How did Ronald Reagan do so well in Los Angels County?

[AN63093]

It's pretty obvious looking at certain county results that RR won hispanics.

Which counties?  Exit polls had Reagan losing the Hispanic vote in both 1980 and 1984.

I think Atlas is (once again) underestimating the amount of demographic transformation that's happened in a lot of urban/suburban counties over the past 30 years.  Los Angeles County was 40.8% non-Hispanic White in 1990, but only 26.5% non-Hispanic White by 2017. 

This.  It has nothing to do with where Reagan was from, the "neighbors and friends" vote (seriously? LOL) or even the decline of the CA defense industry (while perhaps intertwined with these greater trends, and certainly worth mentioning, was not the primary factor).  All these other reasons are over-analyzing it and are varying degrees of irrelevant.

What changed were the demographics.  LA County today has practically no resemblence to what it looked like 40 years ago.

Take the Valley, for instance.  At the 1980 census, the Valley was over 70% white.  Places like Van Nuys were upwards of 80%+ white (Van Nuys by the 2000 census was 23% white.. by now, I imagine it's even less).

It's really just as simple as that.  The same thing is now happening in Orange Cty, although it took a couple decades longer for it to get going there.

[AN63093]

It's pretty obvious looking at certain county results that RR won hispanics.

Which counties?  Exit polls had Reagan losing the Hispanic vote in both 1980 and 1984.

I think Atlas is (once again) underestimating the amount of demographic transformation that's happened in a lot of urban/suburban counties over the past 30 years.  Los Angeles County was 40.8% non-Hispanic White in 1990, but only 26.5% non-Hispanic White by 2017.  

This.  It has nothing to do with where Reagan was from, the "neighbors and friends" vote (seriously? LOL) or even the decline of the CA defense industry (while perhaps intertwined with these greater trends, and certainly worth mentioning, was not the primary factor).  All these other reasons are over-analyzing it and are varying degrees of irrelevant.

What changed were the demographics.  LA County today has practically no resemblence to what it looked like 40 years ago.

Take the Valley, for instance.  At the 1980 census, the Valley was over 70% white.  Places like Van Nuys were upwards of 80%+ white (Van Nuys by the 2000 census was 23% white.. by now, I imagine it's even less).

It's really just as simple as that.  The same thing is now happening in Orange Cty, although it took a couple decades longer for it to get going there.

Changing demographics is most if not 90% of it. Detroit's 5th district voted 54-33 Humphrey in '68, narrowly for Ford in '76, and 95.0-4.2 for Gore in 2000. Why? Demographic changes (massive out-migration to Sterling Heights, mostly).

However, since Carter carried LA County in '76, I wonder if some older Angelenos (long gone now) recalled Reagan's Hollywood days and voted for the old actor in '80 and even '84.

I suppose some of those voters could exist, but it would be pretty much impossible to figure out how many, and I'm not sure it would be a significant number anyways.  Mostly because I'm not sure you can draw any conclusions specific to LA County in regards to 1976 vs. 1980- Carter '76 was the last time the Dems were competitive nationally with whites and actually came close to winning a majority.  Every election since then the GOP has won whites fairly resoundingly, although Clinton '96 came close to a plurality (and we'll never know what would've happened if Perot wasn't in the race, since he got 9% of the white vote that year).  So I think LA County just reflects how demographic voting trends were changing nationally rather than anything specific to LA County.  Had Reagan never ran, the same shift would've happened in the 80s- maybe the margins would be a little different, but it still would've happened.