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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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November 24, 2004

California Exurbia

The other day Ron Brownstein and Richard Rainey of the LA Times (registration required) did this story showing that Bush defeated Kerry in 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the nation, an analysis that vividly illustrated the Republicans’ current advantage in exurbia. That prompted me to do a parallel analysis for California, using growth figures for 2000 through 2003. Here is what I learned.

Bush beat Kerry in California’s six fastest growing counties. They were:

Placer 63-37
Riverside 58-41
San Joaquin 54-36
Merced 57-42
Stanislaus 59-41
San Bernardino 56-44

Kerry won the next two fastest growing counties – Sacramento (49.7-49.5) and Yolo (60-39). Yolo, by the way, is home to University of California, Davis.

Bush won 14 of the next 15 fastest growing counties.

So overall in California, Bush won 20 of the 23 fastest growing counties.

It’s also interesting to peek at the other end of the spectrum.

Three of the four slowest growing counties went for Kerry, and they provided the Democrat among his biggest margins in the state:

55. Marin. 74-26
56. San Francisco 83-15
57. San Mateo 70-29

The three counties basically had almost no net growth between 2000 and 2003.

The final county was tiny Sierra, which actually lost population and went for Bush, an outlier that doesn’t really fit into this discussion.

All of this is interesting. But as I have said before, I don’t see the Republicans winning presidential elections here anytime soon by demographics alone. Down by 1.3 million votes, they need a sea-change in political attitudes among the electorate or a candidate who crosses over better than George W. Bush.