Adam Nagourney and Robert Gebeloff

Or head 7 miles west to Santa Ana, where Vietnamese makes way for Spanish along Calle Cuatro, a bustling enclave of stores and sidewalk stands serving an overwhelming Latino clientele.

The Democratic capture of four Republican-held congressional seats in Orange County in November — more than half the seven congressional seats Democrats won from Republicans in California — toppled what had long been a fortress of conservative Republicanism. The sweep stunned party leaders, among them Paul Ryan, the outgoing House speaker. Even Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor-elect of California, won the county where Richard Nixon was born.

But the results reflected what has been a nearly a 40-year rise in the number of immigrants, nonwhite residents and college graduates that has transformed this iconic American suburb into a Democratic outpost, highlighted in a Times analysis of demographic data going back to 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president.

The ideological shift signaled by the most recent election results, on the heels of Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump here in 2016, is viewed by leaders in both parties as a warning sign for national Republicans, as suburban communities like this one loom as central battlegrounds in the 2020 elections and beyond.

Those new swing suburban counties were one of the central factors behind the 40-seat Democratic gain in the House in November. Many of them have been changed by an increase in educated and affluent voters who have been pushed toward the Democratic column by some of Trump’s policies. That partly accounts for what is happening here in Orange County, but the political shifts can also be explained by the rapidly changing cultural, political and economic face of the region and are on display in places like Bolsa Avenue, which is known as Little Saigon.

“There are so many of us here and that is what is contributing to these changes,” said Tracy La, 23, who is Vietnamese. La helped organize a rally in Westminster in mid-December to protest an attempt by the Trump administration to deport thousands of Vietnam War refugees. It drew hundreds of people to the Asian Garden Mall, one of the largest and oldest Vietnamese-operated malls in the nation.

“This is where the future is heading,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California. “I don’t see anything that took place in these elections or the demographic trends that are ongoing, to make me think this is a one-time incident.”

That said, the critical question for Democrats — and for Republicans eager to get back in the game — is how much of the November outcome, and the large turnout of younger Latino and Asian-American voters, was because of Trump.

Kyle Layman, who ran the Southern California congressional campaigns for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said this election had apparently begun to cement long-term changes in voter behavior — an assessment that is not disputed by California Republican leaders.

“I think what we have done is built a foundation that is going to be sustainable,” he said. “These seats are going to be swing seats moving forward. They are going to be very, very tight. But this is part of a long-term trend.”

Indeed, even if the dramatic shift on display in 2018 was in reaction to Trump — and particularly the immigration policies he has embraced — analysts said that he had only accelerated political movements that were well underway.

“Because it’s becoming more diverse it’s becoming more Democratic, because the Democratic Party is more inclusive,” said Gil Cisneros, a Democrat from Yorba Linda who captured a House seat held by Rep. Ed Royce, a Republican. “This is no fluke at all. It’s been this way for a long time and it’s going to continue to trend this way for a long time.”

There was a steady decrease in white voters in the seven congressional districts that are in and around Orange County between 1980 and 2017, according to census data. In 1980, whites made up 75 percent of the population in the district where Cisneros won. By 2017, that number dropped to 30 percent.

The county’s immigrant population grew five times as fast as the general population between 1980 and 2000, and while the pace of immigration has slowed, the Latino and Asian populations continues to increase, driven by the children of immigrant families born in the United States.

“The Republican Party in Orange County has been traditionally all white,” said Carlos Perea, 25, who moved to Santa Ana from Mexico to join his parents 11 years ago. “The party has pushed for policies that are very harmful to those communities: 2018 was a referendum on that old Orange County.”

In the 48th Congressional District, which voted out Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a fixture of Orange County Republican politics for nearly 30 years, the Latino population jumped from 38,803 in 1980, or 8 percent, to 145,585 in 2017, accounting for 21 percent of the district’s population.

In another corner of Orange County, where Rep. Mimi Walters, a Republican, was upset by Katie Porter, her Democratic challenger, the Asian-American population jumped to 175,540 in 2017 from 14,528 in 1980, or 4.4 percent, and now makes up just under a quarter of the total population.

Marcia Godwin, a professor of public administration at the University of La Verne in Los Angeles, said the once-solid Republican Party registration advantage over Democrats has narrowed dramatically as the makeup of the region changed over the decades.

“You went from a solid Republican county to one in which Republicans were just barely the majority, and it fell pretty quickly in the past two years,” said Godwin. “You have had continued demographic changes. This is a county that went from majority white to having a majority that are Latino and Asian-American. So that has gone hand-in-hand — particularly with the rising Asian-American population — to voting more Democratic.”

By every measure, this is a far different place than it was in the 1980s. The population of Orange County has grown to nearly 3.2 million in 2017 from 1.9 million in 1980; it is the third largest county in the nation’s most populous state.

The defense industry — once the dominant economic driver for much of Orange County — has given way to more high tech and service industry jobs. The population in much of the county is better educated than it was in 1980 — in Royce’s district, the percent of college graduates nearly doubled.

Median income in many parts of the county has also gone up: In 1980, the district represented by Darrell Issa, a Republican who stepped down after 16 years rather than face a tough re-election fight, was composed mostly of farms and modest subdivisions. Today, according to census data, there are nearly four dozen neighborhoods with a median household income above $100,000, including 11 where half of all households earn at least $150,000. Indeed, income growth in Orange County has outpaced the rest of the nation since 1980.

This change in income and education has had a particular influence on the voting patterns among younger Asian-Americans.

“As the Cold War has gone away, you have a shift from families who worked for the defense industry to high-tech workers,” Godwin said. “It’s a much more urbanized population, much more liberal and progressive.”

Republicans said the party had failed to accommodate the changing demographic makeup in a part of California they could once take for granted.

“Everybody is surprised,” said Jim Brulte, the state Republican leader. “Like Orange County is immune to the demographic changes?”

Tom Tait, the outgoing two-term Republican mayor of Anaheim, who saw the county change before him as he grew up here, said the party had failed to keep up.

“The local party has dropped the ball with immigrant communities,” he said. “Anaheim is now one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States.”

The Republican losses in this election were driven by a big turnout among Latino voters, who have historically voted in low-numbers, and Asian-Americans, particularly younger one, analysts said. Latino voters are increasingly Democratic.

Many first-generation Asian-Americans have tended to vote Republican, particularly Vietnamese, but many of their children have moved toward the Democratic Party, because of issues like health care, immigration and education, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Riverside. Until this year, younger Asian-Americans, like younger voters in most demographic groups, turned out in low numbers.

“What happened in Orange County has to be seen in the context of this being a high-turn-out election,” said Ramakrishnan. “There is a big generational divide in terms of party identification. If this had been a typical midterm election, it would have been a more conservative older turnout that came out.”

“From all the evidence we can see so far it looks like Asian-Americans were part of the blue wave,” he said.

La, who grew up in the San Diego area and moved to Westminster six years ago, said the demonstration Saturday took just 36 hours to organize — in a part of the world that was once known for being politically apathetic.

“The federal government and the issues that they are targeting has helped stir the mobilization — as well as the need for action in our community,” she said. “That’s the first time the Vietnamese community has come out to protest. A lot of things are changing.”

Ramakrishnan said Trump had made the situation markedly more difficult for Republicans. He suggested that had Trump not engaged in “so much anti-immigrant rhetoric,” Young Kim, a Republican who was seeking to become the first Korean-American woman in Congress, would likely have won in her race against Cisneros.

“All she had to do was win white Republicans because turnout among Asians and Latinos would have been relatively low,” he said. “Trump made a difference. But it’s going to be really tough to get back to what the Republican Party looked like before Trump.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/orange-county-republicans-democrats-demographics.html" id="9e990564-9f47-3942-aab8-b0ae95d295d9">The New York Times</a>.

WESTMINSTER, Calif. — To appreciate the vast cultural and political upheaval across Orange County over the last 40 years, look no further than Bolsa Avenue. The auto body shop, the tax preparer, a church, a food market, countless restaurants — all are marked by signs written in Vietnamese.

Cultural Shifts Sweep Away a California Bastion of Conservatism

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Adam Nagourney and Robert Gebeloff

Articles written by the author

Cultural Shifts Sweep Away a California Bastion of Conservatism