California, which leans left for more than twenty years, it has not had the status of oscillation statethese states where the gap between the two candidates was less than 3 points in 2020. But thanks to the candidacy of Kamala Harris, who spent her entire political career in California, the state has become Donald Trump’s supreme foil, the obsession by Republican Campaign Clips.
In each of his speeches, the Republican candidate does not stop painting the portrait of a California exhausted under the weight of taxes and illegal immigrants, an apocalyptic portrait that makes it seem “The seven circles of hell in a spa”, according to the chronicler’s expression Los Angeles Times Marcos Barabak. On October 12, in Coachella, 200 kilometers from Los Angeles, an agricultural valley populated 98% by Latinos, the former president repeated it: “We are not going to allow Kamala Harris to do to the United States what she did to California. »
In 2020, Joe Biden recorded about 5 million more votes than Trump (or 63.5%) in California. In 2016, Hillary Clinton obtained 8.8 million of the 65.8 million votes that allowed her to win the popular vote, but not the election, which Trump won, although she was ahead by 2.87 million votes. The Golden State is the one that has the most to complain about about the indirect electoral system: with 39 million inhabitants and 54 voters, the most populated and richest state in the country (the equivalent of the fifth power in the world) is reduced, proportionally, with the same weight as much less populated states. Only Los Angeles County (10 million inhabitants) is more populated than Michigan or Wisconsin, two of the seven key states in this election.
But California has weight when it comes to Congress. With 52 elected representatives in the House of Representatives (40 Democrats and 12 Republicans), the Californian delegation is the largest in the Union. This year, Republicans are optimistic about their chances of recovering to some extent. In a state where they control all the wheels of power, Democrats have been criticized by their adversaries for their inability to resolve the issue of homelessness, whose prices have become extravagant (particularly in the case of energy and utilities). home insurance, due to the risk of fire). … and “the exodus”, According to Republicans, thousands of residents are due to housing problems and excessively high taxes. This wave of departures, however, remains very relative: after three years of decline, the population has grown again. The departures to Texas – which for two years constituted the largest interstate movement of population in the country – were compensated by the arrivals of people who came to work in the field of new technologies. And many of those who left have returned.
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