If you read The Innavotrs during Walter Isaacson, you'd realize that high-tech culture and the counterculture are actually linked. Many of the first computer programmers within the open-source movement were also "hippies" of the time (during the 1970's). As such, it's fallacious to suggest that the high-tech industry and the counterculture in the Bay Area were distinct, opposing phenomena.
That being said, even though the Bay Area has been Democratic-voting for a long time, white professionals were significantly more Republican-leaning in the area in the past, though this has changed, along with many other parts of the country. That being said, much of the losses among white professionals are offset by gains with white working-class voters among Republicans. It's the increasing Hispanic population that has decimated the CAGOP, as MormDem pointed out.
But Southern California didn't have this going on, and the inland South (Riverside, San Bernardino, Inyo, Imperial) was more like Utah or Arizona.
And it, LA, and San Diego were just a bigger count than the New Deal Coalition of the North.
Only when the state realigned from North-South to Coast-Inland could the shift work.
1976 was the last North-South alignment, and 1988 was the first Coast-Inland alignment, just one or two more coast counties and the state would've have gone to Dukakis.
This actually mirrors quite nicely how just a few more Northern States would've given the Election to Dukakis
What are you referring to by "this"? I was referring to Northern California concerning the tech industry and white professional shift, though the same shift among white professionals occurred in Southern California as well, though from a much higher % of white professionals voting Republican as a baseline beforehand.
Anyways, my point was that to my understanding, the white vote in California has been a wash (white professionals, once mixed in the Bay Area and staunchly GOP in SoCal have moved to lean D in the Bay Area and mixed in SoCal, but the GOP has made big gains among the white working class, offsetting these losses), but the large increase in Hispanic and Asian concentrations (many of whom, especially those who vote, inhabit the coastal counties in the South) have really made it hard for the CAGOP to assemble a winning coalition compared to the past. Am I getting something wrong here?
