about a lot of issues,” Norris said. “Cost of living and energy affordability is really at the top of that list.”
LGBTQ rights to continue as wedge issue
Transgender and gender non-binary people make up around 1.6% of the U.S. population, and about 0.35% of California. But they occupy a far larger share of conservative politicians’ minds and campaigns: Trump spent tens of millions of dollars in the waning days of the election flooding the airwaves with anti-transgender ads attacking Harris.
With his win on Tuesday, trans issues — ranging from the right to access gender-affirming medical care, to the right of trans girls and women to play in women’s sports, to the right to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity — will likely continue to be a culture war wedge issue. That’s true both nationally and in California specifically, where anti-LGBTQ politicians from the state Legislature down to city councils and school boards won reelection as well.
In the face of this new nationwide conservative ascendancy, California politicians from Newsom to Bonta to state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, have vowed to fight to protect LGBTQ people and other vulnerable populations from any harmful policies enacted by the incoming Trump administration.
In a statement Wednesday, Wiener, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said that California will not “roll over” for Trump.
“Trump has signaled a deep resentment of immigrants, LGBTQ people, women, climate action, and any American who doesn’t support his extremist vision for our nation. In California, we value pluralism and democracy, and any attempt to undermine these values will be met with the full force of California’s right to self-govern under the Constitution,” Wiener said.
California lawmakers have taken a number of steps to make the Golden State a sanctuary state for LGBTQ, and, especially, trans people. That includes passing laws allowing minors’ petitions to change their gender markers to be confidential, requiring schools to maintain at least one all-gender restroom, barring school boards from banning LGBTQ-inclusive books, prohibiting school boards from enacting policies blasted by critics as “forced outing” of transgender students, and blocking anti-LGBTQ states from initiating civil or criminal actions against parents who bring their transgender children to California for gender-affirming care.
Jorge Reyes Salinas, with the Equality California Institute, which advocates on behalf of LGBTQ people in the state, said that millions voting for Trump shows that California, like the rest of the country, is divided.
“This is nothing new. it is not a shocking revelation that there are Trump supporters in California,” he said.
California’s abortion safeguards may be tested
Trump has sent mixed signals on abortion and vowed in October to veto a national abortion ban. But that’s no big comfort to abortion providers, activists and Democrats in California who blame Trump for installing three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“There’s no question the election loss was devastating,” said Jodi Hicks, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. “Decisions at the federal level can and will impact abortion access in California.”
Although Trump has said he prefers to leave abortion up to the states, he will likely face pressure from his conservative supporters and advisers to impose new restrictions.
Project 2025 — the 900-page document the conservative Heritage Foundation issued as a policy and governance blueprint for Trump’s second term — specifically targets medications commonly used for abortions. It urges revoking FDA approval of the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol, as well as delivery of the abortion pills by mail.
That could have strong repercussions nationwide, including for Californians.
Last year, nearly two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. were completed through the use of medications including mifepristone, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research and policy organization.
Mary Ziegler, a UC Davis law professor who studies reproductive law and politics, noted the incoming Trump administration wouldn’t necessarily need Congress to crack down on abortion.
The White House could potentially use the Comstock Act, a law banning the U.S. Postal Service and other carriers from mailing certain materials, such as obscenity, to block delivery of abortion-inducing drugs.
“The bigger danger is that a Trump Justice Department would say, well, ‘We don’t need an abortion ban because we already have one,’ and would then just start using the Comstock Act that way,” Ziegler said.
“There’s no guarantee Trump’s going to do that. When he’s been talking about his priorities, he hasn’t been focusing on abortion,” she said. “So it’s not inevitable, but it’s important for Californians to understand that whatever the federal government does, state protections wouldn’t be enough on their own.”
Leaders in California began shoring up the state’s abortion protections even before Roe was overturned. In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion rights to the states, California voters passed a measure ensconcing the right to reproductive freedom in the state’s constitution and further solidified the state’s reputation as a sanctuary for abortion care.
State lawmakers have also passed dozens of laws to shield abortion seekers and providers — including those who come here from other states with abortion restrictions — from cross-state legal repercussions.
But a second Trump administration could test all those new safeguards.
“California protections wouldn’t hold up if there were federal restrictions,” Ziegler said, including the new state constitutional amendment approved in 2022 by nearly 67% of voters.
In response to legislation in other states to prosecute women or doctors who cross state lines for abortion care, the California Legislature passed laws to shield medical records and other patient information from prosecutors outside California. So far, they have not yet faced legal tests.
“Interstate conflicts of this kind are just not very common,” Ziegler said. “We’re going to have to stay tuned.”
Lawmakers said the new laws will provide important protections for a state that prides itself on maintaining abortion access and welcoming people from more restrictive states. But they acknowledge gaps remain.
Assembly member Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, plans to introduce legislation to ensure pregnant patients are not denied emergency medical care, prompted by a lawsuit by her husband, Attorney General Rob Bonta, recently filed against a Eureka Catholic hospital for refusing to provide an abortion to a patient experiencing dangerous pregnancy complications.
“There’s uncertainty in federal law whether abortion is classified as emergency care. We’ll be moving forward with a bill on day one to make it clear that in California, it absolutely does,” Mia Bonta said.
Newsom’s White House prospects boosted
The one California Democrat who may have benefited politically from Trump’s win is Newsom.
He has denied any ambition to seek the White House in 2028, but on paper, he’s almost perfectly positioned for a run.
He has the money and the fundraising structure that White House candidates need. Despite his repeated denials about wanting to run for president, he spent much of the 2024 election cycle traveling around the country stumping for national Democrats.
His response to another Trump administration has been swift — and characteristically showy.
Newsom called for the special legislative session Thursday “to protect California values, including fundamental civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action, immigrant families, and more.” A text from Newsom went to voters in Missouri inviting them to a Zoom call to “prepare for a second Trump term.”
Yet he’s unlikely to start in the 2028 election as the frontrunner, or even a solid favorite.
One particular problem: He’s from California.
“I could see a lot of national Democrats reluctant to back another California Democrat for president in 2028,” said Wesley Hussey, professor of political science at California State University, Sacramento.
“California is a liability. True, there are many good things about this state, but also many bad things such as the highest poverty rate in America,” said John Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College.
Newsom has spent the past few years building support. His Campaign for Democracy Group, a SuperPAC that can raise and spend money in unlimited amounts, gave $851,000 to Biden’s campaign this year before Biden dropped out of the race.
Another of Newsom’s PACs, the Campaign for Democracy PAC, had $6.1 million on hand at the end of September.
So while the structure and message are there, the political atmosphere may not be.
“After this election,” Pitney added, ‘Let’s nominate another San Francisco liberal!’ does not sound like a message that will appeal to victory-hungry donors.”
